xkcd

rmsgrey

Keyman wrote:Guess I agree it's a crime, even if it's not illegal.

But quite a long way to go to use "marinaritime".

I was so hung up on "pieracy" that I didn't even notice the subsequent non-word.

rmsgrey

Iron Man (and Iron Man 2) presents a world without superweapons until Tony Stark creates them. Cap shows plenty of Nazi-era superweapons, but there's no sign of them still being in play - Ten Rings uses a mix of conventional weaponry and Stark tech; the US military uses conventional vehicles and we...

rmsgrey

Most of the time, if you're out in the rain, you're not getting any significant evaporation - the air's already saturated with water vapour. If you're trying to decide whether you should run or walk through the rain, then you're probably aiming to get indoors, where the air is probably not saturate...

rmsgrey

New Legacy game coming out based off one of my favorite tabletop games! Betrayal Legacy Wow, that sounds awesome! I'm more cautious than optimistic about it right now. One of the things that sinks Legacy games is ambiguity or uncertainty in the rules, and one of the things Betrayal is kinda notorio...

rmsgrey

Calculating the total amount of rain that will hit you is insufficient. You also need to consider how it will be distributed. Do you prefer to have your hair and shoulders soaked and the rest of your body mostly dry, or to have the same amount of water spread out over your entire front side so that...

rmsgrey

Until Iron Man? How? That's...literally the first MCU film. I mean, unless we count Hulk. Unless you're counting chronologically, and ignoring the whole "we let Nazi Germany have, just, all of the superweapons". Okay, we've obviously had sort of a demand for super weapons pretty much anyw...

rmsgrey

clockworkbookreader wrote:The 100 Item Challenge seems to me to be a thing people do to feel superior to people who just want to get on with their lives... like bicycling or all the people who think that going gluten free means I should as well.

Have you ever encountered a "no-car" evangelist?

rmsgrey

I remember reading an article on just this in the mathematical gazette some years back: http://www.people.hbs.edu/dbell/walk%20or%20run%20in%20the%20rain.pdf TL;DR " keep pace with the wind if it is from behind; otherwise, run for it." Yay for maths! It's worth noting the assumptions that...

rmsgrey

For what it's worth, the National Weather Service does have a page on the meaning of "Probability of Precipitation": https://www.weather.gov/ffc/pop [...] So, the answer to the questions in the first panel are all "maybe" - sometimes the underlying prediction is that a band of r...

rmsgrey

Vibranium isn't a superweapon - it's the raw material out of which superweapons could be made if you had the tech base for it. It's like selling yellowcake rather than selling nuclear warheads - there's a much, much bigger market for suitcase nukes than there is for the raw material that, potential...

rmsgrey

Is the conclusion here that attempting to communicate about controversial topics on Twitter is a sign that you need better communication skills (so that you'd know not to try)?

rmsgrey

Ultimately we live in a world where motivated reasoning is a thing, where ideas are contested and its easy to stumble into this contest, and where the internet allows groups of people, including people who tend towards being easily offended, to find each other and gang together as a community. The ...

rmsgrey

what precisely is local sync? My assumption is that it's like cloud sync, but with a local store rather than sending data across the internet. So files or directories with local sync enabled will be automatically backed up to a designated mirror either attached to the same machine, or on the same L...

rmsgrey

It puts me in mind of "If you meet one asshole, you've met an asshole. If all you meet all day is assholes, you're probably the asshole." Or, as a Pierson's Puppeteer might put it: "The majority is always sane."

rmsgrey

I've honestly no idea why inches and feet are more "natural" than cm or m, or how using metric is in any way harder in any situation. And the people who feel that way are yet to provide an actual situation where using metric is demonstrably disadvantageous. There's this weird, unexamined ...

rmsgrey

pandemic legacy april report: We lost our first game and it was a big loss. It wasn't at all clear how we got that far behind. Usually we're struggling by the end of the game but we weren't even close this time. I was afraid we'd run out of luck and wasn't optimistic for our second game. We won our...

rmsgrey

I can use my size 9 shoes to get distances in feet just by counting; getting distances in meters means multiplying by 0.3 (which introduces an error, but if I cared about precise measurement, I wouldn't be using my shoes to measure it). One meter is approximately one stride length, either a long st...

rmsgrey

Imperial measures are generally extremely well designed for day-to-day purposes when measuring the things they are intended to measure. Can you give an example of an everyday situation where using imperial is easier than metric? I can use my size 9 shoes to get distances in feet just by counting; g...

rmsgrey

Imperial measures are generally extremely well designed for day-to-day purposes when measuring the things they are intended to measure. On the other hand, they're a complete pain when you want to measure multiple different types of thing or do calculations involving multiple types of quantity (even ...

rmsgrey

Dwarf Fortress is one of those games that I keep meaning to get back to some day - particularly if they ever add a decent interface (the interface is functional, but it is a lot like watching the Matrix without an interpreter program - and that carries through to player actions, not just discovering...

rmsgrey

I've thrown out all my socks and replaced them with the same kind before. Need to do it again soon, picked up various non-standard socks over the years and have it's made pairing them up after doing laundry difficult again. Just got back to one-sock mode. The last time I'd bought socks they looked ...

rmsgrey

"When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child; but when I became a man, I put away childish things." As good a course of action today as it was two thousand years ago. "When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of chil...

rmsgrey

"When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child; but when I became a man, I put away childish things." As good a course of action today as it was two thousand years ago. "When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of chil...

rmsgrey

Jorpho wrote:quiche rarely disappoints.

