xkcd

eSOANEM

It's also worth distinguishing between the two directions of spelling. That is, on the one hand, if I hear an unfamiliar word, how easy is it to correctly spell it, and on the other, if I read an unfamiliar word, how easy is it to correctly pronounce it. English is pretty poor at both of these but a...

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rmsgrey's pretty spot on. In particular, I saw from several African people that they thought it was kinda self-defeating of its message and/or disrespectful/appropriating by virtue of the fact that it was using Africa primarily as a stage for addressing experiences/narrative specific to African Amer...

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↶ I'd probably get removed from starfleet for this but: "Captain, respectfully, I'm not like other engineers you may have heard of who inflate estimates on repairs. I could probably get it done in 2 hours if it were a life or death situation, but that's because the downside of this ship explod...

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I just had another thought on this which is that, if you're willing to be wildly unethical and raise infants spoken to 50% by the people on the other side and 50% by our people, after a few years the kid should be reliably speaking both languages. Of course, then you have to convince the kid to tran...

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Or we're not in the timeline he saw where the heroes one (not that that means we're in one he saw where the good guys lost, he never said he saw every outcome, just whatever the number was). Alternatively he may just have learnt how to use the eye better than the Ancient One could. He does seem to h...

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Eh, it's the raven paradox. It's some evidence against string theory but not definitive and, from what I've heard from the physicists here there does seem to be a general trend towards abandoning string theory as a viable model of quantum gravity (although, it is still definitely a useful thing to r...

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↶ I thought string theory was still "up in the air"? And arent the loops particles rather than spacetime itself? String Theory's looking less and less plausible by the month. In order to get fermions you need supersymmetry and that's becoming increasingly ruled out and so, because we know...

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Remember that the neutrinos can be off-shell (so having the "wrong" mass).

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↶ So mass/energy is conserved due to a change in velocity. That makes a certain sense but Im not happy with something changing speed without a reaction force - or is that way too "classical physics" for this subject? I saw the word "superposition" there, is it perhaps a quantum ...

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↶ Thanos's intention is to hold a cull to prevent hardship due to scarce resources but he is so powerful that you wonder why he doesn't just directly create more resources... Well... It's not that kind of power. Or at least, it isn't until he gets all the infinity stones, maybe. Generally, ...

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We have a real-world upper bound on this of 28 years because we know that Cortés managed to get alliances and negotiate agreements with natives during his conquest of Mexico and Tenochtitlan fell 28 years after Columbus' first voyage and the first contact between the Spanish and any American peoples...

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↶ I agree that the motivation behind Thanos's plan was a bit silly. That aside, as a friend on Facebook pointed out, the narrative has a standard three-act structure if you see it as a movie about him rather than about everyoneelseatonce, which is apparently how some critics watched it. I think tha...

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↶ Funny: usually when a letter in a French-derived word is silent on one side of the pond but not the other (e.g. the "t" in "buffet"), I feel like it's the Americans who don't pronounce it and the Brits who do; I'm surprised to find one that apparently runs the other direction....

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xylophone is /z/

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Yesterday my partner took me to look at the daffodils in the deer park (a small, remarkably deer-less park in their college). Once we were amongst the daffodils they asked me to marry them. I said yes, it was great. 29693338_10215587442374242_741564868_o.jpg daffodils 29693950_10215587444134286_2071...

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ucim wrote:↶
Yeah, the key to heroism isn't risk, it's selflessness.

I'd definitely second this (it's definitely necessary although probably not sufficient). The guy who tried to cross the antarctic alone without caches doesn't satisfy this, but Schackleton does.

eSOANEM

From what I understand, names in sign languages are a bit complicated. People often initially fingerspell the person's spoken name but, as they get closer to that person may either merge the various fingerspelling signs or come up with a more iconic sign to use (I'm told the ASL for "Donald Tru...

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↶ That made absolutely zero sense to me. What possible reason do you have for not immediately shooting Klaue? At best - you kill him and you have the gratitude of your partner, and if you want to off her you still have the chance to do so while she's grateful and not considering protecting hers...

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↶ So, have you guys heard about how some of the alt-right are claiming Black Panther as vindication of their views, because (to paraphrase them) Wakanda is totally an isolationist ethnostate exactly like Trump wants to make America, except it's horrible when Trump does it but when fictional black p...

