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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   2190 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for November 14, 2025

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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Bach just dropped a new banger www.youtube.com/watch?v=RXWPqjAEwy8

On Sunday morning my girlfriend and I left our apartment building, which opens on to a little pedestrian lane. Directly opposite the entrance is another apartment complex and a shisha café, and standing outside was one of the most gopnik-looking Slavs you've ever seen: navy tracksuit, white sneakers, baseball cap. We assumed he was waiting for someone, although he'd incongruously placed two full canisters of nitrous oxide on the path in front of him.

We leave to do some shopping, and when we come back a few hours later he hasn't budged. Watching him from the window in our flat, he starts openly huffing the nitrous. I'm a bit put out by someone openly huffing nitrous oxide in broad daylight in a pedestrian thoroughfare with small children walking past with their parents, so I call the police, who never show up.

However, a few minutes later, the proprietor of the shisha café (an Arab man) comes out of the building and tells the gopnik to get lost, which he does immediately. Problem solved.

This little encounter inspired me to invent a new game I'm calling Ethnic Rock-Paper-Scissors. As we can clearly see from the exchange above, Arab beats Slav. Slav, of course, beats Jew. And who does Jew beat? Why, Arab obviously.

When I explained the concept to my brother, he proposed that Roman > Anglo, Anglo > Celt, and Celt > Roman. His friend suggested that Pakistani > Bangladeshi, Bangladeshi > Indian, and Indian > Pakistani.

What others can you think of? Note that I'm specifically looking for ethnic groups, not nationalities ("Vietnamese > American" doesn't count, because the American soldiers in Vietnam were multi-ethnic).

Turks > Greeks > Italians > Turks

Mongols > Turks > Egyptians > Mongols

Off the top of my head I have one from East Asia: Mongols > Chinese, Chinese > Vietnamese, Vietnamese > Mongols.

The last of these three is the most tenuous due to persistent ambiguities about the success of the Mongol Empire's first invasion of Vietnam, as well as about whether the Yuan dynasty's later campaigns into Vietnam should be considered Mongol expeditions due to how sinified and multi-ethnic the dynasty and its armies were (though if "Roman armies" are admissible as a coherent ethnic group really anything goes). But it's the best I can do at the moment.

I'm over 30 hours into Baldur's Gate 3 now.

I pretty much did all the quests in Act 1 (that I could find), and in pretty skillful ways. Only some 'losses': I didn't know you had to knock Mayrina's brothers unconscious to keep them from being killed in gruesome fashion by the Redcaps after they had charged in. Persuading them was not possible. You'd have to equip clubs and knock them out to save their lives. And, much earlier in the game, one of the Grove denizens died during the fight at the gate. But overall I was very happy with my performance. I killed the hag in one turn and saved all of her victims that could be saved. And in the Underdark I killed the would-be terrorist and obtained both a vial and a huge barrel of that super-explosive material.

I'm now in Roseymorn Monastery, having chosen the Mountain Pass route to Act 2. I had Shadowheart draw on the portrait of Vlaakith, much to Lae'zel's chagrin. And Elminster was good fun too. :D

I've got some cool spells on my MC Sorcerer and Gale and Shadowheart. Fireball, lightning, Slow, etc. While Lae'zel does crazy damage with her double actions and follow up attacks.

Did you manage to get hit on by every party member at once? I had vampires, paladins and gay mages trying to jump my bones.

I accidentally banged Halsin in that game, or started on the path to it maybe (been a while). I took a conversation option that I thought was being a bro and sympathizing for the tough times he had to go through, but apparently he took that as "let's fuck".

Maybe it's petty, but that is too me possibly even worse than general wokery and makes me want to avoid the game. Good romance is already hard enough to do well in a video game when focussing on one or two fleshed-out options and still often feels very cringe even then. Strong feelings ought to be earned, which is incompatible with many genres. I often entirely avoid romantic subplots altogether if possible for the same reason, and there is little I dislike more than accidentally stumbling into it (and no, I can just watch porn if I want to see merely casual sex, I don't need it in games).

Many such cases.

No doubt. It is a really horny game, isn't it?

The character creation screen really needs another screen...

I am interested in:

  • Men
  • Women
  • Both

I find mindflayers sexy:

  • Yes
  • No
  • Maybe

Safe horny, maybe. It's more a whimsical anything goes kind of game that happens to feature sex, like all Larian's games.

All the romances are profoundly unsexy and unhorny, despite (or perhaps because of) you being able to stumble into having sex with an errant dialogue choice.

