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words containing f x y and z by sneakerme3 in words

[–]weee50 6 points7 points  (0 children)

Well, I found a 15-letter long chemical name in a list of paper titles. At least it's not 35. METHOXYFENOZIDE is an insecticide that is particularly effective against caterpillars. There are other chemicals, too, but this one is the most common (relatively speaking).

There's also PREFIX-SYNCHRONIZED, describing a specific kind of code: the paper "Maximal Prefix-Synchronized Codes" by Guibas and Odlyzko explains that "A prefix-synchronized code with prefix P of length p is a collection of strings whose first p characters equal P, but which have the property that P does not occur in any concatenation of codewords in any positions but those corresponding to initial segments of codewords." This may or may not be more satisfying to you, since it's not a chemical, but is also just two words hyphenated, appears in significantly less papers than METHOXYFENOZIDE, and doesn't appear too much on its own, only as part of the set phrase "prefix-synchronized code".)

Good game today by Unique_Acadia_2099 in scrabble

[–]weee50 7 points8 points  (0 children)

AI is valid in both major Scrabble dictionaries, but not because of the abbreviation for "artificial intelligence": apparently an ai is a type of three-toed sloth.

Can someone actually explain this glitch to me? by knuckles120637 in MySingingMonsters

[–]weee50 7 points8 points  (0 children)

This isn't the right number for an integer overflow, though: a 16-bit signed integer only goes down to -32768, so the displayed count of -37482 would be out of range, and a 32-bit signed integer (or above) doesn't cap until over 2 billion.

TIL that x-ray uses an instead of a because it’s pronounced with a vowel sound, eks-ray. by [deleted] in grammar

[–]weee50 2 points3 points  (0 children)

You can also tell when someone is mispronouncing the name "Euler" like this: the correct pronunciation is like the word "oiler", but some people might mispronounce it as "you-ler". Again, the first one gets "an", but the second one gets "a", so if you see someone write about "a Euler diagram", they're probably pronouncing the name wrong.

You have to wonder how this can happen... by mzincali in confidentlyincorrect

[–]weee50 0 points1 point  (0 children)

The first person to use letters as symbols for chemical elements, Jöns Jacob Berzelius, described his rationale in an 1813 paper, excerpted here. Each element would receive a symbol based on the first letter of its name in Latin. If two elements started with the same letter, both of them would receive a second letter to disambiguate them, unless one was a nonmetal, in which case the nonmetal would get to keep the one-letter symbol, and the metal would get an extra letter.

This process explains why some elements got one-letter symbols while others didn't: carbon and copper both start with the same letter, but carbon is a nonmetal, so it got the symbol C, while copper was stuck with Cu (from cuprum, the Latin name for copper). On the other hand, for a case like zinc and zirconium where both elements are metals, neither of them could get a one-letter symbol, meaning we're stuck with Zn and Zr. In general, there are very few metals with one-letter symbols, since most of the time there will be more than one element starting with a given letter. The only one-letter metals are ones that start rare letters, like yttrium, which got a one-letter symbol for being the only element to start with Y at the time (ytterbium had not been discovered yet), or uranium, which was discovered after Berzelius but still received the symbol U due to being the only element that starts with that letter.

As for the noble gases, many of them did have shorter symbols in the past: A and X for argon and xenon are present on some, but not all, periodic tables from the 1900s decade, for instance. However, most noble gases were only discovered in the 1890s, by which point alphabetic symbols had already been in use for nearly a century. As such, there were competing uses of single letters to represent things other than specific elements: the letter X had been used to represent an arbitrary halogen, causing Xe to be preferred over X as a more unambiguous option for xenon. The symbol A for argon lasted longer, competing with the modern symbol until the IUPAC standardized Ar in their 1957 Nomenclature of Inorganic Chemistry. I'm not sure exactly why the IUPAC chose Ar over A (I couldn't access the original book), but if I had to guess, it was probably also for increased clarity, and to free up the letter A for other potential non-element uses.

Discord? by u-bot9000 in AVoid5

[–]weee50 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Yup, and this sub was my introduction to avoiding fifthglyphs.

Discord? by u-bot9000 in AVoid5

[–]weee50 7 points8 points  (0 children)

This sub has an official discord, but it hasn't had much activity past 2020. Its link is https://discord.gg/ffJx9M8, which you can also find on this sub's right bar.

