xkcd

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I couldn't decide how plausible it was by just eyeballing it, so decided to run some numbers to check it out. Let's say that X1 has a 50% prior probability of being true, X2 (which is independent of X1) also has a 50% prior probability of being true, H has a 25% prior probability of being true, I be...

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Isogram "Iso" means same, so shouldn't a word with all different letters be called something like "heterogram"? No, no, a "heterogram" is any word that does not describe its own written form. So "palindrome" is a heterogram, but "isogram" is not a h...

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Today I typed "problem exists between" into Google, and the top autocomplete option was "... leopard and chair".

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Faced with the need to count down "Five… four… three… two… one…" many times (for reasons unnecessary to delve into) If you're the person whose job it is to bleep out celebrities when they use curse words on "live" broadcasts, that's fascinating and totally necessary to delve int...

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Might it be worth noting that the Greenwich meridian was adopted as the prime meridian in 1884, and the paris meridian (which would have been popular on french cartography before this) was about 2 degrees east of the greenwich meridian? The line I'm taking for 0° is labeled "Colure des Equinox...

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I've been a vegetarian for almost 25 years, and am happy with that choice. Vegetarianism is healthier, is better for the environment, and causes less suffering than a standard American diet. But obviously some non-vegetarians have lifestyles that are just as healthy, sustainable, and compassionate a...

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I agree that it's French in both language and appearance. The illustration seems reminiscent of (but not identical to) the star maps created by Ignace-Gaston Pardies in the late 17th century.

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I don't know much about astronomy, but decided to give it a try anyway. The stars seem to be about 2.5° to 3° off from the coordinates they had in 2000. (For example, I think the bright star at 17° on the ecliptic is Zeta Piscium , whose celestial longitude in 2000 was about 19.9°.) Since it takes a...

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Yeah, but since the trick only works on nouns, /ɛɹz/ only ends up scoring about 10, compared to the 20 or so I got out of /siz/.

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Can anyone come up with anything as good or better? How about /siz/? ⋅ sees (perceives visually) ⋅ sees (cathedral sites) ⋅ seas (bodies of water) ⋅ seize (grab) ⋅ seise (take possession, in a legal context) [same etymology as "seize"] &sd...

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Dear prescriptivists: don't ask who the bell tolls for; its for y'all.

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I had been led to believe that the cryptic crossword as featured in UK broadsheets was a uniquely British thing and unknown in the US, which suggests that Randall must be thinking of a slightly different type of "word game". Well, crosswords here in the U.S. do frequently have puns. To gi...

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I think of American cuisine as boring and bland, and so mostly eat "ethnic" foods, but just now I decided to make a perfectly normal American snack: a hot dog with ketchup, mustard, and pickle relish, on a bun. ... Well, I'm vegan, so the "hot dog" wasn't technically a hot dog; m...

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The OED defines "plant" as "A small plant, as distinct from a shrub or a tree", and that's the way I would tend to use it here. A "cactus plant" is a cactus that won't die if you keep it in a flowerpot.

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So if you did bring 1e340J into being somehow, how would you describe the predicted effects? Is it a large small enough number that "collapse to a singularity" or "complete destruction of the universe" are reasonable choices? Or is the number so large as to make even those simpl...

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How much comparatively is 1e+340 joules of energy? Just wondering. Okay, no problem. We just need some big numbers. Here is a page with some big numbers on it. Let's see... The total amount of energy in the universe--if we liberated all of it in a giant matter-antimatter reaction--is about 1e70 jou...

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Almost certainly just a typo. The "4" and "1" keys are adjacent to one another on a standard keypad. If the receipt says you paid $40 and got $33 in change, and the reality is that you paid $10 and got $3 in change, that's a net payment of $7 either way. Unless they're hoping to ...

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jewish_scientist wrote:Anyway, the first link provides a citation, so at least I know where to go. Thank you.

It's not a terribly useful citation; I followed it before I posted. It went to a math book whose author said "Two readers independently sent me this method for drawing an egg."

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Floor 1242 would be "Floor 1234 (approximately)", if only we used Base 10.023273 instead of Base 10. But so far it hasn't had any luck convincing people to switch to this new number system.

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Googled this a bit. Didn't find the answer. I found a page by Robert Dickau, demonstrating the construction in question with a bunch of very nice gifs. Unfortunately he just calls it "an oval or egg shape". I found a Wikipedia page on something called a " tri-oval ", which includ...