I did the first time I played (some of) the game. This time around I'm using some proscribed mods (banned on nexus) that reduce some of the woke excesses. Gale and Astarion still seem pretty ready to turn gay though. My character is boning the green, blood-thirsty githyanki woman. Which is... weird but interesting.

Another Friday game rec:

StarVaders is a great, well-paced, slick, and interesting follow-up in the 'rougelike deckbuilder' genre. I'd put it in the "A" tier with Astrea: Six-Sided Oracle and Monster Train (S tier being: Slay the Spire, Inscryption, Balatro half-qualifies genre-wise). The fun twist here being that instead of 1-3 enemies with bigger health bars, here you get a lot of smaller enemies slowly making their way down a grid towards you, Space Invaders style. You "pilot" a mech and the cards move you and shoot stuff along with the classic hand and energy management. It works really well, bosses are fun and interesting, and the game has different pilots and mechs with very interesting new mechanics (e.g. one you "puppet" self-destructible mini-mechs instead) with a good progression curve that is challenging but not quite as brutal achievement-hunting as some other games like it. Of note is how this game actively encourages you to set up disgusting near-infinite combos, and you can get them going a little earlier than usual, which is plenty of fun. Notably, you can get "hit" by enemy attacks, but instead of damage directly causing you to lose, it only adds a garbage temp card to your deck, which is a good balance. Rather, enemies who make their way down to the bottom three rows "channel" a doom point, which you are only allowed 5. Also, single-turn rewind is a nice spin on the concept: you only have three, but they also shuffle your deck, just not the field position, and you can equally use them to re-roll almost anything: any rewards, which route options are available to you, etc. The UI is excellent (often a pain point in games like this, so much appreciated), the music is great without overstaying, just a solid rec if you like the genre. If you haven't tried this kind of game, Slay the Spire is still the entry point IMO.

I dislike DST, but it'd be nice if sunsets were an hour later in Winter...

Annual cost of daylight saving time (DST): peer-reviewed and policy-analytic estimates for the U.S. range roughly from a few hundred million dollars to several billion dollars per year depending on which effects are counted.

  • Narrow, direct estimates (increases in heart attacks, strokes, workplace and traffic accidents) ≈ $0.4–0.8 billion/year (Chmura-type estimates $672M/year).
  • Broader estimates that include lost productivity, sleep-related chronic health impacts, reduced educational outcomes, and wider economic effects range from about $1 billion up to tens of billions per year; some academic work (and media summaries of sleep-cost literature) point to much larger figures when chronic sleep loss is included (hundreds of billions for all sleep-deprivation impacts, though not all attributable to DST).
  • Bottom line: if you count only acute, measurable harms from the clock shifts the cost is on the order of 10^8–10^9 USD/year; if you include broader productivity and health-channel impacts the implied costs can approach 10^9–10^10+ USD/year (and different studies disagree).

Cost to extend daylight by 1 hour using space‑borne mirrors (back‑of‑envelope):

  • Technical concept: a mirror in space would need to redirect sunlight to a region on Earth to extend usable daylight. For a continuously illuminated 1‑hour extension over, say, a midlatitude city (10^6–10^7 m^2 effective populated area) the delivered extra solar energy is enormous.
  • Energy requirement example: solar irradiance ≈ 1,000 W/m^2 at noon. For 1 hour over 10^7 m^2 that’s 1e3 W/m^2 × 1e7 m^2 × 3600 s ≈ 3.6×10^13 J (10^10 Wh ≈ 10 GWh) of additional daylight energy delivered to that footprint. *Mirror size and launch/placement costs (order-of-magnitude):
  • A perfect flat mirror reflecting full-disk sunlight to that footprint would need an area comparable to the footprint projected to the mirror distance and geometry. Realistic space mirrors would be many km^2 for city‑scale coverage. For Earth‑orbit mirrors the required reflective area likely ranges from 1 km^2 to 10^3 km^2 depending on orbit/beam shaping — i.e., 10^6–10^9 m^2.
  • Manufacturing, launch, deployment, and operations costs for lightweight space mirrors today scale roughly $1,000–$20,000 per kg launched (variable), and large-area thin-film structures still require many thousands to millions of kg or advanced in-space assembly. Conservatively, building and deploying a multi‑km^2 mirror system would cost at least tens of billions to hundreds of billions of dollars; more realistic/optimistic engineering might still be in the low trillions if you require durable, steerable, and safe systems.