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↶ Well-meaning Victorian-Era busybodies did their best to "help" Aborigines by taking the children away from their parents and raising them in a "civilised" fashion. I don't think any more needs to be said about that - apparently the response was "ingratitude"... The S...

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↶ Or at least tell their children this was, like, a thing that happened so they dont say "I saw Black Panther but I guess thats an American thing, wow those Americans sure do suck" Fade in. Britain walks into America's bedroom while he's got his headphones on, listening to rock music. Bri...

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↶ but seriously, how many countries (in Africa or elsewhere) still have kings? Not a huge number. There's the commonwealth (all ruled by the same queen as the UK), Bahrain, Belgium, Bhutan, Brunei. Cambodia, Denmark, Japan, Jordan, Kuwait, Lesotho, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Malaysia, Monaco, Moroc...

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[mod note] Split from the Black Panther discussion . Some posts in each thread may be confusing between here and the time I split them. - gmalivuk [/mod note] ↶ yeah i feel like feeling like it is irrelevant has more to do with whiteness, certainly my black british friends have also been excited ab...

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oh yeah, but the idea of such a film with positive representation rather than just as blaxploitation

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I mean, she's from a posh family sure, but she was still a commoner rather than a member of the nobility (prior to her marriage to Prince William) which was actually portrayed as kinda a big deal in the British media (it was the first time someone that close to the throne had married a commoner, at ...

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ooh yeah, Spirited Away is definitely a good shout (and a great film generally). Returning to my first theme of blowing their minds with representation (with Moonlight in that post), Black Panther would probably do it. The explicit criticism of colonialism and imperialism, the fact there are only tw...

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yeah, it's just an example of how complementary distribution is insufficient as a definition of allophones. If you knew the answer though, why ask it?

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↶ Yet my mom sometimes gets call out re: being Native American? Um, what? She's Italian, Portuguese and Polish NOT Native American. Someone found an app that's supposed to figure this stuff out from a photograph. It called me mostly European Jewish with quite a bit of Native American. It was wrong....

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as above

Spoiler:

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↶ Does anyone know any sources that explain how they gather data for the results? A relative of mine, with Mexican heritage, recently posted results to face book, and I thought it was interesting there wasn't a Spanish or Iberian category, but "Celtic/English" and "North African"...

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I've never taken a DNA test or anything but I'm pretty uninterestingly British. My paternal grandfather's from the Channel Islands where his family have been basically forever, my paternal grandmother's from Halifax in Yorkshire, my maternal grandfather's from somewhere in England with some blood fr...

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↶ Spoilers re: last night's episode (S01E13) I guess they're trying to go for epic here? The bit about the mycelial network dying means all life in the multiverse will die came out of nowhere and is ludicrously high stakes for something that gets resolved within 30 minutes. It makes sense for M...

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you say that but the ds9 mirrorverse wasn't that much of a mirror either. In particular, Sisko and O'Brien were pretty similar in both universes with Kira and Garak being the ones with the most obvious differences.

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It's not at all surprising that Croatia is full of non-Slavic toponyms seeing as the Croats migrated there during the Avar Khaganate c. 600AD. For comparison, the Anglo-Saxons migrations started only about a century earlier and an awful lot of toponyms are Celtic (e.g. York, from Eboracon, any of th...

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Yeah, I had a similar thought. One of my friends did point out to me though that, unlike a lot of other shows, killing almost any character hits at least one problematic trope. Like, the only major (presumed) straight white man's Lorca and him dying is way too major to pull outside a fin...

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Can't add an accelerant to your fire if your fire already is accelerant

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That would be a glorious fire.

Do mythbusters still exist? Can we persuade them to do this?

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↶ So, I’ll ignore sound in space, I’ll even let the torpedo dropping thing pass... but I’ve got some things I need to rant about... Small problem: big ships. What’s the point if you don’t bring out enough tie-fighters to protect them? Why would you build big, slow ships... and what’s with the big g...

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↶ 1 Speaking of which, I thought at one point it might be Finn who was at the end of the String. A First Order implant missed by everyone. Might have been an interesting plot-point, especially if everyone was trying to atop him from Escape Podding, when doing so was the answer to their (everybody e...

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With enough time beforehand, any FTL travel can always be combined with prepared sublight systems to create the standard ansible paradoxes.

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