Leggo my prego?

Yup. There’s also an even older Sumerian myth of very similar content: Enlil (ancient mesopotamian god of air, earth, and storms) thought humans were too noisy and decided to destroy them all with a great flood; I guess he really needed some sleep. Luckily, Enki (god of water, knowledge, and creation) told one guy, probably a priest, Ziusudra, to build a boat big enough for his family and a breeding pair of every animal.

Sounds pretty familar, right? Couple of names changed compared to the one in Gilgamesh. And, other than having two gods in the story instead of one, it’s almost exactly the same as Noah and the Ark (of course, there is some compelling evidence that the old testament god in the bible was originally multiple older gods that over time got “absorbed” into one God, hence why he has so many different personalities depending on which story you are reading).

The peoples telling these stories lived relatively close together geographically, and the timing lines up with a period of glacial retreat, meaning flooding was more common due to ice melt, rising sea levels, and and changing weather patterns. Though it’s hard to say if they’re all talking about the same flood or simply using similar stories and motifs to talk about different floods. I tend to think it was just a flood-happy time in the region, and if an entire village ends up underwater i’d say it sure feels like “the whole world” flooded, especially if other peoples you come into contact with have similar stories of their own.

Makes sense to me, but there’s still the whole microplastics issue… But honestly, at this point, anything we can do to keep fossil fuels in the ground is a win in my book. I’d love to see us go down that path for plastic needs that are both necessary and supremely difficult to replace with other materials (like medical and laboratory applications), and stop using plasitic entirely for everything else.

a lot less. we’re talking ~2 microns (ie: 2 micrometers or 0.002mm). For context, the width of an “average” human hair ranges from 18 to 180 microns (there’s a lot of variability due to age, ethnicity, and lifestyle).

If you want to see for yourself, you can dissolve the aluminum to leave just the lining (scrub any paint off the outside of the can first). You can use a solution with pH either lower than 3 or higher than 12.5. For context, draino is about 12 on the pH scale, and coca-cola is about 2.5, but the closer you are to neutral, the longer it will take (so while you could theoretically use the soda inside the can, that will take quite a while). There are sulfuric acid drain cleaners that get down into the 1 to 2 pH range (though note that pH is a log scale, so that’s on the order of 10 to 100 times more acidic than the cola and will fuck your shit up if you aren’t careful).

For whatever you choose to use, be sure to look up safe handling and disposal recommendations before attempting, or simply watch this youtube video instead!

In the books, they all could tell something was up with Frodo and refused to let him go alone. In fact, Sam was actually dropping plenty of eaves, dispite his claims to the contrary in the movies, and they puzzled it all out before Frodo even left Bag End. (Fatty Bolger, another co-conspirator who did not make a movie appearance, decided to stay behind to keep up appearances so that the mission stayed a secret as long as possible. He bought them precious time when the Nazgûl were in pursuit, and later played a role in the resistance against Saruman prior to the Scouring of the Shire.)

I’m actually kind of OK with that b/c it pushes it to the bottom of the comments, so it’s out of the way but still easy to find if i’m curious.

tell that to my astigmatism lol

welp, there goes my Tuesday.

platformers very often include coyote-time to make jumps feel better and to account for imprecise reaction times of players, but that would be cool to see it as a legit mechanic

I truly appreciate the pic! They’ve been putting in a new housing development nearby, and apparently have no idea how to NOT knock my power out at least once a week (which as a work-from-home programmer is… not ideal). So I am just gonna wait until the blasting calms down before i try to figure it out again lol

Same here. It was a life-changing discovery. Until the power went out and all the settings got reset… Too bad I’m a lazy asshole. Those were some good ol’ days…

It’s not about size. It’s the fact that the United States of America has the word “America” in it. And I don’t refer to the US as “America” (unless I’m being cheeky, though in those cases, I spell it 'Murica), but I do refer to people from the US as “American”.

And I know this is all kinda pedantic. I just think it’s fun to talk about words. I get the feeling you read some snark into my pervious comment, but that really wasn’t my goal.

Ok. I get it. There are people in the Americas that are not from the US. But do you call people from the United Mexican States “Unitied Mexican Stateans”? No, that sounds ridiculous. I think that it’s silly anyway to call everyone from either Americas “American” anyway; they are two different continents! “North American” or “South American” would be better, if you must get so broad with your adjectives (but really, continent-wide generalizations of people are rarely useful anyway). Sorry for the rant.

yeah, but maybe they’re only able to read some arcane dead language.

Very true! I wish I could upvote you more than once, so i’ll write a long-winded comment instead…

Quantum mechanics is the least common-sensical realm of science and math, and yet it is excedingly useful and has expanded our understanding of the universe tremendously. But to get here, many someones had to keep asking “why” without stopping at common-sense answers.

I watched (some) of a History of Mathmatics documentary, and what struck me was how many of the theorems ancient people came up with were just common sense. But they wrote it down: that’s what made it noteable.

There were some theorems/axioms that i had trouble getting my brain to accept, but generally it came down to me not “getting” their number/tally system or simply having no context for why they needed that math in the first place (ie: it wasn’t common sense to me). For example. I’m not an ancient accountant who needs to be able to calculate grain taxes and – at the same time – be able to assure a farmer (who can’t read my number system) that i’m taking the correct amount of his food, so their method of long division using different colored stones seemed needlessly convoluted to me.