Wouldn't actually extending the day with a giant space mirror significantly mess up the climate, plants, and animal behavior?

Most of the cost in DST is in switching twice a year. I personally prefer summer time, but would be happy if we just picked one.

Most of the rest of the cost is schools and work places picking opening hours inappropriate for the location, or poor indoor lighting. Fixing your indoor lighting and buying a sunrise alarm or just a 'smart' bulb if you are cheap, seems way easier than spending your days advocating for space mirrors.

My interior lighting is bright enough and Standard Time has an earlier sunrise than DST - the tradeoff of DST is a later sunrise for a later sunset.

I was a more strident advocate for DST being dumb, but I now think it is more appropriate, as trying to get kids up in the morning when it is pitch black outside is pretty rough.

In a world where school started at a more reasonable hour you probably wouldn't need it, but then there's all the knock-on effects from school also functioning as daycare...

DST makes this problem worse, not better?

Maybe he's referring to the many proposals for permanent DST (which would have winter sunrises around 9AM in a lot of America).

That would be very bad -- 'solar noon occurs at 12:00 somewhere in the vicinity of the middle of each time zone' (with maybe the odd carve out for quirky borders or whatever) is the only thing that makes any sense at all.

A 9 AM sunrise is only true if you define most of America as Seattle, which would have a 8:55 AM Sunrise on the solstice. For an arbitrary selection of Northernish American cities I get:

City Sunrise ST Sunrise DST Sunset ST Sunset DST Solar noon ST Day length
San Francisco 7:21 AM 8:21 AM 4:54 PM 5:54 PM 12:08 PM 9:33
Seattle 7:55 AM 8:55 AM 4:20 PM 5:20 PM 12:07 PM 8:25
Chicago 7:14 AM 8:14 AM 4:22 PM 5:22 PM 11:48 AM 9:08
Boston 7:10 AM 8:10 AM 4:14 PM 5:14 PM 11:43 AM 9:05

On the solstice, DST referring to the permanent summer time scenario, ST referring to winter time.

Insisting on solar noon being 12:00:00 is a bit of an anachronism. If you were a farmer back in the day you would tell time by a rooster and the sun, and were used to getting up before the sun in the winter. You also had limited artificial light and heating, and did not have to commute by car for work and kids school. The modern school and work schedule is set by some combination of tradition time immemorial, school effectively being day care, traffic congestion spreading, and position in time zone.

A teenager with after school activities will be waking up before the sun and coming home in the dark regardless. In the permanent summer time permutation you might have the chance of getting some sun after volleyball practice or whatever. From the parents perspective you're probably the first person your teenager sees in the morning, and they take their rage from being cranky waking up before the sun out on you. They are probably slightly less cranky latter in the winter when the sun rises slightly earlier in the standard time scenario. A productive adult, with adult responsibilities, and a normal scheduled is almost certainly waking up before the sun in all these cases. If you live at least as far south as San Francisco you might have some chance of at least catching twilight (the diffuse sky radiation kind though no hate if the vampire fantasy is your thing) on your way home in a permanent DST scenario.

Somehow people in the Alaska Time Zone and China Standard Time make do with extreme variation in solar noon. I suspect because once solar noon is sufficiently decoupled from clock time, work places and schools are finally forced to set hours appropriate for the location rather than relying on conventional hours from before modern lighting.

Both permanent DST and ST suck in the winter, but not particularly because of the timing of solar noon. Switching also sucks, and is where a decent amount of the traffic and health impacts come from.

The fundamental "problem" is that day length in winter is roughly the length of the work/school day, so you don't have any extra daylight to "save" for waking, free time, and commuting. Thus OP suggesting creating more daylight with giant mirrors. I personally hope most of the problem is solved by the increasing adoption of high quality LED lighting and dirt cheap microcontrollers, allowing granular spatial and temporal control over peoples lighting environments.

Not sure you realize how late sunrises are in the western edge of the Eastern time zone. It would be ~9AM in nearly all of Michigan, nearly all of Indiana, large parts of Ohio/Kentucky and western PA (Pittsburgh would get to 8:40 at worst). Even Atlanta would be after 8:30 for a few weeks in December.

Rereading your previous post I see you did say "a lot of America" and not "most," I apologize if I misrepresented what you said.

The list of cities I chose was arbitrary, but the Detroit metro is arguably of comparable scale and one of the places that would have the latest sun rises if the current time zone boundaries were to remain static.

