xkcd

eSOANEM

↶ 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.

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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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The dudes in red are a pretty clear callback to the Emperors Imperial Guards who also wore red. https://i.ytimg.com/vi/3Pw0VqshbaE/hqdefault.jpg The only time we've seen the Knights of Ren, they've worn black and there've only be 7 of them (including Kylo) rather than the 8 guards Snoke has in his c...

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This is a lot less weird when you realise that Thermodynamics is generally a lot nicer when you formulate it in terms of β=1/(k B T) (this does result in heat flowing from low β to high which is clearly wrong so instead of the usual normalisation scheme of setting k B =1 we ought to go for k B =-1 a...

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↶ I really loved Kylo Ren in The Force Awakens. I loved we have a villain who's not all-powerful and menacing, is still scary but also somewhat pathetic, it's just an entirely different characterization from what we usually see in villains, particularly Star Wars villains. I'm just not too happy wi...

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I've seen it twice. I really liked it and really don't understand most of the hate it seems to be getting. A lot of what I've seen seems to be baseless or apply equally to every other star wars film. ↶ 2) What little legitimacy "The Rebellion" had as a governing body was destroyed mid-ish ...

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I was not a partisan for Catalan independence. I am pro-dialogue but, in my view, Spain's recent behaviour has been sufficiently bad that I don't believe they're capable of having that dialogue and so now Independence is probably necessary. You ask who mandated schools teach Catalan, but that very q...

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↶ So the election happened and, predictably, secessionist parties won a narrow majority. Puidgemont is using this to call for proper talks with the national government (to take place on neutral ground in Brussels) but isn't forming a coalition so his claim to speak for the Catalan government's pret...

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Yeah, that'll be a reflection off some sort of concave object. The name for an image like this is a caustic (more info at the link)

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So the election happened and, predictably, secessionist parties won a narrow majority. Puidgemont is using this to call for proper talks with the national government (to take place on neutral ground in Brussels) but isn't forming a coalition so his claim to speak for the Catalan government's pretty ...

eSOANEM

ObsessoMom wrote:↶
Just in time for the holidays, we learn that glitter is evil.

Biodegradable glitter exists; it really ought to be more common though.

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↶ Most four-word phrases aren't actually that common, though, and "happy as a clam" shows up as frequently as "in for a pound" in that corpus. And "in for a pound" is the second half of the full phrase and frequently dropped (I definitely hear "in for a penny"...

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Whilst we're comparing handwriting I'll write my stuff up: 24172633_10212981781051380_663656494_n.jpg I've written the stroke order for the capitals and the lower case forms are much neater here than in my usual fast writing; they're all one continual stroke apart from the x (which is two separate c...

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↶ (Also I don't think the thing about fountain pens was about cursive...?) The system of cursive taught in US schools was developed for use with fountain pens to try and minimise blotting and the chance of breaking the nib or scratching the paper. Blotting mostly happens when the pen is lifted from...

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