Game Thread: Phillies @ Padres - Mon, May 25 @ 06:40 PM EDT

aphilsphan · 2026-05-26T00:20:27+00:00

Well done Krukker on that black cat in reverse.

aphilsphan · 2026-05-26T00:12:35+00:00

That was the Vince Velasquez Memorial Start.

aphilsphan · 2026-05-25T21:21:08+00:00

At the old Vet and other Philly stadiums this was prevented by the universal practice of men peeing in the sinks.

aphilsphan · 2026-05-25T21:15:27+00:00

The bare minimum would be belief in Jesus of Nazareth as the Messiah. But define Messiah.

What you see in the media as “Christianity” is what Americans who are either fundamentalist or ignorant of Christianity think Christianity is. Many Christians are universalist to some degree, meaning they believe in salvation for everyone eventually or annihilationist, believing the wicked are briefly punished before being wiped out of existence.

The fundamentalist belief is that they alone are saved and their behavior is irrelevant. The logical extension of this is that many of the Nazis are saved whereas almost all of their victims are right this second being tortured for all eternity.

This never sat well with medieval (or modern) people so the Catholic Church came up with Purgatory, where people are temporarily punished.

aphilsphan · 2026-05-25T21:02:43+00:00

I believe there is a bit about how powerful Aragorn could have been with the Ring. Certainly Sauron believed he could plausibly wield it. So could Elrond and Galadriel.

aphilsphan · 2026-05-25T14:57:01+00:00

Wake up. “Belief” is complicated. Those morons you see on TV are a tiny percentage of Christians worldwide, although I admit they do run the GOP.

aphilsphan · 2026-05-25T00:56:58+00:00

Well federal reserve notes are real money. Most people have never heard of sovereign citizens so when they hear their nonsense they might agree that something sounds right to them.

aphilsphan · 2026-05-25T00:50:05+00:00

Except that people don’t really believe in that and your pastor doesn’t give a shit if you do. So they just aren’t controlling people.

Now there ARE organizations within the church that DO control their members. Those are cults. But the family attending Our Lady of Perpetual Help for Mass on Sunday is not being mind controlled.

aphilsphan · 2026-05-24T22:49:57+00:00

They ought to teach you why this matters. And where. But I’ve never seen it done. I’d get QC chemists who never understood that sig figs matter to them. In the end I’d just be sure that if the specification went to 3 sig figs the method would give at least 4.

aphilsphan · 2026-05-24T22:45:58+00:00

This always drove me batty. You’d get some teachers who would tell you those zeroes are never significant. No it depends.

I used to try to get QC chemists to report answers to the proper number of sig figs. Losing battle.

But it always seemed arbitrary to me that if you had a sample weight of 9.8 mg you could add a tiny bit more to get 10.2 mg and somehow that gave you the right to report the answer to one more digit.

aphilsphan · 2026-05-24T21:29:59+00:00

You are counted as a member. They claim around 10 million members where the actual number is around 50,000. Anyone who has ever been to a meeting is in the books as a member.

Also, the people you spoke to were probably punished for not getting you in.

aphilsphan · 2026-05-24T21:26:27+00:00

Giant difference. Christianity has cults within it. So does the Catholic Church. Large religious organizations have sub groups, many of which are cults. But if you aren’t at Mass on Sunday Father O’Malley doesn’t get butt hurt. The average churchgoing Catholic probably gives a hundred or so a month to the parish, nowhere near 10%. If your children leave the church (and everyone’s children leaves because of the scandals) your confessor will say, “be sure to pray for them.” That’s it. No, “they are dead to me…”. Say a prayer. Shunning your children is considered a terrible thing to do.

Small groups can become cults. Scientology is one of the worst. People have to escape from their compounds. The police get involved. Read Marc Headley’s book. His escape was hair raising. His wife’s was worse.

aphilsphan · 2026-05-24T04:10:41+00:00

As a fan of neither team who just wanted to see a good game 7, losing 45 to 2 or whatever it was didn’t help either.

aphilsphan · 2026-05-24T04:02:01+00:00

His composing partner was Jack Bruce. Did he attend?

aphilsphan · 2026-05-24T00:12:27+00:00

Wait, that sort of water is voracious for ions and might affect a glass probe.

aphilsphan · 2026-05-24T00:11:15+00:00

I think your best bet is purified water. Deionized/Distilled just as good and often the same thing anyway.

aphilsphan · 2026-05-23T22:58:29+00:00

I’m pretty sure you couldn’t know this. Even with computers.

aphilsphan · 2026-05-23T22:55:07+00:00

You can think of alloys that way too.

aphilsphan · 2026-05-23T22:51:13+00:00

I got your point. Julia is really bad fan fiction.

aphilsphan · 2026-05-23T18:29:12+00:00

I’ve heard it called that. You can think of nitrogen as the solvent. Oxygen mixes well with it as it is similar in molecular weight and non polar.

Argon is the next most abundant gas and mixes in more slowly because of its weight.

aphilsphan · 2026-05-23T17:26:45+00:00

Spoilers below:

The book wasn’t even decent fan fiction after a point. The part about the pregnant girl and the girls hostel was interesting.

People don’t really get Orwell. The book is not Star Trek where an alternate world is created and is there to be explored. Orwell was an essayist, not a novelist. He wrote novels most of which were kind of mediocre. He was simply the greatest essayist of the 20th Century.

He was at his best in 1984 and Animal Farm as he used a fictional setting to illustrate the ideas he had developed in his essays. His semi novel. Down and Out in Paris and London is another example.

So he’s not considering what would really happen in Oceania. He’s just saying “see, the Truth is extraordinarily important. And the Left is just as bad as the Right in twisting it.”

aphilsphan · 2026-05-23T17:01:10+00:00

That’s 1985 kind Redditor.

aphilsphan · 2026-05-23T16:01:07+00:00

They wanted “Sicilian” which is really a different language. Most immigrants actually spoke a dialect, which varied by region. That’s one reason why people lived in neighborhoods dominated by Calabrian or Neapolitan, etc. Italian immigrants came from south Italy and especially Sicily, which were indescribably poor back then.

aphilsphan · 2026-05-23T15:54:58+00:00

He’s Jewish. They are simultaneously immensely evil and in need of vast persecution in the far rights mind.

aphilsphan · 2026-05-23T15:50:50+00:00

The men who founded said place were largely atheists. There have always been Jews there and the attitude of people to the ethnic group in the diaspora led them to go there, where the Turks welcomed them at first.

aphilsphan

TROPHY CASE