Of the places you mentioned Michigan and Indiana are (basically) fully west of the 82.5°W meridian, which would be the natural boundary for the UTC-5/6 division based on solar noon. For Ohio major population centers Columbus and Cincinnati, and for Kentucky population centers Louisville, Lexington, & Bowling Green are also west of 82.5°W. Atlanta as well, though places south of 35°N have less of a problem with insufficient daylight.

This means they are already effectively living in daylight savings time in the winter relative to solar noon, which would be UTC-5. In the summer when they go to UTC-4 they are living in double daylight savings or something. Somewhat ironically, permanent UTC-5 seems to be what some people in Indiana prefer, they just call it Eastern time with out daylight savings time observance rather than Central time with permanent daylight savings time. Neither of which is what people in actual Eastern time or actual Central time currently observe. If the US really were to adopt year round daylight savings Indiana should almost certainly move to be part of the central time zone, which is where they were historically and by meridian. This would solve the problem for people who live in the Chicago-Gary metro having to be split of from the rest of the state. The current situation in Indiana with 11 time zones, and hundreds of previous permutations, is ridiculous and as far as I can tell only justified by trying to assert their independence from Chicago-land.

Indiana is the most egregious and should not be in Eastern time even under the current system. Tennessee, Kentucky, Ohio, and Michigan should probably move to Central time under permanent DST. Ohio and Michigan would then have the same sunrise they have now in the winter. Tennessee and Kentucky would gain the advantage of not being split in timezone.

Pittsburgh would have a late sunrise, but not worse than those poor people who live in the upper peninsula of Michigan now. Atlanta, sure but nearly 10 hours of sunlight on the shortest day of the year isn't really that bad to begin with.

While I do prefer permanent DST to permanent standard time, I am somewhat sympathetic to people who prefer standard time. Essentially there are people who have relatively early schedules who currently commute both ways in the dark during winter. There are people who have relatively late schedules who currently have some daylight on their commute in. Under permanent DST the early people gain the sunlight on the way home, at the cost of the late people who are now the ones commuting in the dark both ways. What I have a problem with is people who post exclusively about the cost of a late sunrise without acknowledging that shifting the clock affects more than the sunrise on the winter solstice. Or that no amount of changing the clocks will actually produce more daylight or make everyone happy. Just ask the people of Indiana. Maybe we should just produce more daylight with space mirrors.

When you then population weight the effects DST vs. standard time there are clearly tradeoffs, but the net effect varies by study. The only consistent thing they find is that changing the clock twice a year produces a measurable and negative effect. Permanent DST vs permanent standard time is a tradeoff between relatively early schedule people and relatively late schedule people. Changing the clocks twice a year gives everyone (very minor) jet-lag. It's mostly an inconvenience, but at the margins results in excess deaths and economic losses.

Wouldn't actually extending the day with a giant space mirror significantly mess up the climate, plants, and animal behavior?

If you're sending up space mirrors to orbit in order to light your cities, you can just as easily send up space sunshades to the Lagrange point in order to fine-tune global temperature - blocking only 2% of sun light from reaching the earth would cancel global warming. You'd also need less sunshades than space mirrors, since the sunshade always deflects sun light, while the space mirror supposedly only puts light onto the planet for a few hours per day in winter.

But yes, it would mess with plants and animals - though probably less than current light pollution does.

I'm pretty sure that indiscriminate general shading of the planet would substantially disrupt crop production as well as wild flora. For global warming geoengineering purposes you want to increase albedo in the IR range, but retain the spectrum primarily involved in photosynthesis.

If you are only using the mirrors to light your cities, it also seems highly pointless. The biggest direct cost with going to work or school with limited daylight is traffic crashes. If you are only interested in lighting limited areas, we already have the ability to do that it's called a lamp. Using fully shaded and cutoff lensed high-mast lighting limits light pollution and you can install them over the highways leading into the city. If you've ever commuted into a city by car it should be clear the areas where crashes occur due to insufficient lighting are on the unlit highways running in, not the relatively well lit city core.

Using a giant mirror to illuminate an area would also probably not produce the pleasant light people associate with a mild partly sunny day. It would practically be more probably like the light from a full moon, which will not fix the sleep problems and productivity losses associated with short winter days. For people with seasonal affective disorder you need something way stronger either something like a Lumenator or moving closer to the equator. Blasting a whole city with noon-levels of irradiance so a bit of light can trickle in through some peoples windows seems way less efficient than just having people who need it replace their old lights bulbs with corn bulbs.

