palordrolap

Ah, misleading use of terminology that indicates one thing, but will win in court even if it actually means, or can later be said to mean, another.

I hope those involved in helping companies win these lawsuits choke on bones from food sold as boneless. Because that won a court case after “boneless” was redefined as a cooking method.

I don’t want them to choke to death. Just a little lesson, you know?

Offtopic word choice nit-pick: “weary” means tired, “wary” means afraid. The first is related to “wear” as in “worn (out)” (or “wear and tear”), and the other is related to “aware” / “beware”.

Since “wear” and “-ware” are generally pronounced the same by most modern speakers, it’s easy to see how the confusion might arise, but in “weary”, it’s pronounced “weer” - “weery”.

Reminds me of a certain dirty joke. https://folklore.usc.edu/irish-pub-joke/ contains one telling of it, but it’s far older than any attribution given there.

I think it’s more like an uncanny valley phenomenon. Or it could be that humans are largely neotenous and other primates haven’t developed that trait, so they remind us of old, or diseased members of our own species at a unconscious level.

Or it could be both. Strange hairy men that live in the woods? Avoidance response activated.

That one xkcd about tautologies sure is that one xkcd about tautologies.

There can’t be a comma missing from a motto which is itself entirely missing. They threw it in a ditch a few years ago. (I’ll be honest, I thought it had to have been at least 10 years at this point, but Wikipedia says otherwise.)

The example picture at the top of the article is weird.

The window title reads “nano” but the software running in the window is Pico, Nano’s now deprecated (and strangely-licenced) spiritual parent. Or it’s Nano hacked to have a Pico header which, while somewhat fitting with the theme, that would be even more weird.

As best as I can tell, the 22nd amendment talks about how no-one can serve more than two terms. It does not, however, give a limit on how long a second term can be.

As such he wouldn’t need to touch that particular amendment to retain power, and so I can’t accept the bet.

It took a minute to find the right place, but the four-year maximum term length is actually set in Article II section 1 of the Constitution proper.

And now bear in mind that Donnie is quoted as being in favour of “termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution.” should the circumstances require it.

He’s going to try it. And since he’s immune from prosecution, what’s going to be done about it if he doesn’t leave?

If he’s still alive in 2029, there’s a good chance he’ll still be President then. And I mean after January.

The rules that say he can’t will all be thrown out over the next four years.

Remember in 2017 when he called Xi “king” of China? Xi apparently liked that. It doesn’t matter whether Donnie only thought Xi liked it or if he actually liked it, it showed what’s been going on in Donnie’s head.

He wants to be king, and kings only step aside when they die.

I say all this in the hope that I’m wrong. But I think the US will have more than an election to contest in four years’ time.

Illiteracy possibly. Almost certainly more people will be less able to read older texts.

If that’s going to happen anyway, they could do worse than adopt Pinyin or some variant of it. Or they might prefer something like Bopomofo if they don’t want to use Western characters for whatever reason.

Either way, any decision like that is likely to be 20-30 years away at minimum, and that’s assuming literacy rates start going down, which they might not. I doubt Xi gives it any thought at all.

The vowel you’re talking about is “ə”, also known as “schwa”. It’s probably the most common vowel sound in all varieties of English - in defiance of spelling - but it occurs in lots of languages. (German often uses it as the sound for final e, and French still retains it in some words and dialects for the same thing too.)

As to how common it is in English:

“Thə vowəl yo~ə’re talking əbout is “ə” also known as “schwa”. It’s probəbly thə most commən vowəl sound in all variəties of English.”

In some varieties ə moves closer to ʌ, a similar sound that’s a little further back in the mouth. Links go to Wikipedia where there are sound files to listen to.

Spies working for a country do not have to look like the stereotypical person from that country. The spy could even be “on loan” from some other country friendly to SK.

Mathematics doesn’t try anything. It’s abstract. Humans try to fit mathematics to real world phenomena, often with great success, but we don’t know why things seem to work out, only that they do.

Whether it means the universe is fundamentally mathematical is a bigger question than for both science and philosophy combined, and so mathematics is merely a useful modelling tool until we know for certain. (And we might never know.)

The “perfect” mathematics in this case is that this planetary system has all planets in what’s called resonance, that is, the orbit time of the planets is in some relatively simple integer ratio. e.g. the innermost planet might go around twice for every once of the next furthest out (2:1), or three times for every two (3:2), etc.

The article doesn’t give the ratios, but there is a tendency for planetary resonances to self-reinforce, that is, once nearby planets in non-resonant motion get close to an orbital resonance, there is a tendency that their orbit speeds will shift towards that resonance over time, and outside interference is usually needed to break a resonance once it has been set up.

There was no grand mathematical plan, only an emergent phenomenon.

Maybe this system has ended up with 32:16:8:4:2:1. That would be neat.

If I was Finland, I would continue as if Russia had changed nothing at that camp, however reassuring the changes there might appear to be.

Even if it’s “only” a training camp now and not a fully operational military installation, I’d still not let my guard down just in case the Russians decide to take a “special training exercise” over the Finnish border. That is the sort of thing they like to do, after all.

I remember this being panel two in a Dilbert strip (from back in the days when Adams did a great job of presenting as sane.)

So it turns out that the word centibillonaire existed before this comic and refers to having 100 billion to 999 billion currency, despite the fact that the prefix centi- means a hundredth not a hundred times.

By rights a centibillionaire should have between 10 million and 999 million currency, i.e. less than a billion.

Frickin’ rich people ruining terminology. I’m still convinced that one of the reasons the US came up with the short scale system of numbering was so that a billion dollars was a somewhat achievable goal.

“Thousand-millionaire” doesn’t have the same ring to it, after all, and “milliardaire” sounds like “millionaire” said by someone with a cold.

The blog writer got his account on SO restricted.

As I said elsewhere earlier today, the admins and mods there do not like to be told they are wrong and will shut things down fast if it starts looking like they’ve made a mistake.

Here the mistake appears to be treating Mangione’s account differently to those of other alleged and actual felons, but secondarily, taking retribution against anyone having the absolute audacity to point that out.

We should all be praising the Emperor’s new clothes and none of that truth stuff.

Need you be reminded that German carmakers were among those who rigged cars to cheat on emissions tests?

They got caught, but it proves they’ve been willing to lie and cheat and there’s no reason to believe that they’re not still willing, even if they fixed that particular problem.

DuckDuckGo currently provides free access to four different LLMs. They say they don’t store user conversations, but I’m not sure I trust that, or that that won’t change at some point even if they don’t right now.

Most of them have the strawberry problem (or some variant where that word is explicitly patched(?)), fail basic arithmetic and apologise repeatedly and often without being able to better themselves when mistakes are pointed out. Standard LLM fare for 2024/5.

More than you ever wanted to know about nutmeg, and its colonial history 105 minute documentary.

Insultingly simplistic TL;DW: New York might not have become New York if it wasn’t for the nutmeg trade.