palordrolap

Well, no, but in a sense, I kind of was. The ovum already existed and had for <mother’s age at the time> years, but the exact sperm did not. I came along too much later for that to have been possible. But my DNA was all there. Just not assembled in the right order yet.

Alternatively, if you believe in reincarnation, I still might have been. I have at least one relative who was there who didn’t make it to my birth. Maybe I’m one of them come back.

If that was a conscious choice, that may have been a mistake, but that’s another story.

The site malfunctioned for me because of the NoScript browser extension, so for a second I thought I’d somehow become colour-blind.

Once I sorted that problem, it loaded the example images properly and they all look different to me, confirming that I’m not colour-blind.

You mean, right-click and save-as the images that are built into the site before uploading them somewhere else? That seems unnecessary. Anyone could grab those from the site themselves. Or use the site.

The site malfunctioned for me because of the NoScript browser extension, so for a second I thought I’d somehow become colour-blind.

Once I sorted that problem, it loaded the example images properly and they all look different to me, confirming that I’m not colour-blind.

Oh man, I was freaking out for a second after clicking one of the simulations and seeing no difference from the regular image. Then I thought to check whether NoScript had blocked scripts from the site. Yeah. So, it hadn’t loaded the simulated image and I was seeing the original.

Look, if I’m wrong, I’m wrong, but you’re not making a good case here. Brine is also known as salt water. Just how much of a stretch is that? Sea water is salt water. Sea water is also known as brine. Depending on which term we use, either the sea turns into milk or it doesn’t. This is a problem.

But then this is all a hypothetical and maybe the real bend is how far we’re both getting out of shape over this :p

OK, yeah, you can’t control a third party’s promises (or hallucinations), but the boss isn’t going to fire someone from sales and/or marketing. They’ll fire the developer for failing to deliver.

TBH, this is barely any different from marketing promising that a product will have a feature that the development team only find out about later purely by accident when upper management asks about it.

This. The modern mathematical symbols, at least in their current use, are no older than 550 years. Heck, the numerals we use are about as old as that. The Arabic world had a head start with early versions of those numerals, but even then, those are only twice as old as the oldest mathematical symbols still in use.

Prior to that, people wrote things out in words, or, as you suggest, invented their own symbologies and shorthands.

I have a book around here somewhere that shows how Diophantus wrote a particular polynomial equation and it’s all Greek letters, some with macrons (overlines), some superscripts that don’t mean what we’d use superscripts to mean, and one large upturned capital psi in the middle of it. Mind-boggling.

And they’d be more mystified by our notation than we are by theirs because at least we (or some of us) know what Greek letters and numerals are. They’d have no such head start.

Information paradox detected. You’ll somehow die and your own advanced biology will become the trigger you went there to seek.

Another name for brine is “salt water”. Now is it water or not?

My kettle boils a mug’s worth of water in less than a minute, and it takes me longer than that for even a brief toilet visit and washing of hands. I have learned not to switch the kettle on until I get back from the bathroom, otherwise I’ll be boiling the water twice.

Important factors: 1) Britain has 230V mains power so electric kettles can boil water incredibly quickly, 2) The stereotype about Brits and tea is true in my case. I get through three to six mugs of the stuff per day. 3) Hot tea must be made with boiling water. Power isn’t cheap and re-boiling the water adds up over time.

Now you have to define “water form”. What percentage of dissolved constituents prevent water from being “water form”? Or is it how it looks rather than what’s in it?

It’s possible to have a brine solution of 25% salt that looks like ordinary water, at least at first glance, for example. Would only the H2O molecules in that be replaced by milk or would the salt be replaced as well?

What if I add food dye to a glass of water beforehand? That doesn’t look like water any more, so would that get turned into milk? Would the dye stay?

How about if I mixed an emulsifier, oil and chalk dust into a glass of water beforehand? That’s not milk, but it looks like milk. What would happen with that? And then we’re back to percentages again, I guess.

Has Putin started being paranoid about his food and drinks yet?

In principle, I’m all for that. In practice, I’m on a shoestring budget and when serviceable toilet paper can be had for half the price of a bamboo roll, I have to take the cheaper option.

I like to use the plastic wrappers that toilet rolls are sold in for waste bin liners. I don’t know about other places, or even manufacturers, but the ones I buy come in a wrapper that doesn’t have any holes except the one I tear to get at the rolls in the first place. All I need to do is widen that a bit once the rolls have run out and it’s ready for any bin or bucket I might be using.

I’m also using an old shredder bin as a waste bin because the shredder part died. Decided I might as well hang on to the lower part. Perfectly usable receptacle.

It’s rubbish, but that only makes it more apt!

(The following is from my, possibly faulty, personal observation. Take it as you will.)

Clowns are at least 80% mime. If you can convey a message - often a funny one - with only exaggerated actions and facial expressions, I’d say you’re well on your way to clowning. They almost never talk and there’s a definite shared white face-paint thing going on.

The main talkers seem to be the ones that do kids’ birthday parties or ones in “senior” positions in a troupe where it would be funny to imitate a bossy person. They might otherwise allow a shout or mock cry of pain, but rarely use words when they do.

The other 20% is brightly coloured, ill-fitting (usually oversized) clothing, a bigger emphasis on slapstick, and props that make noise.

I’ve seen mimes perform cheap magic tricks, so that’s not exclusive to clowns, but I’d say that was more of a clown thing as well.

There’s a whole continuum from mimes to clowns to magicians and back again now that I think about it. Teller of Penn and Teller fits somewhere around the “back again” part. And Harpo Marx was basically a clown without the face-paint.

Be strong, Clarence. Be strong for Mother.

People who have only just learned the moves of chess play better chess than I do.

Well, once you’ve had your country invaded by rabid psychopaths, there’s bound to be some gene admixture (to put that far too mildly) and so you’ve a chance that their descendents, even if it’s recessive and rare, will have the desire go on to do the same.

Of course, rabid psychopathy and the urge to invade other places can also come about on its own, but when you look at the way the Vikings and their Germanic cousins invaded western Europe a thousand years or so ago, and then note what happened a few hundred years later, it has to make you wonder whether it might have only happened the once.

There’s the figure of speech “to tap-dance around (a topic)” meaning to make concerted effort avoid talking about a particular topic all the while talking about many things that are adjacent to that topic. It’s usually to avoid coming across as offensive or ignorant in some way.

The underlying cause and/or whether a bit more knowledge on the part of the speaker could render the dance unnecessary is highly contextual (and mostly irrelevant here), but nevertheless, people tap-dance around topics all the time. (The previous sentence might even qualify as an instance.)

So, the question is: How much contribution to this n-gram is people pointing out that someone is, or was, tap-dancing around a topic?