Agreed on all points, maybe my original answer should have included the remark that both mirrors and sunshades are pretty dumb - but fun to think about.

I'm pretty sure that indiscriminate general shading of the planet would substantially disrupt crop production as well as wild flora.

To be pedantic, the sunshade-at-Lagrange-Point-1 idea would really just dim the sun by 2%. No matter if you use thousands of independent sunshades or one big one, when viewed from Earth it will only occlude a tiny part of the suns disk. Every spot on earth would receive 98% of normal sunlight. This wouldn't "substantially" disrupt crop production, it would just diminish it by around 2% (naively - except in cases where the limiting factor is available water or soil nitrogen/phosphorus or pests/weeds or ...). Making a sunshade that's larger but transmits the red and blue wavelegths relevant for photosynthesis would be smart, but probably even more ludicrously expensive than just having a thin film of aluminum on a polymere membrane which indiscriminately reflects all sun light.

Ultimately, if it matters you could also pretty easily "turn off" a sunshade by flipping it 90° (you probably need this capability anyway, because you have some degree of maneuverability in space using radiation pressure). If you really need a boost to the global growing season a little, you could always just turn it off.

An AI covered Eminem's "Without Me" in a soul/R&B style and it works incredibly well.

I’m partial to the Stomp Clap rendition of Ye’s Heil Hitler.

This video is private.

Obviously some people weren't as partial to it as you were.

Amazing, it only had a few hundred views. I suspect mottizen interference.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=33-ybR-8BAY&t=2125

https://rumble.com/v70txoc-kanye-west-ye-heil-hitler-hh-all-50-different-versions-compilation.html

1:01:03 timestamp.

Chinese learners, where do you start? It's a tonal language with an impenetrable writing system. I know there are other Category 5 languages out there, but this one is probably the hardest to start, right? Japanese was easy to start; just read Genki and start doing the homework. Anyway, how do you start learning Chinese?

  • Decide if you want to learn PRC (Mainland) Chinese or ROC (Taiwan) Chinese. Taiwan has its own phonetic writing/typing system which is not pinyin (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bopomofo), and uses traditional hanzi rather than simplified characters.
  • Decide what your goal is. Do you want to speak, write, or pass a test? If the goal is only speaking, learning ideographical writing will bog you down. All the official textbooks out of PRC/ROC will tell you to learn writing, but if speed is the goal, you can learn to speak at an elementary school level without Hanzi. HSK requires you learn writing. Choose your goal, at least for the first six months.
  • If speaking/listening is part of your goal, decide which dialect to focus on. Most resources teach "Mandarin" (again, PRC or ROC) but there are also a lot of resources for Cantonese.
  • How motivated are you, how immersed are you, and what is your timeline? If your timeline is less than six months ... prepare to learn a few travel phrases and have a bad accent. If your timeline is more than a year, you can reasonably expect to learn to understand simple spoken language or written text (but not both!) or learn to speak in simple phrases without any accent at all.
Motivation, immersion, disclaimer

I have not learned Chinese. I have learned Korean to fluency and then tried to adapt my method to Chinese. After a few years my personal circumstances changed so I completely lost interest. I feel much happier now focusing on Korean again.

Back when I started learning Korean, the core of my learning strategy was adapted from AJATT. It seems the website is down now, but the core of it is summarized here: https://learnanylanguage.fandom.com/wiki/All_Japanese_All_The_Time

The core idea is that learning language properly takes a lot of thinking about the language and thinking in the language, so it is a motivation and immersion game. Studying is hard, so you need to motivate yourself through fun (throw out any resource which gets boring), immerse (in fun things!), and use spaced repetition to optimize your memorization (while deleting any boring flashcards).

A tangential idea from AJATT is that you should only take advice from people who have already "walked the path" (or less politely, don't take dieting advice from a fat person).

I have not walked the path for Chinese, only started the hike and lost interest. I recommend finding some blogs of people who have mastered Chinese fluently and see what resources they found most useful. But here are the resources, strategies, and philosophies I used to start learning mainland Mandarin.

The following assumes you are very motivated and your timeline is measured in years. I was not very motivated for Mandarin, so my studying was limited to 25 minutes per day of non-immersion. After three years, I wouldn't pass a beginner test. For immersion in a language school in Beijing, I hear the timeline is one summer to one semester to learn to hear the sounds and pronounce them accurately. Adjust your expectations accordingly.

