palordrolap

I saw the 20 second version of that video around that time. I thought it was a fake at first and then the next time it replayed it became clear that this was no fake. The person who showed me it was showing it to share the burden of having seen such a thing.

No desire to see it again. And after that I saw all sorts of things like rotten.com, goatse, the BME Pain Olympics and all sorts of other gross stuff on the early WWW. Some of that came pretty close but nothing has topped it.

I kind of want that to mean we can now insult and impugn the Taliban on the internet without fear of retribution but 1) that’d be cruel even if they are wilfully backward, 2) it would undoubtedly devolve into racism and Islamophobia from the less bright among us, and 3) you can bet the top brass of the Taliban won’t have given it up.

I bet at least one of them is a closet Swiftie.

Wikipedia seems to agree with you. Dropping the J was probably a good idea considering the people who would have to read it on a regular basis, and how J sounds in English.

As I recall, that is remarkably close to the true story. They wanted something that could make web pages dynamic, wouldn’t crash the browser or any pages that used it and they wanted it in the Netscape browser ASAP.

One man thus threw something together that looked a little bit Java-like and it ended up in the browser fairly shortly thereafter.

Hard to believe that was 30 years ago.

Then you should have sex with as many rich people as possible then die as quickly and quietly as possible, there’s a good chap.

Best regards, Your corporate overlords

Are you one of those pro-Zionism cranks or am I missing a trick here?

So I went down the rabbit hole of the etymology of “Gentoo” and you might say that “too” and “two” are more closely related as words and meanings than either is to the “-too” of “Gentoo”.

The latter is a corruption / evolution of Latin -tivus of which the -tiv- part still exists in modern Latin-derived English words, like “adjective”, “active” and, perhaps importantly here, “genitive”.

Start with the Latin root: genitivus; push it through early (*gen(i)tiū) then colonial Portuguese: gentio; and then confuse the meaning with “ill-born” or “gentile” in colonial British-Indian English to get “Gentoo”. The word was used there to describe the non-Hindu inhabitants of India. Because of course it was.

So, apparently, Gentoo penguins are called that because they’re somehow reminiscent of 19th century Indian Muslims. Oof.

Pausing for a second to let that one pass…

And now…

English “too” evolved from “to” into its own niche (compare how “than” came from “then”). The second-ness / two-ness of “too” is an accident more than anything, even though the pronunciations have converged.

Do not ask about Ubunthree.

Dead people can’t own land. Murderers can take that land. Profit.

No idea. I did find that WDC are still making a variant of the 16-bit successor to the 6502, so I hadn’t considered that the tech might not still be around for the earlier generation.

It was only very recently that they stopped making Z80 cores for embeddable use, so if that tech was mothballed rather than thrown out it, theoretically it wouldn’t take long to spin all that back up again.

That “theoretically” might just be an uninformed dream though.

Of all the - often eldritch - parodies of Garfield, I like this the least.

Ha. What are the odds that someone resurrects the Z80?

(I’m a 6502 boy, but it would be interesting to see the rival come back)

Good point. Those actual scientists who crave fame have to be in there somewhere.

I can’t really argue one way or the other. I’m a recreational mathematician at best. There’s wanting to be recognised/known for good mathematical work and there’s wanting to be famous, and I didn’t really take that distinction into account. I wouldn’t mind the former - however unlikely - but the latter, no thanks.

It’s not clear what your narcissist associates (? or associates of associates) actually want out of the deal, but their crank level is clearly high even if they’re otherwise legit.

Maybe someone could write a paper involving the punnet square crank/non-crank versus pseudo-scientist/actual scientist, and how many of each there is in each square. Or could it be one of those 2D alignment charts. Throw in a third dimension and there’d be a fame/infamy axis too.

Hawking definitely had some crank about him - and not because of his disability - so he wouldn’t be at one of the corners.

