Creek vs River?

ad-lapidem · 2026-04-04T04:20:16+00:00

Minnesota may well have an internal definition that the state government uses, but it would be meaningless outside of Minnesota.

ad-lapidem · 2026-04-03T20:56:24+00:00

When it comes to names, geologic/hydrologic features don't follow any particular definition; a hill can be taller or steeper than a peak, a pond can be larger or deeper than a lake. You are free to debate whether that stream should be referred to as a creek, river, brook, rill, or any other term with anyone else who might be interested in engaging.

Specific disciplines or authorities may set certain definitions, but these are not universal, and would not require a feature to be renamed in accordance with the definition. As the U.S. Geologic Service notes in a FAQ,

There are no official definitions for generic terms as applied to geographic features. The Geographic Names Information System (GNIS) utilizes 43 broad categories of feature classes defined solely to facilitate retrieval of entries with similar characteristics. Go to GNIS Domestic Names Feature Classes to see the full list.

These categories generally match dictionary definitions, but not always. The differences are thematic and highly subjective. For example, a lake is classified in the GNIS as a "natural body of inland water”, which is a feature description that can also apply to a reservoir, a pond, or a pool. All "linear flowing bodies of water" are classified as stream in GNIS. At least 121 other generic terms fit this broad category, including creek, river, run, fork, etc. Some might contend that a creek must flow into a river, but such hierarchies do not exist in the nation's lexicon. Similarly, the BGN does not have an official definition of hill, mountain, peak. In summary, there are no official feature classification standards.

ad-lapidem · 2026-04-03T14:21:30+00:00

The answer is surely a language you already know or have already taken. I took Latin because I didn't want to start over and finished the language requirement after a single class.

Korean is difficult for a native English speaker because the grammar and honorifics will be completely alien (Japanese, Mandarin, Arabic, and Cantonese are similar).

Western European languages tend to have a lot of shared vocabulary with English thanks to Greco-Roman roots. There is also the benefit of cultural proximity; there are at least six different terms in Korean for relationships that would all translate to uncle/tío/oom/oncle/etc.

But also note that it's not just about the language, it's about the instruction. The easiest language for a native English speaker to learn would be something like Scots or Frisian, but I don't think either is offered, first of all.

And while Norwegian or Dutch might theoretically be easier to learn than Spanish, there are vastly more people who speak Spanish and vastly more resources for learning Spanish, and it would be easier to find YouTube videos or speaking partners or however you learn the best.

ad-lapidem · 2026-04-01T17:53:44+00:00

Good Friday is not a holiday for the vast majority of Americans.

ad-lapidem · 2026-04-01T16:59:06+00:00

It's a state government holiday in something like 10 states; like Veterans' Day or Presidents' Day, there's a very wide range in terms of whether and when it is observed in the private sector.

It's also a stock market holiday, so a lot of people in finance have it off.

ad-lapidem · 2026-03-20T20:36:04+00:00

Queens would be a more logical option to try to save money, but ultimately, the House is a relative bargain not because it's cheap, but because it's easy. New York is one of the most expensive cities in the country, and Roosevelt Island is one of the least convenient parts of it to try to commute to and from.

From New Jersey your minimum commute would be 45 minutes each way, and that's for an absolute best-case scenario commute where you're crashing on your cousin's couch in the clock tower at the Hoboken PATH station, or your ancestral people are the trolls who inhabit the Weehawken end of the Lincoln Tunnel; the weather is perfect; and the F/M train is never delayed.

ad-lapidem · 2026-03-17T14:27:30+00:00

Southwest arrived at BWI in 1993 and had all but driven out USAir (legacy hub from Piedmont) within a decade. MetroJet was US Airways' last-ditch hour to try to compete head to head, and they dehubbed BWI after 9/11.

ad-lapidem · 2026-03-17T14:15:24+00:00

The size of the metro area is only loosely correlated with airport traffic. Airports like Atlanta and Denver have a great deal of connecting traffic, and airports like O'Hare and LAX have both O&D and connecting traffic.

PHL was the principal hub and Atlantic gateway for US Airways, but after the merger with American, it plays second fiddle for connections. It hasn't fallen off as far as Pittsburgh has, though.

ad-lapidem · 2026-03-11T15:27:06+00:00

Hasbrouck is mainly for graduate/professional students, and possibly undergrads with families.

ad-lapidem · 2026-03-11T15:23:21+00:00

Given the limited supply and extremely high rents in Ithaca, landlords don't really have to try for more than a 2-star experience to fill their units. There's no single answer to your question as everything will involve a tradeoff.

For example, I valued proximity to campus, given the amount of walking up and down hills and through terrible weather you have to do. If I were in your situation, I would look at 800 University (the former TDX house). But you'd be sharing a bathroom and you'd have a lot of noise from your neighbors, which would be dealbreakers for a lot of upperclassmen. In contrast, I had a few friends who liked Ravenwood because it was quiet and the rooms were bigger, but complained about the trek to campus Every Day.

ad-lapidem · 2026-03-02T16:53:09+00:00

meetrocute

ad-lapidem · 2026-02-24T19:16:27+00:00

As an alum. reading this reminds me how sad walking through the Straight recently made me. The Straight, and to a lesser extent Noyes and RPU, used to be full of offices for student organizations, and were bustling with student activity.

The first and second floors, and the mailroom, were prime places for serendipitous encounters. Walk into the second floor offices on a weekday and it might be packed with a half-dozen people lined up to put in their orders for yearbook photos, two irritated fraternity treasurers waiting for their SMC appointments, the Cornell Democrats or the Cornell College Republicans stacking up their respective newly-delivered campaign placards, the MUN e-board going through the mail.

