Mushguffler
1mo ago
I read recently that cats have been evolving to be less friendly to humans, at least in the West, because friendly pet cats are spayed or neutered, as are strays that are caught by people. The cats that are reproducing are strays unfriendly enough to avoid animal control. Seems plausible the same effect is occurring for dogs.
Mushguffler
1mo ago
Do you think any new countries will become independent in the next twenty or so years?
Mushguffler
2mo ago
Not to nitpick, but isn't Thursday the 15th?
Do y'all think we're likely to see any new countries become independent in the next, say, twenty years? Just curious.
Mushguffler
6mo ago
About 2000 Hawaiians. But I can't rule out the possibility that they are a supervillain and his lackeys. Still counts.
Mushguffler
6mo ago
I gave up and got the answer. It's not one of those states, but I think it is a suburb. I had heard of it though.
I should have gotten that one,
Sure, it's Cityquiz.io They have other places besides the US too.
Yeah, it's hard to see from the map. Most of the major cities are surrounded by smaller ones with generic names that were easy to guess, like Glendale, etc. So they get crowded.
Texas has a bunch of big cities with very generic, forgettable names (like Garland). Also, every single place mentioned in King of the Hill is apparently fictional.
The Dakotas are sparsely populated but full of easily guessed names, towns with like 6 people in them. Lotta towns named after people's names -- Pierre, for example.
Most landforms and terrains that are famous have a city named after them, eg Everglades. The exception is Hawaii, where there is no Maui, Oahu, Mauna Loa, Waikiki Beach, etc. Luckily you can guess a couple towns just by combining the relatively few letters in the Hawaiian language. I got a couple I've never heard of that way.
Spanish-language placenames seem harder to guess. English-origin names like Michael usually have a town named after them. There's no town named Miguel though. Of course any saint most likely has a San Whatever or Santa Whatever town, but other than that, Spanish names are hard to guess. Also, if a county has an English-origin name, there's likely a town of that name too. If a county has a Spanish-origin name, it probably does not have a town of that name.
I've been playing an online game where you just try to name as many US cities as you can. Here's my map. My goal was to name all the cities over 500,000 people. I am stubbornly short one such city. I haven't looked up the correct answer yet.
Can you guess which one American city over 500,000 people I'm missing?
I've been canoodling around with it for a week or so, and I've been listing generic city names and getting a surprising number of correct answers that way, including some big cities.
You named 2,826 cities, with a total population of 120,814,720 (46.35% of the national urban population in 2020).
I also got 234 of 339 cities over 100,000 people (69.0%).
Edit: I checked, here's the city I missed:
Mushguffler
8mo ago
I was in the grocery store the other day when I noticed a brand of ginger beer from Bermuda. That struck a chord with me because at some point I saw a cooking show where someone mentioned "a famous brand of Bermudan ginger beer" -- you know how they don't say the names of companies that aren't advertisers, so that was how they described it in lieu of actually naming it. I wanted to try it, so I bought it and liked it.
I was just curious if anyone else has experienced something similar -- an attempt to avoid giving free advertising to something instead drawing more attention to it. I'm certain if they had just said "Barritt's ginger beer", it wouldn't have stuck in my mind at all.
Mushguffler
9mo ago
AFAIK, the main plausible explanation is that it's a cover for top-secret stealth aircraft. The gov't doesn't want to explain, so they just imply it's probably aliens. Schumer's bill contains an exemption for national security data, which will encompass anything meaningful. They know perfectly well the Chinese and Russians know this, it's a kabuki show for the normies because it's easier than both keeping that stuff secret and batting away paranormal "researchers". The change in policy was to put up a lightning rod to attract conspiracy theorists rather than trying to repel them.
Mushguffler
9mo ago
Yeah, but I'm gay and she's married to my friend, so I don't think that's what she was going for in this case.
Mushguffler
9mo ago
easy majors (communications is a big one)
A friend of mine's wife once was begging me for help with an assignment for a class for her communications degree. The assignment was to watch a TED talk and write four sentences about it. That was the entirety of the assignment. She needed help.
Mushguffler
9mo ago
In the US, at least, if "she" had been human, that'd be nowhere's near enough to charge her with anything, so I wouldn't think you could charge her creators either.
Mushguffler
9mo ago
Maybe military academies will argue that they have other purposes besides mere education and some sort of racial discrimination might be helpful, like if they want more Arabic-speaking officers or if they need more officers comfortable with Russian or Chinese culture, or if they want say a Samoan officer able to lead Samoan troops on a mission in American Samoa, they might want to consider race in some sense.
Mushguffler
1yr ago
I have a Puerto Rican friend whose daughter has terrible taste in men. Every time I see him, he brings up out of the blue like "You know, Peruvians are all retarded and they fuck dogs", and I'll say "your daughter's dating a Peruvian guy huh?" He's got a reason to dislike every Spanish-speaking nationality. Colombians beat their wives and are all gay, Venezuelans are poor and smell like trash, Salvadorans are miniature gangsters, Mexicans are morons, etc. She's had a lot of boyfriends.
Mushguffler
1yr ago
I edit highly technical documents, fixing grammar and spelling, and I've long thought a bot would eventually do my job. One of the companies I work for even uses a bot, sends us the bot-fixed papers, and then we double-check the bot, fixing its mistakes. Despite this going on for years, they are no closer to replacing us, in part because the standards keep getting raised. Like a recent update to the style guide suggests we should be using wherein in appropriate spots. Using where to mean in which has been normal in English for like forever, but it seems now that the bots are doing the easy stuff, we're expected to do the harder stuff too.
