there is a beard, Godzilla is doomed.

it’s normal for unstressed short vowels in English to all come out as a “schwa”, which the most common phoneme of the language.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mid_central_vowel

prisons used to have treadmills to power machines. six hours a day, with rest breaks.

when there’s an engine to replace that, of course they’d explain it in terms of how many men it could replace permanently.

saying “but look at how much power Usain Bolt can produce for a few seconds” is not relevant.

the hp unit is reasonable based on whole-day power from typical farm horses.

Freezing temperatures being obvious with a minus number is an advantage, not a problem, IMO. Easy to see from the bigger negative number when water will freeze more quickly, when snow is more likely to lie on the ground, etc.

americans really just have to remember a long list of random numbers like how many ounces a full pint is supposed to be, huh.

i’m imagining a whole day of school like, “when people say nickel, they mean 5 cents, a dime is 10 cents, 12 inches is a foot, 3 feet is a yard, water freezes at 32F and boils at 212F…” and the children just crying into their notebooks by the time they get to miles and tons and acres.

Those are both serious blockers for me tbh, I like to take it out away from home and watch YT / Nebula vids. I’m keeping am eye on Asahi’s progress though.

I have an M1 Macbook Air (under half price secondhand thanks to a superficial dent on a corner) and while I agree I love having such powerful hardware that sips battery so sparingly, MacOS can go eat a whole bag of stale dicks. Homebrew makes it… tolerable, but I’m holding out hope for that new Qualcomm ARM laptop - the recent benchmarks beat Apple’s chips handily.

the bats near the dark tower flapped when you won, i think?

ha, “rumble”. is it ever going to dawn on you that all your grayzone, jimmy dore, glenn greenwald, caitlin johnstone, et cetera bullshit that claims to be leftist is funded by right-wing billionaire peter thiel, and run out the same offices as trump’s “truth social”?

useful idiots indeed.

The Andes are so tall, they slow the winds. (My guess. I am not a geographer)

It’s from 台风 (sounds like typhon, more than it sound like typhoon tbh) and tbh the “ty” part might just be from “dai” meaning “big”, so just “big wind”, but I’ve heard it’s just as likely to be “wind from Taiwan”, the same 台 ty as in 台風, Taiwan.

And yeah, this map proves that Taiwan (and northern Philippines) is the world capital of strong typhoons.

This map is a great illustration of why the “ty” of typhoon is from the “Tai” of Taiwan in the original meaning of the word.

Bonus fun fact - “hurricane” is from a native Caribbean word, from the same language family as another loanword “hammock”.

is Bogdan another cognate, then? from the same root?

what do you reckon about spotting-scopes with camera-mounts?

i can’t quite figure out why “camera” lenses suitable for wildlife are so much more expensive than spotting scopes.

i use my astronomical telescope with my full-frame digital camera. it is a 450mm f/5 prime lens, but it was a fraction of the price of any similar “camera” lens, even including the substantial tripod (which cost about as much as the tube). it actually can focus on things not too far away. no good for indoor use, sure, but fine in a park.

what’s the advantage?

the Sony Zeiss 55mm f/1.8, (that one with the concave front element), is my one desert-island lens, for sure. Me developing my own style went hand-in-hand with getting to know it better for a few years.

I used to love using “weird” and specialist lenses, but it’s so versatile, it killed my trying all kinds of cheap/vintage glass- since getting the Zeiss, everything else just stays in the bag.