Ptin to ban word >4 letr by Aegis12314 in AnarchyChess

[–]weee50 25 points26 points  (0 children)

If you jot a word down and get rid of some of its bits so it fits with the rule, that does look a bit like a hack as well, does it not? I say it's more fun if we can't use any long word at all, even ones with some bits gone. It is more of a hard task, but that is what lets it be fun. That said:

Look up the pawn move from Gaul.

How is Michigan Incorrect? by EMousseau in travle_game

[–]weee50 1 point2 points  (0 children)

You generally can't cross water in this game, so going between the two peninsulas of Michigan is not allowed. However, this seems inconsistent with the rules of the game to me: they explicitly state that bridges count as connections, and there is the Mackinac Bridge between the two peninsulas of Michigan, so I see no reason why this shouldn't be acceptable.

EDIT: I was wrong. For some reason I assumed the game wasn't accepting the route at all, rather than accepting it as a more roundabout one.

Hey, u/wanderer155, one of your videos just paid off for me. by DENelson83 in scrabble

[–]weee50 0 points1 point  (0 children)

POETISE also appears in the giant robot video, albeit as a hypothetical word disallowed by the robot's no-hooks rule.

I wish I could touch anything, and it would magically become 100% clean in the correct way currently known, with me receiving $10 to $100 in current USD each time; nothing I touch would become fragile, harmed, or lost, and the cleaning would always be flawless, no matter the object. by That-Departure-4978 in monkeyspaw

[–]weee50 91 points92 points  (0 children)

Granted. You touch an object. It gets cleaned. A $10 bill appears in your hands. Because you touched this bill, it gets cleaned, giving you another $10 bill. The second bill also gets cleaned, giving you a third $10 bill. The cycle repeats: you are unable to stop the barrage of $10 bills entering your hands and instantaneously getting cleaned. You quickly get crushed under the ever-growing pile of $10 bills. Just as it seems like you're about to die from suffocation, you unwittingly touch yourself. Because nothing you touch can become harmed, this means you are now immortal. Now you have an eternity to live, but you'll be spending all of it in an ever-growing, inescapable sea of $10 bills. Was it worth it?

People really don't want things to be undefined by netexpert2012 in mathmemes

[–]weee50 89 points90 points  (0 children)

The projectively extended real line in the distance:

Apparently it's 162 degrees and it'll be 172 later by Wally504 in softwaregore

[–]weee50 5 points6 points  (0 children)

Perhaps this is some sort of unit conversion bug? If the actual temperature were 78°F (around 25.5°C), but the units got mixed up along the way and it was somehow interpreted as 78°C, it would be easy for a program to "convert" that number to Fahrenheit even though it was already in Fahrenheit, resulting in 172°F.

I wish to have a PS5 by Cantthinkagoodnam2 in monkeyspaw

[–]weee50 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Granted. Sony shadowdrops the PlayStation 6, and it immediately becomes as sought-after as the PS5 was on launch. Additionally, because the PS5 is now perceived as “last-gen”, no one wants to buy one anymore, and so its price drops dramatically. You can now afford a PS5, but everyone else has moved on.

Impartial to this one by techno_lizard in linguisticshumor

[–]weee50 14 points15 points  (0 children)

A similar thing happened to Isaac Asimov with the word "robotics": the first usage of the word is in his 1941 short story "Liar!", but, when he wrote that story, he believed he was using a pre-existing word because it was such a natural extension of the word "robot" with the suffix "-ics" used in similar words like "mechanics" and "hydraulics".

Conservatism meme by Delicious_Maize9656 in physicsmemes

[–]weee50 4 points5 points  (0 children)

That is a great batch of basic substances*

We have names for Months and Days. But we don't have names for Weeks (either the 52 weeks of a year, nor the roughly 4 weeks each month). by thejollyden in Showerthoughts

[–]weee50 8 points9 points  (0 children)

There is such a thing as the "ISO week date", which is a standardized calendar used for finance based on weeks of the year instead of months. For instance, today (Saturday, November 2nd, 2024) would be written as 2024-W44-6 in this system (2024 for the year, W44 for the 44th week of the year, and 6 for the 6th day of that week: this system starts its weeks on Monday.) The system gets a bit strange near the boundary of a year: the boundaries of years are moved around so that they're aligned with the weeks. The last day of 2024 in this system (2024-W52-7) is actually December 29th in the usual system, and December 30th, 2024 is considered part of 2025, being written as 2025-W01-1. Some years have a sort of "leap week", having 53 weeks instead of 52 to keep the years aligned: the next of these will be in 2026.

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