“Yay, my swollen belly isn’t ascites from liver failure!”
“Yay, my swollen belly isn’t ascites from liver failure!”
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I still remember the way my science teacher explained a hypothetical warp drive (like how it is in Star Trek). He took a black towel, representing space, and laid it flat on a table. He set down a miniature model of the Enterprise on one end of the towel, then accordion-folded the towel up so that the other end was close to the ship. He moved the Enterprise over to that end of the towel, and unfolded it so that it was flat again. The Enterprise was now on the other end of the table.
An overly simplified visualization, but it really illustrated the idea to my ten year old brain how space-time could hypothetically be bent to make fast interstellar travel a possibility. Also it made me realize that warp speed on the Enterprise wasn’t just a super powerful rocket or something.
Before Louis Pasteur’s disproving of spontaneous generation, most people believed that bacteria and putrefactive organisms like maggots etc. spontaneously poofed into existence, like a video game character spawning. Pasteur suggested that maggots came from flies laying their eggs on rotting meat etc, and that bacteria were everywhere and will multiply quickly under the right conditions. A lot of people at the time thought these were crackpot ideas.
I could be dead wrong on this (and I’m too lazy to google) but I’ve read that the term “ham radio” comes from the fact that early versions of amateur radio sets were cobbled together from other radio parts, in a hamfisted way.
“Punishable by fine” is just another way of saying “it’s legal if you can afford it.”
The other day I was trying to explain this “made with 100% whatever” concept to a coworker.
A HFCS fruit drink might say “made with 100% real juice”, but that real juice could be like 2% of the total recipe when the rest is HFCS, dyes and flavorings. It’s one of those technically true things and it’s enough to skirt FDA labeling requirements, and a lot of people are dumb enough to be taken in by it and believe they’re drinking a real product.
I got permabanned from pre-Elon Twitter for saying Donald Trump Junior should live up to JFK Junior’s legacy and get in a small plane.
Yet people still tell me that Twitter was a leftist cesspool before Elon bought it.
That being said I don’t have memories of everything being snappy 20 years ago - there were messy scripts and gigantic images that made Geocities and Angelfire sites near unusable back then as well.
Pages with dozens of embedded JPEG files that are larger than your monitor’s resolution and are compressed at highest quality. Easily a quarter to half of a megabyte each and take several minutes to load on dialup, then the webserver times out the connection because you’re taking too long to download all these giant files at once.
I don’t miss those days. Not to say things are better now, but they necessarily weren’t back then either.
Oh, and RealPlayer. Fuck RealPlayer.
“Owning a car = freedom”
Unfortunately in a country where the infrastructure is so hostile to public transit or even pedestrian/biking amenities that it’s nearly impossible to live, work or function without a car unless you’re lucky enough to live in a dense urban community, I can see how people might believe this.
Even worse is when the source is hidden behind a paywall.
I always use seconds as an allegory to dollars when I explain to people the difference between thousand, million and billion (I did the number crunching in my head and rushed it, so if I made any errors lemme know).
1000 seconds = 17 minutes
100,000 seconds = 27 hours
1 million seconds = 11 days
1 billion seconds = 31.70 years
148 billion seconds (Bezos’ net worth) = 4693 years
Same with coconuts. They are associated with Hawaiian and Caribbean cultures when in fact they’re native to South Asia and the Austronesian islands.
The fact that calcium is a metal is the reason why bones can be detected in X-rays.
(I’m pulling this out of my ass and I’m too lazy to look it up to see if it’s actually true.)
never gonna give you up never gonna let you down?
I think the earliest instance of “brain worms” I remember was from an episode of Invader Zim in 2001. Zim is offended at the concept of paying to ride a filthy, poorly maintained bus and shouts at the driver “Have you the brain worms?!”
Edit: found the video https://youtu.be/BiqTTozWNhA?si=bxNeTnreb77vdd00
Scotty also does this in Star Trek III…
Scotty: “If you don’t have eight weeks, I can do it for you in two.”
Kirk: “Mr. Scott, have you always multiplied your repair estimates by a factor of four?”
Scotty: “Certainly, sir. How else can I keep my reputation as a miracle worker?”
Mirror universe Musk was a proletarian hero who organized a mining industry revolution.
My city has a rail station right in front of the stadium and barely anyone uses it, not even during big games/events.