Slightly undercooked supermarket quiche served cold. The only reason it doesn't disappoint is if experience has already lowered your expectations far enough...

rmsgrey

I think of this as the "Why fruitcake used to be cool but now gets constantly dissed" solution. a) Fruit cake is highly variable. Good fruit cake is still great, but my tolerance for bad fruit cake has dwindled over the years. b) Kendal Mint Cake has existed since the mid 1800s, and is su...

rmsgrey

Moreover I miss Sir Pterry GNU Terry Pratchett. More generally, I've never been a huge fan of Turkish Delight (though the chocolate coated stuff is okay). Sherbet Lemons are good, though you have to be a little careful otherwise the natural sharpening effect of sucking them leads to superficial cut...

rmsgrey

It gets even better. If time is like a physical dimension, then moving yourself will, like moving a square that is part of a cube, move infinite other yous in the same direction. Every you will be torn across timelines until the one that's in control arrives at his destination, leaving half of the ...

rmsgrey

It was a sad day when I learned that you can't win a 'How Many [X] In This Jar?' contest by answering >1. I feel like I was cheated, but I'm not sure where to direct my complaints. You can win with that answer, just not with a significant number of other entrants. The guy who guesses >100 is usuall...

rmsgrey

You are suggesting that the MCU does not have a market for superweapons? Really? Have you SEEN the other movies? Rich guys after superweapons make up at least half the villains. Yeah, my point there is that just because Klaue calls them (and thinks of them as) "savages" doesn't mean he un...

rmsgrey

(And he apparently didn't even know that much -- since the instant he tried to actually arrange a sale for just a chunk of vibranium, Wakanda immediately knew where and when) And Klaue had a plan for getting away from them that worked. How many people, including native Wakandans, would know enough ...

rmsgrey

Yeah, that's not even vaguely in line with how the movie presents him -- or how he's portrayed in the previous movie ( Age of Ultron ). You're just twisting the story up into a pretzel to justify your narrative -- a narrative that, might I remind you, amounts to "Exploitative white European un...

rmsgrey

Just managing to carry out a successful raid and escape in a place where he's the only person of colour for hundreds of miles argues for some solid information. I'm not going to touch that absurdly inappropriate "person of colour" comment (not even with a thirty foot pole), but I will poi...

rmsgrey

Having a Wakandan insider would help, but I'm not convinced it's necessary - Killmonger has the journal and whatever reminiscences and more recent intel Klaue can be persuaded to share (and you can bet Klaue knows more about Wakanda than any other non-Wakandan - and probably some Wakandans), and hi...

rmsgrey

When it comes to the Jabari, they're a wild card within Wakanda, and the natural rallying point for any underground resistance - the other four tribes all answer to the throne, and will take a while to reorganise; the Jabari are already in the shadows, and in opposition, so they have all the advant...

rmsgrey

[...] Yes, if Killmonger (or Zemo) planned to keep following the same steps in the same order regardless of how the earlier steps turned out, then his plans would have been ridiculous. This isn't something where every single step has to work so the next step can happen so his end goal can be achiev...

rmsgrey

I agree with most of your points. Regarding the villain's plan... It was already mentioned before that the idea was to have Klaue humiliate T'Challa by escaping him and being brought in by Killmonger. It was part of the destabilizing the regime strategy by showing the new ruler is ineffective. ...

rmsgrey

I'm reminded of the fact that in every single generation for which we have written records, people have been bemoaning the delinquency of modern youth. Recently I came across a dodgy piece of statistics being circulated (that has, I discovered, been being circulated on social media for something lik...

rmsgrey

(Then you need to say that HQ, with the chronomatrix-launchpad-thingummy at its heart, is perhaps enveloped inside a Continuity field. That must apply to the guys at the Project Quantum Leap desert base, perhaps related to the aurora effects that Al sees during that first unscheduled Leap activatio...

rmsgrey

The thing that tends bother me about time travel plots is how often characters are rushing to accomplish something that shouldn't matter how long it takes to do because there's time travel. Yeah, the standard fictional model of time is that, even if there's not full San Dimas Time (in Bill & Te...

rmsgrey

The utility of separate power-control to each and every three-way (L/N/E) plug is just so useful. Having grown up without switched power outlets I've never felt a particular need for them. They are probably handy though... They're not that useful when dealing with properly designed equipment that h...

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