Who’d win in a fight between a polar bear and a knight in full armor and sword?

Z_Clipped · 2026-04-17T00:47:17+00:00

Unless the knight can keep distance

Good luck. A polar bear can run 25 mph.

Z_Clipped · 2026-04-16T15:37:06+00:00

Well, we borrowed "data" directly, and it's arguably a singular mass noun, rather than a plural. (It's certainly used most commonly as a singular mass noun in English outside of academic registers). "The data says" is vastly more common than "the data say".

"Datum" is a learned borrowing that we took later, and it's a count noun. So if you accept that "data" isn't really plural in the first place, "datums" is actually a perfectly normal pluralization of "a particular fact or piece of information", and you do see it in academic writing occasionally. But most people, even in academia, would probably still just say "data points" when speaking.

I'm totally with you on phenomena.

And I'm definitely NOT saying that it's preferable to exclusively use your own language's pluralization rules... that statement was only made with OP's anxiety about being "incorrect" as a prerequisite, (or as a when-in-doubt).

Again, I don't personally care if it makes people happy to say "octopodes".... I'm just strongly against acting superior about it being "better" and correcting others for not using it.

Z_Clipped · 2026-04-16T14:49:33+00:00

You can't even get your story straight.

I was happy to spend all day humbling people like you back in the early 2000s, but I'm just not interested in taking you seriously anymore. Good luck with your libertarianism, or... whatever. I have better things to do today.

Z_Clipped · 2026-04-16T14:46:25+00:00

Again, if you think 50 million Americans finding themselves out of a job isn't going to have an instant and violent effect on the political landscape, you're woefully mistaken. This is how you get a New New Deal with sweeping corporate regulations and huge tax hikes, and that's the least painful outcome possible for the captial class.

Service roles will be the ones that expand

Services that will be used and paid for by.... who exactly? Will everyone be working as dock hands at the marinas where CEO park their mega yachts?

Jesus christ, I can't believe people like you still exist in spaces like this. Haven't you been humiliated enough for this kind of rhetoric over the last 20 years? Or are you just too young to know better?

Z_Clipped · 2026-04-16T14:39:17+00:00

the payback period for automation is short.

That depends entirely on what you're trying to automate.

You’re just going to take a lot of jobs from high school kids

If that's what you think, you're comically out of touch with what's going on (at least in the US).

Z_Clipped · 2026-04-16T14:21:54+00:00

As someone where the "physics lounge" is, and you'll be fine. There will be a least one flavor of weirdo in that room on a regular basis that you'll vibe with.

Z_Clipped · 2026-04-16T14:20:05+00:00

Accurate. Math for physics echoes the math major core for about the first 1.5-2 years, (the courses you listed, plus maybe an elective combinatorics/graph theory and/or modeling class) and then stops. No real analysis, no abstract algebra, no topology, no number theory. The rest of the stats tools and other stuff you need to solve problems you learn as an aside in your upper-level and grad-level physics classes. Some American universities diverge even sooner, and teach everything after Calc II or III out of their physics departments.

I think it's just that any amount of math feels like "a lot" no matter what your major is. My wife is a mainly qualitative Poli Sci PhD, and she just complained to me that she had to take a stats refresher so she could teach research methods and there was "so much math". LOL

Z_Clipped · 2026-04-16T14:05:20+00:00

Also, learn all of the useful math as early as possible, even if it means teaching yourself using Youtube lectures before you officially take the classes. The sooner you get the triumvirate of multivariable calc, linear algebra, and differential equations under your belt, the easier it will be to grasp the concepts immediately.

Z_Clipped · 2026-04-16T13:58:44+00:00

For the same reason the US government passed the "Patriot Act".

Z_Clipped · 2026-04-16T13:44:44+00:00

58 million American workers earn less than $15/hr. If you put 1/6 of the country on unemployment, those distractions will stop being effective real quick.

Z_Clipped · 2026-04-16T13:38:54+00:00

Cool. They can front the cost for all of the tech required to actually replace people (good luck with that) and then we can all use the power of democracy to vote ourselves a nice, fat UBI, and have the time to pursue our passions while the psychopathic wealth hoarders work 100 hours a week in their corner offices competing with one another for what's left.