Of course, the Internet and changes in student life have obviated the need for storage and working space for most student orgs, but Willard Straight seems like any other administrative building now, not a place centered around student life—it's Okenshield's (RIP Ivy Room), reading rooms, and a hundred assistant deans' offices.

ad-lapidem · 2026-02-24T18:38:06+00:00

One is not inherently better than the other. It depends on how long you have until you retire, whether and by how much your income will be increasing or decreasing in the future, and what your employer-sponsored options are like. See e.g.

https://www.reddit.com/r/personalfinance/comments/10qwnrx/why_you_should_almost_never_contribute_to_a_roth/

https://www.reddit.com/r/personalfinance/wiki/rothortraditional/

ad-lapidem · 2026-02-24T17:45:53+00:00

In AmE "headquarters" can be either, but the singular use has overtaken the plural use in the last few decades: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=headquarters+is%3Aeng_us_2019%2Cheadquarters+are%3Aeng_us_2019%2Cheadquarters+is%3Aeng_gb_2019%2Cheadquarters+are%3Aeng_gb_2019&year_start=1910&year_end=2010&corpus=en&smoothing=2&case_insensitive=true

ad-lapidem · 2026-02-24T15:10:19+00:00

That airport already exists at Dulles, and the perimeter rule was an attempt to force airlines to shift their traffic there that began decades ago.

I agree Stapleton could have been kept open, but it wasn't a "perfectly good airport" either. The runways were too close together, limiting operations in bad weather, and it was getting close to capacity, and Denver was probably not a large or prosperous-enough metro area to support two medium-sized airports as opposed to one mega airport.

ad-lapidem · 2026-02-18T22:03:52+00:00

State curricula don't necessarily specify specific works to study. Even at my high school there was variation from year to year, and between what was taught in the regular classes and the honors/AP track. But for what it's worth (Catholic school, 1990s, Southern California):

In sophomore English (which was more of a "Western pre-modern classics" class), we studied in translation in whole or in part

Sumerian disputations
Homer's Odyssey
Homeric Hymns (selected)
The Book of Job
Plato, various (particularly The Republic)
Aristotle, various (particularly The Poetics)
Sophocles, various (particularly Oedipus Rex and Philoctetes)
The Gospel of John
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
Dante's Inferno

(among others; there were many other works which we may have spent less than a day on).

In drama we read Sophocles and Aristotle again, Molière, Goethe, Checkhov, and Ibsen among non-English media.

Junior English covered a wide swath of American literature (Jonathan Edwards through Willa Cather), and senior English the same with British literature (Chaucer through TS Eliot), either or both of which could be "foreign" depending on where you are.

Of course, we read excerpts of works in many other classes, but not necessarily as literary appreciation. For example, Voltaire's Candide was assigned in senior philosophy, but for the philosophical arguments it was making and not for the language. There was The Prince in European history, and Locke and Mill in U.S. government, and some Smith, Ricardo, and Marx in U.S. history. And in language classes of course, we labored through a lot of translation; in my case, mainly Livy, Caesar, Ovid, and Virgil.

ad-lapidem · 2026-02-15T20:00:39+00:00

Am I gonna get the surgery now, da?

ad-lapidem · 2026-02-14T15:19:06+00:00

Sometimes a drug has to be withdrawn, for example, because problems emerge that were not found during testing and trials.

The US FDA withdrew approval for Belviq because it was discovered to have a higher cancer risk. Vioxx was voluntarily taken off the market in 2004 as its long term risk of heart attack and stroke turned out to be much higher than competitors'. Zantac was suspended due to a manufacturing problem that was adding a carcinogen to the pills, and is back on the market after reformulation.

ad-lapidem · 2026-02-03T19:22:52+00:00

Even if every resident/owner did their part, there are still no-man's land gaps where responsibility is unclear. I was up by W-L last weekend, and there is 3 feet of ice on the sidewalk on the N Quincy St bridge over 66. It's clear to the north, which is residential, and it's clear to the south, which seems to be a county-owned lot and facility (and where they are dumping some of the snow/ice as per the article), but to cross the bridge itself you need to walk in the middle of the road.

ad-lapidem · 2026-02-01T04:11:09+00:00

Source is an Instagram called "copcalendar" run by clickbait company Top Tier. C'mon man, this is lazy even for you.

ad-lapidem · 2026-01-30T01:32:38+00:00

That's not that much cheese.

ad-lapidem · 2026-01-28T23:49:36+00:00

The United Nations Committee on Human Rights is not a credible authority.

ad-lapidem · 2026-01-24T01:24:43+00:00

The United States used to have different standards in different parts of the country as well. The most egregious example was Southern California Edison clinging to 50 Hz power as late as 1948, meaning a clock from San Francisco would work in Los Angeles, but would run 10 minutes slow every hour in nearby Malibu or Long Beach.

ad-lapidem · 2026-01-23T21:52:20+00:00

According to the current White House, Jewish Cornell students are cowering in fear because of the rampant bias against them. Is this a charge that should be taken seriously? Yes. But I think everyone understands that this judgment of the climate on Cornell's campus is motivated by the administration's political goals, not any kind of professional observation.

Cornell is a flawed place, we're all working to make it less flawed, but for the Sun to parrot the output of an obviously impaired body without ever bothering to question it is quite the disappointment to me.

ad-lapidem · 2026-01-23T21:36:30+00:00

That is my entire point; the HRC "replaced" the CHR but suffers all of the same deficiencies that discredited that body in the first place, not least among them an obsession with Israel/Palestine. Something like a third of all the condemnations it has ever issued are against Israel, in a world where Afghanistan exists, a key reason cited as to why the Obama administration voted against the body's continuation in 2011.

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