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
2mo 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
7mo ago
About 2000 Hawaiians. But I can't rule out the possibility that they are a supervillain and his lackeys. Still counts.
Mushguffler
7mo 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
9mo 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
10mo 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.
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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