Listening/speaking
  • Non-native speakers develop a foreign accent because they start speaking before they know what the language is supposed to sound like or before they are comfortable sounding like a native speaker. This becomes a bad habit which they cannot fix. If your end goal is to speak fluently, start with lots of listening (so you know what the sounds should be) and deliberate phoneme generation in a low-pressure environment (so you can generate the sounds accurately). It is much easier to learn slowly than to fix a bad accent.
  • I made Anki cards for syallables to learn to distinguish tones by downloading the University of Michigan phonemes database (https://tone.lib.msu.edu/) to create a 2400-note deck for phoneme -> pinyin and back. This was probably a bad idea, because the Univeristy of Michigan tones are really slow and native speakers think they sound funny. Learning to hear the tones was a slow process. It took me two years to finish studying my deck (on my commute time). There are downloadable "quiz" apps with more native speech for learning to hear the tones, but they aren't spaced repetition and don't cover the whole set of possible phonemes. The holy grail would be an Anki or Mnemnosyne deck which has good native pronounciation of individual syllables and covers all legal phonemes.
  • Find some good source audio of slow sentences (like from a textbook) and use Audacity to cut it into pieces and make flashcards for transcription and listening practice. Use Anki or Mnemosyne for the spaced repetition. This will give good listening practice and make you more familiar with the intonations. For bonus points, you can "repeat after" the cards, but I wouldn't recommend that until you can consistenly differentiate the sounds you are supposed to be repeating. If using Anki, I would create a separate auto-generated card type for repeating after a card, and have it introduced after listening to the relevant card has been mastered. I often practiced this next to a native speaker to make sure I wasn't forming bad habits.
  • Repetition is the holy grail of listening. You can learn the flow and intonation of a language perfectly just with enough repetition. Spaced repetition is most efficient, but any repetition will work. For Korean, I found a single expisode of a good drama with a lot of male lines and listened to it 100 times while doing other things.
  • But for understanding, the best method (according to research) is by explicit (grammar) instruction followed by input that is mostly comprehensible.
  • So explicit instruction helps with priming what to listen for, and repetition is good for learning intonation and flow.
Writing
  • Heisig did a great thing and created a systematic way of learning the writing system which builds up the characters from simple to complicated, using memory hints to build stories about them. It works great for remembering how to write, but the meanings sometimes differ slightly from actual use so as to introduce common characters in memorable ways. So you will need to relearn a bit once you get immersed. (For example, the character that means "of" is memorized with the keyword "glue" in the Heisig system.) Here's a link collection and someone's blog about using Heisig quite aggressively: https://mandarinsegments.blogspot.com/2013/05/heisig-method-remembering-hanzi-full.html
  • Heisig will conflict with ROC or PRC-designed textbooks and language aptitude tests, because they have their own system for introducing characters which is based on usage frequency rather than making conceptual connections. But it looks like the guy in that blog learned 500 characters in 18 days and 1000 characters in 46 days. So maybe you can delay the textbooks for a month while you focus on the basic characters.

Back when I started learning Korean, the core of my learning strategy was adapted from AJATT. It seems the website is down now, but the core of it is summarized here: https://learnanylanguage.fandom.com/wiki/All_Japanese_All_The_Time

It's not down, it just moved from alljapaneseallthetime.com to alljapanesealltheti.me

Oh thank you! So much nostalgia! Now https://alljapanesealltheti.me/index.htm returns "404 Page not found." but https://alljapanesealltheti.me/ works.

Whoops, fixed! Yeah, sorry, it was supposed to be https://alljapanesealltheti.me/index.html

It helps that they set up a romanization system, Pinyin, so you can read/write at a basic level even without learning any Hanzi.

IMO the Chinese grammar structure isn't too hard for a native English speaker, and there's no verb conjugation whatsoever, so there are some upsides.

I've been doing Chinese on Duolingo for a couple of years now, only because my husband (who's doing Spanish) bought a family membership. It's only been tolerable because I studied Chinese in a classroom setting several years earlier, and retained a lot of the basic grammar; I would absolutely not recommend Duolingo for a newbie. HelloChinese seemed good, although you do hit a hard paywall before too long.

Self-study? It's the same as any other language these days, grab your preferred app and go through all the lessons. Duolingo is shit for Chinese and I haven't really used many of the options myself, but I understand that DuChinese and HelloChinese would be good to get started with.

And the other thing about ubiquitous smartphones is that there really is no reason to learn hand writing anymore, because everything can be done with pinyin and copied if you have to write something.