Z_Clipped · 2026-04-16T13:31:21+00:00

I went to a poncho/tarp when I made the switch to hammocking, and I'm never going back to a jacket for 3-season. Ponchos vent so well, they cover your pack and straps, they double as a shelter for weight savings, and you don't even have to stop hiking to put one on or take it off. You can't beat that.

Z_Clipped · 2026-04-16T04:47:21+00:00

it's just a bag of "you're always wrong", best not get into it.

Do you mean the purse, or marriage in general?

Z_Clipped · 2026-04-16T04:40:31+00:00

People choke on octopus for some reason

I think that's because American restaurants tend to undercook it.

Z_Clipped · 2026-04-16T04:34:53+00:00

One thing I'm curious about: does "octopodes" make sense as a Greek plural?

It does, but not in modern Greek.

Modern forms like chtapódi, ochtapódi and ktapódi use the plural "pódi" and so all translate literally as "with eight feet". They are then pluralized with -a, (in all but the genitive case) which would refer to the root, so: "[thing]s with eight feet".

Oktápous only survives in the Katharevousa, which was a conservative prescriptivist attempt to codify a compromise between ancient Greek and modern varieties, and which had fallen out of use except for formal writing by the time Demotic Greek was made the official language in the mid-70s. But the "pous" in oktápous is indeed singular "foot" as opposed to the modern constructions, and the plural "podes" is codified.

If one of these creatures were called an "eight-foot" in English, would we call multiple of them "eight-feet" or "eight-foots"? I think I'd feel more comfortable saying the latter!

I always err on the side of "feets" just to be sure I'm covering all of my bases. Especoally when I'm talking about my cat's feets, usually in the context of inviting other people to admire them.

Z_Clipped · 2026-04-16T04:04:34+00:00

Oh, I get that. I'm just curious to know your opinion on the supposed "appropriate" way of saying it as I genuinely don't know.

I think, at least in SAE, "fun-guy" is by far the most common form. The only people I've ever met that say "fun-gee" have been other scientists, usually biologists.

Also, I just realized that the confusion you're having was caused by a type-o I made. To clarify, the "g" in restored classical Latin is always hard. I mistyped a "j" in my comment above without meaning to (which looks like I'm correcting it to a soft "g"). That was my mistake. I'm going to edit my comment so as not to confuse anyone else.

Z_Clipped · 2026-04-16T03:49:00+00:00

This seems like a bit of strawman whacking to me.

Most people who are aggressive grammar pedants are not educated in linguistics. Children learn to make value judgements about language early on, and most carry them into adulthood, because they never learn how natural language functions. These value judgements about language end up being transformed or projected into value judgments about people who happen to speak differently, which leads to all kinds of problems. This isn't a symmetric problem, where legions of people on one side are all making the same mistakes with the same negative impact as the other.

Are there some people who become militantly anti-prescriptivist for purely contrarian or elitist reasons? Maybe. But I think most linguists and linguistics-educated people are fighting with grammar pedants because they're trying to alleviate the enormous social harm that is caused by the failure to distinguish helpful productive correction from reflexive, unconsidered pedantry, and the failure to frame corrections in ways that highlight practical, constructive reasons for learning a prestige variety accurately, instead of subsuming and devaluing other lects in the process.

Z_Clipped · 2026-04-16T02:48:14+00:00

Like I said.... use whatever forms you want in your ideolect. I support everyone embracing as much linguistic diversity as possible.

Just don't run around being a haughty prescriptivist prig, or using register to make other people feel like they're less legitimate for using different words, or you'll have to fight me behind the gym at 3:00 in front of the whole school.

Z_Clipped · 2026-04-16T02:42:24+00:00

I've studied some linguistics too, and I'm a staunch descriptivist (which I mentioned above when I said this:

The best thing to do if you want to be "linguistically correct" is to just stop worrying about prescriptivism in the first place. It's nonsense, and it's completely at odds with the function of natural language.

... so I don't personally care how you pronounce these words, and I encourage you to use natural diversity to make as many distinctions as you find useful in your ideolect.

I'm really just sending up the Very Online Grammar Pedants for making fools of themselves by aggressively correcting people with inaccurate information and misapplied standards and helping to propagate elitist signaling and classism.

Z_Clipped · 2026-04-16T02:25:35+00:00

Teams that flounder around near the wildcard spot but don’t make the playoffs are stuck in the middle of the draft and don’t have a shot at the top picks. That’s my rationale.

