Some middle-aged guy on the Internet. Seen a lot of it, occasionally regurgitating it, trying to be amusing and informative.

Lurked Digg until v4. Commented on Reddit (same username) until it went full Musk.

Was on kbin.social (dying/dead) and kbin.run (mysteriously vanished). Now here on fedia.io.

Really hoping he hasn’t brought the jinx with him.

Other Adjectives: Neurodivergent; Nerd; Broken; British; Ally; Leftish

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Joined 11 months ago
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Cake day: August 13th, 2024

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  • If we’re talking about unpleasant sensations, there’s one I get that makes me feel nauseous that I can only describe as being like a smooth grooved surface with unwanted lumps in it and I’m travelling and lurching over it in some unseen dimension. (I’ve actually met at least one other person who described this without me mentioning it first, so it might be somewhat common. I have no idea.)

    I was watching a Let’s Play video of a video game the other day and the texture for the water’s surface in-game somehow reminded me of it, and it made the video hard to watch.

    If we’re talking about actual pain, I’ve had food-related (possibly also medication-related) stomach pain that had me curled in a ball thinking I was going to die and then thinking that might not actually be such a bad idea because then the pain would stop.

    I now assume that that must be similar to what some people go through with period cramps. No way I’d want to do that once a month. The handful of times it happened to me was more than enough.

    Honourable mention: The weird sting and sensation that isn’t actually a smell but is somehow in my nose if I accidentally touch a hidden juvenile thistle in a lawn. Those things are prickly monsters that are just a shade bluer than grass and you often don’t see them until you’ve put your hand on one. Other sharp pains sometimes trigger that “smell” as well. I always associate it with the colour of those thistle leaves though.





  • My parents were of the opinion they were an elaborate hoax until they had me draw what I saw in one of them.

    This was in a newspaper 30 or so years ago maybe. The image was accompanied by a depth-map image of what should be visible, but they covered that up. Then they asked if I’d looked at the newspaper before them because, even with my terrible art skills, it was clearly what was in the depth-map version.

    I think they believed me in the end though.




  • Edit: See responses for why this probably wouldn’t work. Nonetheless, if I was a grower I might look into it anyway just to see what happens. How much could a dry corner of a field affect margins anyway…

    Fun fact: Rice can be grown in the dry. The reason it’s grown in the wet is that, unlike other grasses, it tolerates being grown in the wet, and so the water protects the rice from unspecified environmental factors.

    My point here being the question as to whether the factors that destroy rice in the dry are worse than these flamingos. And if not, there’s a solution presenting itself here.


  • My parents recently got rid of a set of encyclopedias that they’d had in the house since at least the '90s. I don’t actually remember where they came from or exactly when they were suddenly there, but recently they got rid of them (donated to charity) and I was a little offended - not that I said as much - that they didn’t offer them to me.

    They weren’t even recent. They were printed in the early ‘50s, but in my parents’ (still) no-Internet house, those encyclopedias were a good pastime.

    There are usually several sets of the same available on eBay, but 1) the good sets are a bit out of my price range, 2) I have internet here and 3) I’m already hoarding far too much stuff.



  • Well, no, but in a sense, I kind of was. The ovum already existed and had for <mother’s age at the time> years, but the exact sperm did not. I came along too much later for that to have been possible. But my DNA was all there. Just not assembled in the right order yet.

    Alternatively, if you believe in reincarnation, I still might have been. I have at least one relative who was there who didn’t make it to my birth. Maybe I’m one of them come back.

    If that was a conscious choice, that may have been a mistake, but that’s another story.





  • Look, if I’m wrong, I’m wrong, but you’re not making a good case here. Brine is also known as salt water. Just how much of a stretch is that? Sea water is salt water. Sea water is also known as brine. Depending on which term we use, either the sea turns into milk or it doesn’t. This is a problem.

    But then this is all a hypothetical and maybe the real bend is how far we’re both getting out of shape over this :p




  • This. The modern mathematical symbols, at least in their current use, are no older than 550 years. Heck, the numerals we use are about as old as that. The Arabic world had a head start with early versions of those numerals, but even then, those are only twice as old as the oldest mathematical symbols still in use.

    Prior to that, people wrote things out in words, or, as you suggest, invented their own symbologies and shorthands.

    I have a book around here somewhere that shows how Diophantus wrote a particular polynomial equation and it’s all Greek letters, some with macrons (overlines), some superscripts that don’t mean what we’d use superscripts to mean, and one large upturned capital psi in the middle of it. Mind-boggling.

    And they’d be more mystified by our notation than we are by theirs because at least we (or some of us) know what Greek letters and numerals are. They’d have no such head start.