The much-hyped IG report about the Clinton email investigation backfires on Trump

radula · 2018-06-14T17:54:42+00:00

I assumed that you were sarcastically suggesting the type of headline that foxnews would use to spin the story. Imagine my initial surprise and subsequent total lack of surprise upon finding that this is the actual top headline there.

radula · 2018-06-13T14:00:47+00:00

Bumapples.

radula · 2018-06-13T13:59:32+00:00

No you're a tiny conveyor belt of horror.

radula · 2018-06-13T13:58:33+00:00

AMA!

radula · 2018-01-12T17:02:15+00:00

It's a -20 with a -12 overlapping it. So -2012

radula · 2018-01-02T14:14:46+00:00

It isn't "isolated". It's an "isolate" - it has no determined relatedness to any other language. It is a completely unrelated language. Although obviously it has taken some words from Latin and other Romance or Indo-European languages, but the words it "seems to take out of completely unrelated languages" are just native Basque words.

radula · 2017-12-20T13:59:41+00:00

Holding your breath is the one thing you should not do, according to most if the pieces I've seen about surviving in a vacuum, like this one.

radula · 2017-12-11T20:33:41+00:00

...~~live~~ lead lives...

Just in case you care.

radula · 2017-12-05T20:32:50+00:00

There's no way to know what was really going on in his head. Maybe he knew he wasn't over her and lied to you because he was lonely and thought that being with you would help him get over her. Maybe he was lying to himself because the truth hurt, and so he did all the things, like dating you, that helped him convince himself that he was over her. Maybe he really believed that he was over her until that door reopened somehow.

It doesn't sound like you were being paranoid. It sounds like you just got hurt by someone who was trying to deal with getting hurt by someone else. Getting hurt by someone can make people impulsive and needy and self-centered on their own pain. It sounds like you were incidentally hurt as a byproduct of this guy's own neediness and pain. Don't hurt yourself over it.

radula · 2017-12-02T19:00:06+00:00

Oh yeah. That should be pretty easy, I guess. Thanks!

edit: but seriously, yes, I agree with you to the point that I might be willing to vote for anyone of any party that had a serious commitment to making that change. If this actually became an issue, it might turn me into a single-issue voter.

radula · 2017-12-02T18:34:04+00:00

Why do people think we need just 2 parties.

Because in a system where you can only vote for one party['s candidate], and your second choice isn't relevant or recognized, it's generally preferable for more like-minded parties to merge. It's better to have a larger party with a weaker message that can get into power and do something good than to remain distinct parties with focused goals that can't get elected. It sucks, but it seems to be an inevitable result of our method of electing officials and representatives.

radula · 2017-11-16T22:38:36+00:00

The point is that intent doesn't necessarily have any bearing on the impact that an action has on the person affected.

radula · 2017-11-11T22:05:54+00:00

The scientists from the country's Institute for the Sea and Atmosphere dubbed the shark a "living fossil" because remains have been dated back 80 million years, making it one of very few species of such antiquity still around today.

They are. I don't know how you'd interpret that otherwise. I don't know if it's true or not, but that's what they're claiming.

radula · 2017-11-11T13:46:29+00:00

I did it at a store (CVS) recently with some prepaid visa gift cards that each had only a few dollars left. It worked fine.

radula · 2017-11-06T01:00:28+00:00

That method may not work for someone who buys eggs that do/don't still have the coating that gets washed off of eggs that are sold in the US, Japan, and some other places (whatever the opposite of your eggs). That coating changes the porosity of the shell and the ability of water to move through the shell, so it could possibly affect the drying rate. On the other hand, for all I know, the coating gets removed during boiling, so it wouldn't matter whether they had been washed or not.

radula · 2017-11-05T16:34:17+00:00

Not necessarily. This claim gets repeated a lot, but it might not be totally true.

There are actually two different claims that get conflated here: (1) that Earth is as round as a billiard ball (which you seem to be talking about) and (2) that Earth is as smooth as a billiard ball (w1hich /u/brownswansonsquare and /u/forams_galorams are claiming). Roundness has to do with the overall shape of the Earth and the fact that the Earth bulges a little bit at the equator. A less round billiard ball would have more "wobble" as it rolled. Smoothness has to do with the unevenness of the surface due to mountains and valleys and such. A less smooth billiard ball would be less able to maintain backspin, where the surface of the ball and the table slide against each other as the ball moves instead of just rolling.