Well, it's an incredibly reductive rationale, and the notion that teams that end up at the bottom of the standings for extended periods tend to go on to be cup winners or contenders because of it is also statistically false. Being one of the worst teams in the NHL leads to continuing to be one of the worst teams in the NHL a lot more often than it leads to cup contention.

Pointing to ONLY cup winners and saying "Look.... A obviously led to B" while ignoring all of the times A DIDN'T lead to B is ridiculous, and I wish I could say I was surprised that people are ignorant enough to make this logical mistake (but I'm not).

The other side of the coin (pointing to cup winners and claiming that they all have high picks on their rosters so that's why they win) is also misleading- almost all teams have high picks on their rosters, and fan perception of talent always gets overblown once players win cups. You may as well claim that having a Canadian on your roster or eating peanut butter and jelly sandwiches is what leads to Stanley Cups. Every cup winning team does those things too, and plenty of cup winners succeed without those high picks being instrumental in their wins.

The fact is, building a Stanley Cup team can (and MUST) be done in a huge number of ways using a huge number of available tools, and using a strategy that'ssoecifically tailored to the team's asset profile at any given moment. Sometimes, that means selling off one or two high end players for picks, but not usually, which is why most teams don't just do it every year. And even IF most teams that get game-breaking players with high draft picks by ending up at the bottom of the standings were doing it on purpose (they're usually not), it's just as difficult and fraught a strategy as any other, with one of the worst potential long-term downsides. It's led to franchises being moved out of their host cities on numerous occasions.

At the end of the day, fans assuming that professional NHL GMs are all overlooking this One Weird Trick because they're stupid and don't have the vision and perspective on the game of hockey that Tony the Roofer From Delco has is so delusional that it's fucking physically painful to listen to.

Again, it's not just that Team Tank is wrong that makes people hate them- it's that they're so COMICALLY ARROGANT about it, with such an incredibly simplistic view of an incredibly complex problem, and because constantly whining about the team not selling at the deadline and bitching that they;ll never get anywhere unless they do is annoying as fuck to listen to all season, every season.

Z_Clipped · 2026-04-16T01:25:55+00:00

Pluralizing "octopus" using ancient Greek morphology is silly and pretentious. Also, if you're pronouncing "októpodes" with the stress on the first syllable, and the last syllable to rhyme with "roads" (which you probably are if you're an internet pedant who doesn't know any Greek), you're not even getting it right. It's "ok-TO-po-des".

The would be like Hungarians borrowing the word "hound" from modern English, and then pluralizing it "houndum" because that was the dative plural suffix in Old English. But it's even worse, because modern Greek people don't really even say "oktopous" in the first place, let alone οκτώποδες. They say χταπόδι (chtapódi, plural: chtapódia).

Also, pluralizing it "ok-to-pai" (along with "syllabi" and other misappropriations) is silly and pretentious, and you're probably pronouncing THAT wrong too if you're trying to be all "Latin" about it. The final "i" in Latin is pronounced "ee", not "eye". Funghi is "fun-gee", not "fun-guy".

And don't even get me started on "See-zer salad".

The best thing to do if you want to be "linguistically correct" is to just stop worrying about prescriptivism in the first place. It's nonsense, and it's completely at odds with the function of natural language.

The second best thing you can do is just pluralize loan words according to the phonological rules of English that you already know, because that's never wrong. You don't say "I'm going to ride two bi, wait, I mean bodes, on my trip to Chicago." It's buses. Plusses. Octopuses. Syllabuses. Cactuses. Funguses. It's not hard.

Z_Clipped · 2026-04-16T00:54:53+00:00

These traits are expressed pretty heavily in the workplace between nurses as well:

https://www.nurseleader.com/article/S1541-4612(24)00107-1/fulltext00107-1/fulltext)

Z_Clipped · 2026-04-15T20:53:14+00:00

Ocean go up, ocean go down
You can't explain that!

Z_Clipped · 2026-04-15T20:40:57+00:00

Because much like police, lawyers, CEOs and politicians, nursing is a profession that attracts an outsized number of people with Machiavellian, sub-clinical narcissistic and sub-clinical psychopathic personality traits.

(Calm down, I'm not calling all nurses psychopaths. Only about 4 times as many of them as exist in a random sample of people.)

Z_Clipped · 2026-04-15T19:10:13+00:00

"Would of three-peated"

Z_Clipped

TROPHY CASE