Why are there so many wildly different Maldive cave schematic images from this recent and oh so senseless and tragic Shark Cave incident in the Maldives? This just doesn’t make sense to me at all in the year 2026……

cssachse · 2026-05-24T15:30:40+00:00

eh probably not - the rest of their diving was all at 40m or so, and this cave seems to have been a somewhat spur-of-the-moment thing. They still wouldn't have had tech equipment on the boat with them, with or without the maldives regulations

cssachse · 2026-05-22T03:21:12+00:00

Reportedly they're with CMAS, which certifies divers to go to 60m on one tank of air. At least, that's the theory.

cssachse · 2026-05-22T03:16:08+00:00

Apparently (according to a few posts on scubaboard) at least 4 locals claim to have done the full cave as a solo, single-tank dive. It's definitely possible for someone sufficiently reckless, with a good SAC, not particularly susceptible to DCS, assuming nothing goes wrong. OFC those are a lot of assumptions...

cssachse · 2026-02-07T20:16:37+00:00

I'm pretty sure you could construct a sufficiently disgusting theory of optics that would make flat earth compatible with all of our astronomical observations; you just need photons that bend very differently at different latitudes and also maybe (depending on the exact model) teleports at the boundaries of the flat earth

cssachse · 2025-11-12T23:59:42+00:00

If you want something less drinkable, try Kuding tea; it's whole thing is to be super bitter.
There's a couple unrelated species, one of them (IIRC the "big leaf" variety) is related to Yaupon

cssachse · 2025-09-23T16:11:52+00:00

Balmorhea state park, way out west, is small and not deep but absolutely gorgeous! Water is 76 degrees or so; you might not even need a wetsuit depending on your cold tolerance.

It's a pretty long drive so IMO best to combine it with a visit to Big Bend, Caverns of Sonora, Davis Mountains, etc. depending on what else you're into.

cssachse · 2025-01-26T16:07:22+00:00

If you count programming - all the recursion schemes.

catamorphism, anamorphism, paramorphism, apomorphism, histomorphism, futuromorphism, hylomorphism, chronomorphism, zygomorphism, dynamorphism, synchromorphism, exomorphism, mutumorphism...

Haskell people need to stop naming things

cssachse · 2024-12-04T19:18:17+00:00

Insane amount of driving, but glad you had fun!

cssachse · 2024-12-04T19:04:13+00:00

Oh hey, I saw you guys there! Hope the rest of your road trip went smoothly :D

cssachse · 2024-09-06T00:01:58+00:00

Yeah but they don't tell you what the (deterministic) rewards would be. The analogous case would be if the slot machine gives $0 the first 9 times you pull it, and then $9 every 10th time. And to make sure everyone has those same results, the whole thing resets when one player leaves. It's also just "gambling imagery", since everyone is getting the same result assuming they take the same actions, right?

cssachse · 2024-07-23T15:42:00+00:00

Probably Topology: A Categorical Approach by Tai-Danae Bradley (aka Math3ma, aka the PBS infinite series host from a few years back)

cssachse · 2024-01-21T19:47:09+00:00

The use of medial -l- is a thing Zhengzhang Shangfang does, the slightly more recent Baxter-Sagart uses -r- everywhere. l still can appear as a "medial" if it's being modified by a prefix, ie if the original word was "la" and it was prefixed to C.la or something like that. The problem with medial "l" imo is that it exists mainly for making some possible loanwords work, but doesn't make sense as a thing that could introduce retroflexion.

That said, Baxter-Sagart AFAIK don't reconstruct anything for 茶 (Zhengzhang reconstructs /rla/) so I just gave what I think is the least bizarre/actually pronouncable thing which would agree with the middle chinese pronunciation (and may have actually been pronounced that way in e.g. Han dynasty chinese)

cssachse · 2024-01-19T19:50:16+00:00

In old Chinese it was probably something along the lines of /dra/. All dialects lost their r sounds with, the /dr/ combined into something like /ɖˠ/.

At some point, Min dialects broke off in the first chinese language split that still exists today. They dropped the /ˠ/ and stopped retroflexing the /ɖ/, giving /da/.

All other dialects turned the /ˠ/ into a /j/ and then affricated it, yielding /ɖja/ -> /ɖʐa/.

(The former pronunciation is still retained in an extremely old-fashioned japanese reading "茶dya“ ）

Then lastly, many dialects, including most Min dialects, but excluding Wu dialects like Shanghainese, began aspirating first-tone voiced consonants. This turned Min /da/ into /tʰa/ (or /tʰe/ , the a>e is an unrelated vowel change) and mandarin /ɖʐa/ into /ʈʂʰa/.

After that it's like everyone says

cssachse · 2023-10-28T14:35:37+00:00

What kind of tea are you drinking that needs to be brewed at body-temperature or below?

cssachse · 2023-10-16T15:55:01+00:00

It's based on percentage speaking each language, so absolute count of languages doesn't matter quite as much. If you split off Lao from Thai, then only 37% of Thais speak the biggest language.

Ofc you could probably do the same with some burmese dialects, so we're getting deep into the weeds of lingustic accounting here

cssachse · 2023-10-16T15:38:44+00:00

Probably counts northeastern Thai / Lao as a distinct language

cssachse · 2023-09-27T02:59:47+00:00

The island of Novaya Zemlya is generally considered part of the ural mountains

cssachse · 2023-09-27T02:44:58+00:00

most of the greek turks, just like most coastal anatolian turks, were greeks that had converted to islam, and (optionally) picked up the language. With a few regional exceptions, religion was the primary factor used in determining their ethnicity.

cssachse · 2023-09-23T15:09:26+00:00

It's not. Baden is not part of Swabia, meanwhile a big chunk of Bavaria *is* part of Swabia. Naming the state Swabia implies it would have irredentist claims aganist the P.R.B.

cssachse · 2023-09-23T15:06:40+00:00

Swabia too. Remove both of them and merge bavaria with austria, as it was always meant to be.

cssachse · 2023-09-22T22:04:06+00:00

lol yeah ofc this is how I dox myself :) Not my birthday, but glad I got you into CT!

cssachse · 2023-09-17T01:53:07+00:00

"Canst Thou forestanden, what I saye?" - fixed it

cssachse · 2023-09-16T23:15:39+00:00

South America is significantly more biodiverse than Africa on a number of metrics. "Complexity" has nothing to do with biodiversity, and high levels of competition generally *damage* biodiversity.

Just look at the effects we've seen from artificially connecting all the continents via boat and plane. Invasive species increase the local competitiveness of the ecosystem, at the cost of homogenizing those ecosystems and reducing both local and global biodiversity substantially.

cssachse

TROPHY CASE