I'm going to a funeral. Any recommendations for funeral-friendly jokes? (I'm not going to tell risky jokes at a funeral; I just thought "funeral-friendly jokes" would be a good "Friday Fun" prompt.)

Edit: Someone wore navy slacks with black shoes and a black sweater. Another guest wore a blue jacket with tan slacks and looked fine, albeit a little out of place, but the navy slacks with an otherwise black outfit just looked bad and tacky. (I, admittedly, do not have any black shoes, so wore matte dark brown shoes with an otherwise black outfit, but I figured that if everything else you're wearing is black/grey, anyone who cares about the difference between black and matte dark brown shoes is paying too close attention.)

Will echo the funny PG-level anecdotes as an approach if you're speaking

Another thing I'd suggest is making a dedicated effort to engage with smaller groups and individuals. When someone dies, the unique person they were to all of those different combinations of other people dies with them.

When a buddy of mine died, I talked with his mom about how dedicated a friend he was. Our teenage pothead team reminisced about freezing in the backyard treehouse with the 2-liter coke bottle bongs he'd slapped together for the night. I let another friend vent about how strange it was to have a slightly-inconsiderate-lover-but-still-a-good-guy pass away while those strange and sexual memories were still so intact.

My condolences as well.

My condolences as well.

Thanks.

Funny anecdotes are likely the ones that will be the most appreciated, as long as the deceased is not the butt of the joke.

Depends on the funeral. Attendees will be much more open to jokes at the funeral of an 80-year-old practical joker who died peacefully in their sleep than at the closed casket funeral of a teenaged drunk driving victim.

Stick to jokes the deceased would have loved, even better if they're jokes the deceased loved to tell all the time. Frame it as a remembrance rather than just an attempt to lighten the mood. In general I would also recommend being a little overly careful/conservative. Humor can be very soothing on the grieving, but you dont want to risk being insensitive.

Edit: Sadly while the post rendered correctly in the preview, it looks like some of the tags do get stripped when they get published in final form. I guess because arbitrary xml has some theoretical vulnerabilities. I guess we'll have to live without math support for a while longer.

The Motte has (limited) math support!

Inspired by the recent discussion of innumeracy, controversies caused by the refusal to specify problems symbolically, as well as past lamentations about the lack of math support I endeavored to research the simplest way to add MathJax to the codebase for limited TeX support. During my journey I discover that W3C has apparently been working on web native math in the form of MathML since 1998. It has varying implementation completeness for its 2½ components. There is semantic MathML, Presentation MathML, and MathML Core. The good news is The Motte appears to freely pass along the raw MathML XML tags, the bad news is implementation appears to then depend on the users browser. Fortunately, it seems like at least Core is implemented in most modern browsers. I have tested the latest Firefox for Windows and Android, as well as Chrome for Windows and Android.

The raw code is a bit of a mess. To render:

x=−b±b2−4ac2a

The LaTeX:

x=\frac{-b\pm\sqrt{b^{2}-4ac}}{2a}

becomes:

<math xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML"><mrow><mi>x</mi><mo>=</mo><mfrac><mrow><mo>−</mo><mi>b</mi><mo>±</mo><msqrt><mrow><msup><mi>b</mi><mn>2</mn></msup><mo>−</mo><mn>4</mn><mi>a</mi><mi>c</mi></mrow></msqrt></mrow><mrow><mn>2</mn><mi>a</mi></mrow></mfrac></mrow></math>

Fortunately there is a relatively easy workaround. There are a number of applications that support translation, including online. Allowing you to construct decently complex equations. e.g.:

L=∫0∞Bν(T)cos(θ)dν=2π515k4T4c2h3cos(θ)π=σT4cos(θ)π

The rendering is still not perfect, but much better than plain text.

@ZorbaTHut thanks for all the hard work you do keeping the site running. DM me and I'll send you a patch if you want a note for the 'Formatting help' page, and that's somehow easier than just adding it the next time you're working on the code base.

Oh man, I don't know if this is a promise or a threat, but if we got even basic LaTeX support, I can imagine writing so many more math posts here. Hopefully more Friday Fun than Culture War.

Court saga:

  • A municipality has an ordinance requiring a towing company that operates in the municipality to have a storage lot within the municipality.

  • 2013: A towing company with a storage lot in an adjacent municipality sues, arguing that the ordinance violates a state law that requires municipal towing ordinances to be "non-discriminatory and non-exclusionary".