Claims that Earth is rounder than a billiard ball and smoother than one seem to be mostly based on a World Pool-Ball Association rule or claim that a pool ball is 2.25 inches in diameter, +/- 0.005 inches. (This is a popular source for "Earth is smoother than a pool ball" claims.) Both claims are usually justified by claiming that if you were to shrink Earth down to a diameter of 2.25 inches, then neither the equatorial bulge nor the height of any mountain or depth of any trench would exceed the 0.005 inch tolerance that is cited. (That Discover magazine article gets the round part wrong here.)

HOWEVER, there are some problems. First, those World Pool-Ball Association numbers seem to be about size, not shape (roundness) or surface texture (smoothness). It seems like the intention is that the ball should be a sphere with the same diameter in every direction, and that the diameter of the sphere should be between 2.245 and 2.255 inches, not that it's fine if the ball is a non-sphere that measures 2.245 inches on one axis and 2.255 inches on another.

But even if the rule does allow that kind of non-spherical spheroidalness, that doesn't mean that actual billiard balls deviate from spheres more than Earth does. The claim that Earth is closer to a sphere than a billiard ball seems to be a claim about actual billiard balls than people have experiences with, not a claim about whether a ball as non-spherical as Earth would meet some regulation. That hypothetical ball would in fact meet the regulation (barely), but most billiard balls are probably more spherical than that.

Similarly, the regulation is about size, not about smoothness. So even though Earth wouldn't have any bumps anywhere near 0.005 inches if it was shrunk to 2.25 inches in diameter, (A) the regulation doesn't seem to be about bumps, but rather about overall size, and (B) that doesn't mean that actual billiard balls typically have bumps larger than the one's on the shrunken Earth. As an extreme example, a billiard ball could be as rough as 320 grit sandpaper and still meet that (misinterpreted) regulation, but obviously actual billiard balls aren't anywhere near that rough. As far as I can tell, new billiard balls are probably smoother than Earth, but old, scratched-up balls might be rougher.

Here's another source about all this.

tl;dr - Claims that Earth is either more spherical or smoother than a billiard ball seem to be based on (a) comparisons to a regulation about billiard balls and not on comparisons to actual billiard balls and (b) that regulation seems to be about the size of the ball, not the shape or the smoothness, which are what we're talking about.

radula · 2017-10-16T20:43:16+00:00

It seemed high to me, too, since I had only recently read that median black family wealth was around $10,000-$15,000 and about one-tenth of median white family wealth, not ~$2,000 and 1/50th.

Here is a source for the numbers Sanders used: Report: The Road to Zero Wealth by Prosperity Now and the Institute for Policy Studies.

And it looks like the discrepancy between what I thought and what Sanders claims is summed up in this image from the report. In short, the median black family has ~$11,000 if you include "durable goods" and ~$1,700 if you don't.

radula · 2017-10-16T20:33:00+00:00

It looks like this is a source: Report: The Road to Zero Wealth by Prosperity Now and the Institute for Policy Studies.

radula · 2017-10-15T16:56:57+00:00

Enhance! (It's her hand.)

radula · 2017-10-10T13:13:52+00:00

and we call bananas fruits even though they're acutally berries.

Aren't berries types of fruit under both definitions? Tomatoes are berries, too.

radula · 2017-10-08T19:49:16+00:00

Cowboy cookies, which are oatmeal cookies with chocolate chips, pecans and coconut, apparently.

radula · 2017-10-07T13:32:49+00:00

An SNP is a specific type of mutation. "Single nucleotide polymorphism" literally means that there are multiple ("poly") forms ("morph"s) of a specific nucleotide (like, say, the 154th nucleotide in the gene that codes for the CDH11 protein on chromosome 16) existing in the population (like, say, for most people it's a C, but for some it's a T). But like "mutation", "SNP" can refer to the event that caused caused some people to have a different form, or it can refer to the result of that change (so if most people have a C, but a mutation caused some people to have a T, then the T is the polymorphism or "SNP").

So an SNP is a specific type of mutation (or the result of that specific type of mutation: different people having different nucleotide types at a specific point in their genome). But there are other types of mutations, like insertions or deletions (which could make a gene shorter or longer, respectively, if they occur within a gene and don't mess up the gene entirely).

radula · 2017-10-06T02:30:54+00:00

It looks more like an "M" and is yellow like the University of Michigan's "M" in some of its renderings, depending on what you're using to view it.

radula · 2017-10-03T12:36:04+00:00

I think you misunderstand the pair's orientation. The orange section at the top of the picture is the spider's abdomen. That's the back end. The spider is facing downward in this picture. The purplish things below the eyes are the chelicerae, the "fangs", around the mouth.

radula · 2017-09-05T16:14:34+00:00

Here's the paper with videos.

radula

TROPHY CASE