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Here's a cropped version of 445 with some dialogue added. See also 222 and 1961.

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Trade doesn't really require words, does it? Each side shows what they're offering, indicates how much they want for it out of what the other side is offering, and then either agrees or doesn't agree. A fifteen-second cartoon would be enough to establish a workable protocol. There could be problems ...

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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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honestly I can't say if I've ever had to use tableau in the plural. What do you call the stacks of not-yet-played cards in solitaire games such as Klondike or FreeCell? I have found some serious problems in the Collins dictionary's listings before. Check out their entry for "dice." What's...

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Huh. How about other "-eau" words? Like, do y'all pronounce the /z/ at the end of the plurals of "bureau" and "plateau"? (I do, but I also spell them with an "s", which I why I didn't use them as my example. Meanwhile, I could see leaving the "x" sil...

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And "tableaux" is pronounced exactly the same as "tableau." It's just the plural form, and the final x is silent. Huh. I've always pronounced "tableaux" with a /z/ on the end... Okay, I just looked up "tableaux" in a couple of dictionaries, and neither Merria...

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I'm not sure I even know what a "xylem" is. I wonder why they didn't pick a less obscure word for their list, such as "xylophone" or "tableaux". Also, I pronounce "luxurious" with /gzh/ and not /ksh/. "Crucifixion" would have been a more unambiguous ...

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what about "catch"? Do you pronounce it /kæt͡ʃ/ (rhyming with "match") or /kɛt͡ʃ/ (rhyming with "fetch")? For instance, the poem Jabberwocky rhymes "claws that catch" with "Bandersnatch," which wouldn't happen in my dialect. Huh, interesting questio...

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I'm not entirely 100% certain that I found quite all of the locations in Mornington Crescent, but this is a sort of map I threw together Or you could Google "London Underground Map". (Are you one of today's lucky ten thousand people who will be seeing it for the first time?) The game enco...

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Freaking, fricking, frigging, or effing? Which of these do you use in situations where you don't use "fucking"? Well, it's not really part of my normal speaking vocabulary, so pretty much every situation is one where I don't use it. But in terms of what I use in positions where it could h...

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I identify the tune.

Pile calling Mission Control. We have a loose polecat--repeat, a loose polecat--on board. Queen Elizabeth II is whistling "Dixie" on the stern bridge and is in possession of our bow. Over.

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Since illegal immigrants are "persons", are not "Indians not taxed", and are not "citizens", it appears to me that they are supposed to be represented. The 14th Amendment clearly contemplates representation of state inhabitants who lack voting rights: for example, women...

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I take the pirate and replace him with an astronaut who may not be going to space today. Pile calling Mission Control. We have a loose polecat--repeat, a loose polecat--on board. We are hearing a whistling noise and have lost interior lighting on the stern bridge. Please advise location of our bow. ...

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Bumping this thread because I spotted Artemis on the new-books shelf at the library today, remembered liking The Martian (the book, that is), so checked it out.

And then accidentally read it in a single sitting. Weir is a good author.

Think they'll make this one a movie too?

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Cthulhu wanders off, taking his vending machine with him. I'm sure it's fine; how much harm could one cosmic entity do? And as one would probably discover if one read through the history of this thread, nothing bad ever comes out of vending machines. Yep, it's all fine. Arrrrr matey *sqwuak!*, thar ...

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Pfhorrest wrote:Literally just "may" + "or"

No, it isn't. It rhymes with "player".

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I mean, your protocol is basically the Steffen protocol, with some different assumptions about how much space people need while fooling with overhead bins. That probably is the best that can be done given assigned seating and perfectly-compliant passengers. But it should be possible to do better wit...

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Except if you board back to front, anyone who's stuck delaying a row is going to be further back in the plane. Maybe I didn't explain myself properly. If the door is at the front of the plane and the passengers in row 40 are taking forever to get into their seat, the passengers in row 39 don't give...

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otherwise it should definitely just go back-to-front. Why in the world would anyone load a plane back-to-front? I mean, I guess it's marginally better than front-to-back, but it's still substantially worse than just boarding in random order. (Passengers tend to block the aisle temporarily while get...

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Okay, I think this is how I want to represent the back vowels in my (American) dialect: "ooh" = /u/, "cool" = /kul/, "GOOSE" = /gus/, "pool" = /pul/ "could" = /kʊd/, "FOOT" = /fʊt/, "pull" = /pʊl/, "wolf" = /wʊlf/, "...

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