  • 2015: The municipality settles the lawsuit by agreeing to change the ordinance to require a towing company to have a storage facility within five miles (eight kilometers) of the center of the municipality, as the crow flies. (Unfortunately, this lawsuit is too old for any of its documents to be available in the state's online judicial database.)

  • February 2020: A second towing company with a storage lot 5.6 miles (9 kilometers) from the center of the municipality sues, arguing that the new ordinance still violates the state law.

  • October 2020: The trial judge dismisses the lawsuit, finding that the five-mile radius is a reasonable method of ensuring convenience for the municipality's residents.

  • 2022: The appeals panel vacates and remands for further proceedings. The municipality never actually stated on the record its rationale for the five-mile radius (other than that it included the first company), so the judge had no basis to infer a rationale.

  • 2024: The municipality states on the record that the five-mile radius was picked as a "reasonable distance" for the convenience of its residents and police officers. The trial judge rejects the second company's arguments that any radius not measured from the edge of the municipality (which is approximately an 8 mi × 3 mi (13 km × 5 km) rectangle) or along roads is unreasonable, finds the five-mile radius reasonable, and dismisses the lawsuit.

  • 2025: The appeals panel affirms.

Here is an extra-detailed floor plan for a two-story house.

  • Dashed lines: Footings, foundation walls

  • Solid lines: Rooms, drywall, studs, sheathing, continuous insulation, portals, doors, door swings, windows

  • Dotted lines: Roof overhang, gutters

The footings, insulation, and rafters are based on the harsh climate of Fairbanks, Alaska (snow load 67 lb/ft2), and can be reduced in size if the house is built in a warmer location. (The International Residential Code's prescriptive tables top out at 70 lb/ft2, so for anything higher than that an engineered design is required. The highest snow load listed in the International Building Code (for ASCE 7 risk category II, which applies to houses) is 432 lb/ft2 in Whittier, Alaska, which is warmer than Fairbanks but has a wetter climate.)

Fun fact: If you are nostalgic for the days when gamepads were as light as feathers, you may be able to drastically cut down on weight by simply removing the rumble motors! The linked guide instructs you to desolder the wires, but merely cutting them works just as well if you are removing the motors rather than replacing them.

What's with the doors opening into each other?

IMO, it's an obvious way to waste less area on door arcs.

I've got a shower door that opens into the bathroom door and it really fucking sucks. Even when I'm alone I need to do way more operations to get in and out of the shower/bathroom.

I find that extremely hard to believe. The bathroom door and the shower door should never be open at the same time.

If the doors intersect:

  1. Open bathroom door
  2. Close bathroom door
  3. Open shower door
  4. Close shower door
  5. Shower
  6. Open shower door
  7. Close shower door
  8. Open bathroom door
  9. Close bathroom door

If they don't:

  1. Open bathroom door
  2. Close shower door
  3. Shower - no need to close bathroom door if nobody else is in the house
  4. Open shower door
  5. Close bathroom door - shower door can be left open for improved ventilation of the shower

It's that easy.

Is this allowed by the fire code? IMO, it's a terrible way to save space, too.

I'm with you. My house has this in the master bedroom, where the hallway door opens into the walk-in closet door, and with a closet it's not quite annoying enough to want to do something about, but I can tell I'd hate it with a more high-traffic intersection like a bathroom.

Just leave your doors closed or ajar rather than wide open, and there's no problem.

Many of us prefer the improved airflow and sense of space that comes from leaving internal doors open, though, that's why we're all criticizing your plan.

Is this allowed by the fire code?

I see no prohibition in International Residential Code § R318. It does contravene International Building Code § 1010.1.7, but that doesn't apply to houses.

IMO, it's a terrible way to save space, too.

Maybe if you constantly leave doors wide open rather than ajar or closed. I personally do not do that.

My Texan mind simply can’t comprehend the prospect of hundreds of pounds of snow sitting on my roof.

As for controllers—do you actually like them lighter? I feel like the heft of a Switch pro controller is much nicer.

My Texan mind simply can’t comprehend the prospect of hundreds of pounds of snow sitting on my roof.

Snow load at the northern edge of Texas reaches 19 lb/ft2, which is almost as much as the 20 lb/ft2 of live load for people walking on a flat roof.

As for controllers—do you actually like them lighter?

I don't care much about the weight (though, having removed the rumble motors from my Xbox One controller, I do think it now feels better to hold), but I hate rumble and disable it in every game I play, so why not remove rumble motors that I never use? (Some Internet searching indicates that people with arthritic or otherwise-unhealthy wrists also like lighter controllers.)

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


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