I saw something about this the other day, but I forget exactly where. They spoke about two famous people, both with given name “Craig” where one was British and the other American. They said that they would deliberately pronounce the name differently for each person in order to reflect that person’s preferred pronunciation.

Approximating that within your own accent wasn’t mentioned, but I assume that would be acceptable.

Another one that springs to mind is the name “Colin”. There was that well-known US politician who insisted that his name was to be pronounced with a long ‘o’ not a short one, which deviated even from the standard US pronunciation.

If I remember correctly, he insisted that if it was to be pronounced the other way, it should have had two L’s in it. Makes me wonder how he spelled/pronounced travel(l)ing.

Any household name from the STEM fields. Most people don’t get into those fields with the intention of becoming famous.

Those that do are often cranks, which, mostly to their annoyance, usually ends in infamy, not fame.

Some those that have had fame thrust upon them adapted pretty well to it. Stephen Hawking was a notable example.

Others really wanted nothing to do with it and have shunned the attention. Grigori Perelman is arguably better known for not wanting to be well known than he is for his mathematical work. (This assertion coming from my remembering his name and his desire to be left alone, but not the theorems he proved.)

Like Mandarin, it may be that cat-speak is tonal. What sounds to an untrained ear like the same word could in fact be something entirely different. Even if your untrained ear is trained in another tonal language.

Cat says “Hi”, you think you’ve imitated perfectly but accidentally imply something crude about their mother. Or possibly a horse. Who can tell?

The current government cancelled the previous government’s “send 'em all to Rwanda” plan if that’s what you’re thinking about.

This is not to say we’re squeaky clean when it comes to the treatment of migrants - we’re still firmly in “could do better” territory - but as far as I know, we haven’t been deliberately sending people just anywhere else. At least not yet*. Deportations are to where they can be unequivocally proved to have come from, and there’s usually a good reason for it.

* If the Reform lot get in at the next General Election then the policy is almost certain to be MAGA-level insane.

It’s not clear whether they’re quoting Trump or not there, but yeah, that’s a blatantly pro-Russian stance.

I have to wonder if they’ve become aware of the legitimate research that implies that paracetamol (= acetaminophen) may actually be no better than a placebo for pain relief.

Unlike a placebo, it does have real side-effects that are genuinely harmful, like potential liver damage and so on.

And then there’s that other research that found increased levels of paracetamol in both autistic children and their birth-giver, whatever the heck that means.

Naïvely extrapolate from these data points and you can reach the same conclusion they have.

The truly terrifying things here are 1) their complete misunderstanding of the statistics behind increasing diagnoses of, and also the history of autism and 2) that autism is being considered a bad thing.

Like the concept of predeterminism (is the future already written?), the concept that this might all be a simulation has exactly the same “solution”: Don’t get too hung up on it. We might as well act like it isn’t.

We have as much control over things whether this is all real or not.

Do what you can to get by with as little harm as possible to yourself and others until, well, you know: Game over.

If you have the strength and maybe resources, you might even be able to make this existence more pleasant for others, but if not, try not to worry about it.

As for brain chemistry, I’ve been in the same head space that brought about your question, and undoubtedly will be again at some point in the not too distant future.

It’s probably only because I’ve taken a bath today and put on fresh clothes that I’m relatively chilled out and philosophical right now. Also the Sun is out, which is probably helping too.

Potential exception: “Adult.” Arguably because it generally isn’t a verb when emphasis is on the second syllable, some people do that even when it’s a noun.

I’m an Adult vs. I’m an aDULT. *

Use as of “adult” as a verb is non-standard and where to emphasise that is even less clear-cut for those of us who put the emphasis on the first syllable of the noun. Interestingly, “adulterate” is less strange as a verb and the emphasis is definitely on the second syllable there.

We could tie ourselves in knots analysing the late emphasis form as a verbified noun, re-nounified. Ow.

* The underlying truth of said statement is irrelevant. Chronologically, I have been one for some time. Mentally… ehh.