xkcd

ThirdParty

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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I'm pretty sure that the passenger cabin cycle (deplaning + cleaning + boarding) is not the main bottleneck to airplane turnaround time. Certainly it wouldn't be if any reasonably-efficient boarding protocol were used. This has a number of important implications, most notably: ⋅ Consistenc...

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It's not hard to figure out which echo chamber told you it was biased. There are several possibilities though. Climate change is probably the scientific topic that people complain about the most, but it could just as easily be a group of Creationists complaining about the "bias" they see ...

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Floor 1226 is empty. Maybe the description intended by the Builders of the skyscraper is something like "Floor 1226 contains wax busts of everyone who has ever won an Olympic medal while representing Tannu Tuva". But if so, there's not really any way for anyone to figure out what the inten...

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Floor 1222 contains a working (if very primitive) ansible. Both ends of it, unfortunately; they're bulky and have to be kept at a temperature near absolute zero, so can't be moved from Floor 1222. And the bandwidth is 0.5 baud. But still: if you want to communicate a very short message to someone st...

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Floor 1217 contains a real-life version of Life , the cellular automaton. If you've got fewer than two or more than three people standing next to you, you pop out of existence. If there's an empty space with exactly three people next to it, a new person pops into existence, complete with memories th...

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It seems like we ought to be able to enforce our immigration laws more effectively than we do. I've never quite understood the Libertarian objection to issuing a photo ID to all citizens and legal residents and requiring them to keep it with them and display it on request. (Bonus: it would make it ...

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I don't think there's going to be a perfect solution, but here are some thoughts. 1. I'm not willing to accept a permanent underclass. That's the exact opposite of what America is meant to be. So anybody who's been here long enough, regardless of how they got here, should be able to become a full ci...

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I've seen the kind of shopping carts you're describing, here in the US. Except here they take quarters (25¢-pieces) rather than euros. ... But I've only seen them at Aldi, which I think is a German supermarket chain trying to expand to the US. (Or rather, one that has succeeded in expanding to the U...

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The whole idea of an escalator is for people not to have to walk up/down stairs on their own. If you're not into that, use the emergency stairs. The main place I encounter escalators is in airports, and I feel like usually there aren't stairs available as alternatives, or at least not without havin...

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Floor 1213 is an abacus repair and refurbishment shop, set up by a deserter from the first Floor 1210 and getting most of its clients from Floor 1205.

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You've left a very important item out of the algorithm: - If there is no traffic in front of you, proceed forward at the maximum speed that you can safely travel. Without this addition, your algorithm would allow people to park on the highway and cause severe traffic jams. True for traffic, not sur...

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The obvious solution to this conundrum is just to apply the usual traffic rule "keep right unless passing" correctly . Algorithmically, that rule means: - If there is no traffic to your right, move right, unless there's nowhere right to move. - If there is slower traffic in front of you, ...

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