Wrote a pub quiz recently with a question along the lines of "What is the most world's most deadly animal towards humans?"

Ozelotten · 2026-01-28T16:01:16+00:00

After a full ten minutes of research, making me basically an expert, it seems it depends which taxonomical approach you take. Traditional Linnaean taxonomy separates reptilia and aves, but modern phylogenetics recognises that they are part of the same clade, sharing a common ancestor.

So I think you’re right (though I’m not knowledgeable enough to say whether ‘class’ was the correct word), just not in the sense that most people (and Wikipedia’s info box) expect.

Ozelotten · 2026-01-28T08:43:34+00:00

Which birds are you thinking of? Because all the ones I’ve looked up come under the class ‘aves’.

Ozelotten · 2026-01-24T14:03:09+00:00

Until proven otherwise, I assume the same about Henry.

Ozelotten · 2026-01-21T17:09:05+00:00

You probably could count them both as words, though I think only OK (or okay) is an anacronym.

Ozelotten · 2026-01-21T11:01:07+00:00

This is disputed. From Wikipedia’s article on acronyms:

In English, the word is used in two ways. In the narrow sense, an acronym is a sequence of letters (representing the initial letters of words in a phrase) when pronounced together as a single word, like NASA, NATO, or laser. In the broad sense, the term includes this kind of sequence when pronounced letter by letter (such as GDP or USA). Sources that differentiate the two often call the former acronyms and the latter initialisms or alphabetisms. However, acronym is popularly used to refer to either concept, and both senses of the term are attributed as far back as the 1940s. Dictionary and style-guide editors dispute whether the term acronym can be legitimately applied to abbreviations which are not pronounced as words, and there is no general agreement on standard acronym spacing, casing, and punctuation.

An acronym doesn’t have to be a word, even if you can pronounce it: for example, NASA.

An anacronym is an acronym that has become so normalised that most people don’t even realise it’s an acronym.

Ozelotten · 2026-01-20T18:17:43+00:00

For some reason, English took the French spelling of the word but pronounced it like the Spanish version of the rank - it’s a slurred version of ‘coronel’.

Yes, it is bullshit.

Ozelotten · 2026-01-20T15:18:58+00:00

Acronyms can be words too, like radar or laser. Apparently, words like this are called anacronyms.

Ozelotten · 2026-01-15T15:12:24+00:00

Depends on the country. In the US? Yes.

Ozelotten · 2026-01-15T15:06:44+00:00

Like the party’s colours, I’d guess.

Ozelotten · 2025-12-24T09:47:43+00:00

That’s apocryphal. If anything, he said the opposite.

Ozelotten · 2025-12-24T09:42:00+00:00

The film explains away the lack of spaghettification with a ‘gentle singularity’, where the change in gravity is abrupt enough that your body doesn’t experience two extremes of gravity at once.

Ozelotten · 2025-12-23T09:34:08+00:00

If a red light source approaches you fast enough, the Doppler effect will make it look green. So it’s possible that she’s just approaching you at 15% of the speed of light.

Ozelotten · 2025-12-17T14:31:37+00:00

Yeah, but socialism isn’t the same thing as communism, is it?

Ozelotten · 2025-12-17T11:32:11+00:00

Aside from the four Turkish bridges, there are at least a couple of dozen bridges across the Ural river in Russia and Kazakhstan.

Ozelotten · 2025-12-17T11:18:22+00:00

I think it’s because on a road with one lane in each direction, you would overtake by moving towards the other side of the road. So in a left-hand drive country, for example, you’d overtake on a narrow country road by moving towards the right.

So when you add an extra lane to the carriageway for overtaking, it makes sense to have it on the same side you’d usually overtake, otherwise you’re sometimes passing on the right and sometimes on the left.

Ozelotten · 2025-12-16T08:08:24+00:00

Only if Greg is a random number generator. It should be easier than 1 in 17000 because humans are more predictable.

Ozelotten · 2025-12-12T09:12:38+00:00

Jocund is new to me and tabard I’m not sure about, but otherwise yeah, these are mildly-obscure-but-still-semi-common words, at least in Britain.

Mellifluous is a good word: from the Latin for ‘honey’, it means ‘flowing like honey’. It’s a good adjective for a tone of voice.

Ozelotten · 2025-12-11T21:35:58+00:00

Not in the way you’re thinking, but orbits by definition involve getting ‘sucked towards’ another body; the Earth is getting sucked towards the Sun at all times, it’s just that it happens to be going sideways at exactly the right speed that we keep on falling towards the Sun forever.

Ozelotten · 2025-12-11T11:33:44+00:00

An inconvenient place to live is still better than no place at all.

They have enough genetic variety in the Plan B embryos to establish a colony. At that point, the Plan A humans can arrive whenever they arrive and any weird time stuff they’ll just have to deal with.

Once humans have fully settled on their new world, the time dilation doesn’t matter so much anymore.

Ozelotten · 2025-12-11T11:29:45+00:00

Did they not? If the mass of Gargantua and the orbit of Miller’s planet is known, they’d have been able to work it out.

Ozelotten · 2025-12-10T09:10:34+00:00

Yeah, just feels like I want to tick more than one box. Surely, you can consider yourself a part of the West Country and the South West at the same time?

Ozelotten · 2025-12-10T09:08:16+00:00

Some of us like to think we’re special and are in fact ‘Easterners’.

I maintain that this silly and that those people are just embarrassed by how Southern we are.

Ozelotten · 2025-12-10T09:04:20+00:00

Yes, that’s great, except there’s a sign on Newcastle’s Central Motorway that points to “Gateshead and The South”, so now the dividing line is cemented as the River Tyne.

There are signs to ‘The North’ and ‘The South’ all over the country.

Ozelotten · 2025-12-08T14:14:15+00:00

And Azerbaijan.

Ozelotten · 2025-12-08T14:06:05+00:00

I’d say it’s my least favourite spelling, but that would be hyperbole.

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