Mushguffler
1yr ago
She's upset at her own work being "interrupted", but of course her own work "interrupted" the day of the people who went to her seminar. Urgency is only a problem when people are not being urgent about her.
Mushguffler
1yr ago
In the recent Memphis police shooting case, some have noted that, aside from the actual assaulting officers, several others were apparently standing by and not intervening. That is a violation of Memphis PD policy and may be a criminal act.
In most (all?) states, people in mandatory-reporting professions, such as teachers, are required to report certain kinds of wrongdoing.
My understanding is that it is widely accepted that teachers et al do report mere suspicions of wrongdoing even against their coworkers. But cops seem to rarely do so. Do you think that's inherent to the us v them nature of policing? It forces people to a side more intensely than teachers and such? Or is that the law requires teachers to report any suspicion but the Memphis PD are only supposed to report the things they witness (I think)? But this recent incident clearly goes well beyond a suspicion...
Just curious what others think.
Mushguffler
1yr ago
Do you use one of those self-control applications to stop you from e.g. wasting time on Facebook or reddit? I've been using one for a couple years, and I've noticed something. I usually keep the timer at a particular duration until I have a reason to change it, so right now it's at four hours and 17 minutes, it has been there for months. I set it a couple times a day.
I've noticed the time almost always runs out within a minute or two of me going to bed. I often seen it pop up (because it's done) literally as I'm getting up to to leave. Other times I check it just before going to bed and see it has like two minutes left.
I am curious if this happens to other people. Am I subconsciously timing my bedtime to sync up with the end of my blocking software's timer?
Mushguffler
1yr ago
In D&D a long time ago, I mentioned that you could estimate the time by using the width of your fingers to measure the distance between the sun and the horizon. My friends pooh-poohed this and mentioned it for years as an example of me being stupid and believing in dumb shit.
Until Johnny Depp did it in a Pirates of the Caribbean movie. Then they accepted that it was real. No amount of me googling it, finding good sources or even literally doing it so they could see it was real would help. They had to see Johnny Depp do it.
Mushguffler
1yr ago
I do it all, I think the SK stuff is mostly agronomy, engineering and public health, at least lately. Poland I think is #2 in my experience. I find French authors to be pretty sloppy IMHO.
Mushguffler
1yr ago
Yeah, exactly. I get a lot of sentences like:
Though Treatment A showcased a reduction of cholesterol, Treatment B inclined levels of cholesterol's diminishing trends.
Treatment C's effects on decreasing cholesterol were lessened than the lowerings of Treatment C.
Verbs of increase aren't as confusing, I guess because there are fewer of them. Basically just increase, raise and rise in most cases (maybe soar if you're being dramatic), and a lot of ESL speakers use "arise", but they mean "rise". A lot of them think "augment" = "increase" for some reason, which I guess it kinda does but not in like 99% of the cases it's used in.
The other biggies I see a lot of misuse:
by/with/through/via
way/route/method/means (seriously, scientists, "way" is rarely correct in journal articles, just don't use it)
tool/equipment/kit
discuss/interview/survey (and talk/speak/say though that doesn't come up too much in my articles)
I also always think it's funny when they have obviously looked up synonyms of a common English word and chose something unreasonably archaic, like using "gelid" for "cold".
Anyway, the AI sometimes tries to fix these, but often doesn't fix them right or even fixes correct ones sometimes.
Mushguffler
1yr ago
Their English is often near-perfect. It's usually better than the papers from English-speaking countries.
I edit scientific journal articles and one of the companies I work for has a pretty sophisticated AI that does a first pass, I'm just cleaning up and fixing the things the AI fails at. Their AI has gotten good at the basics of grammar and capitalization, n-dashes and hyphens, that kind of thing. But it remains utterly hopeless at fixing non-English speakers' incorrect use of words, which is a huge part of what I do. Stuff like the difference between "go down", "decline", "reduce", "lessen", "lower", "decrease" and "diminish", for example, which you pretty much have to be a native English speaker or South Korean to get.
Mushguffler
1yr ago
The main competitor to Amazon for ebooks is Smashwords, who pay authors a bit more. We'd appreciate off-Amazon sales, if you want to give them a try.
In case anyone's wondering...
1: Pest-control companies said they didn't know which pesticide they used because they hadn't diagnosed the problem yet. They hadn't chosen a pesticide. (edit: or, more likely, the person on the phone isn't an exterminator and doesn't know)
2: The company that didn't say she had to wash all her clothes, etc. just skipped that step to get a customer. The moths will likely be back within a year, because they laid eggs in the folds of old clothes or stacks of cardboard or ruffles on the edge of a couch cushion. I realize it's a pain, but it's the only way to solve the problem (thereby minimizing the total number of "murdered" moths, the cost of treatment and the amount of pesticide used).
3: This seems more like burgeoning OCD than legitimate animal welfare concerns. Switch to hardwood floors, synthetic fabrics and no whole cereal grains if you really care so damn much about moths.
4: Carpet moths don't eat carpets. They eat human hair, insects and animal leavings, etc. Actually carpet moths don't eat, but carpet-moth caterpillars do.
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