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This was hard to watch ๐Ÿฅด by velorae in TikTokCringe

[โ€“]pengo 0 points1 point  (0 children)

The guy trying to represent science and reason is an absolute asshole here for deliberately misinterpreting what the woman is saying.

My pet hate is when scientists redefine a word and then tell people they're wrong for not using the word the way they have redefined it.

The original meaning of chemical is a highly refined substance, not commonly found in nature. CHEMISTS STILL USE THE WORD THIS WAY THEMSELVES WHEN THEY ORDER CHEMICALS ON A CHEMICAL ORDER FORM FROM A CHEMICAL COMPANY AND PUT THE CHEMICALS IN THE CHEMICALS CUPBOARD. Even though every cupboard on earth contains nitrogen and oxygen, two "chemicals", the chemist does not label an empty cupboard as "CHEMICAL STORAGE" nor a cupboard containing lego bricks or pasta sauce as "CHEMICAL STORAGE" but they DO put those redefined chemicals they've ordered from a chemical company in a cupboard labeled "CHEMICAL STORAGE". Why? Because they know when the "refined substance" meaning of chemical is appropriate EXCEPT WHEN THEY'RE TALKING TO SOMEONE THEY WANT TO MAKE FUN OF WHEN SUDDENLY A SCIENTIST CONSIDERS IT OK TO SWITCH DEFINITIONS AND ACT LIKE A FUCKING JERK "DUH! ACTUALLY EVERYTHING IS CHEMICALS LOLOLLOL! GOTCHA HAHAHAHJA U R DUMB"

Does the woman have wild, unjustified ideas about fluoride and "chemicals" in food? Yes and probably. Are the guy's arguments meaningful? No. One hundred percent no. They're based on deliberately misunderstanding her words, and twisting the meaning.

Dihydrogen monoxide is a funny "haha gotcha i'm smarter than you". (And he really had to keep pushing it to get to the punchline) It's an absolutely garbage argument if you're trying to actually talk to a human being. He did not engage with the substance of anything she said. If he did he could have made some powerful points, especially about the importance of fluoridization, but instead he went for the cheap "haha i'm going to pretend not to understand you"

If you want to convince someone, listen to what they're saying and don't twist their words. Absolute failure by this guy.

Seeking site which has public domain audio books because I like my audio books to sound old and I like the hiss in my speakers that comes with books-on-tape. by History_guy2018 in audiobooks

[โ€“]pengo 0 points1 point  (0 children)

There's something unironically nice about digitized cassette tape audiobooks with a light crackle and announcements to flip over the tape at dramatic moments.

It was not until the 1980s that audiobooks were really a big commercial thing, which isn't really long enough for them to fall out of copyright. Perhaps you could find radioplays and poetry from before the cassette tape era. Would love to be proven wrong though.

Could try searching "audiobook cassette" or similar on archive.org

[Meta] Should we ban ChatGPT questions? by lemoinem in AskPhysics

[โ€“]pengo -1 points0 points  (0 children)

Great! I have a heap of mundane questions for you, papers to translate to plain english and maths equations where you can explain the meaning of all the symbols. You can start tomorrow. I pay you nothing. Thank you so much for volunteering.

_._. .._ _. _ by RoboArmadillo in memes

[โ€“]pengo 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I forgot my wallet can you pay for me

To send this it'd take 20 seconds at 20 wpm, which is a decently fast speed, though it's possible to get much faster. But still it would take a long time (many months) to get proficient enough to understand it at that speed. Even then you'd likely need to repeat the message twice (or at least repeat some key words).

At a beginner speed of 5wpm, it would indeed take 3 minutes to repeat each word twice. Either way, you'd want to cut down the message to a couple of words.

It's more for radio communication. The name a misnomer, it's not a particularly good language as a "secret code". It's used for open communication. It's a code, like an encoding, but not a secret one..

You also can't easily tap morse code on a table or anything like that because it needs two lengths of symbol (dots and dashes), so you can try doing this with taps and scratches, or tapping on someone's hand, but it's pretty awkward, and not really what it's designed for.

If you want to ask your mate to buy you a beer across a noisy pub, or communicate with hand touches, you'd be much better off learning a sign language (ASL if you're American), or even just fingerspelling.

But if you want to get into amateur radio, I'd highly recommend trying to learn Morse code.

Also, if you just want to learn Morse code to write weird notes to people or hide messages in picture frames (and don't care about actually understanding the tones in real time), you can memorize the code in a day or two.

What do you guys think of Atari's new puzzle platformer coming out next month? by jacoBlear in puzzles

[โ€“]pengo 0 points1 point  (0 children)

There's literally zero connection to the old Atari. Just a trademark that's been bought.

Coffee was first cultivated in Ethiopia, first brewed as a drink in Yemen, and was first introduced to Europe by the Turks. How then did "Java", an Indonesian island, become the source of a popular name for the drink while no other place had that happen? by derstherower in AskHistorians

[โ€“]pengo 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I'd say that the port city of Mocha in Yemen also had that happen. Not to mention the US (americano).

Words get their meaning from using, not from some magical committee striving to create some sort of fair and logical, historically accurate system. Java was the first place where Indonesian coffee was grown, and became synonymous with the coffee. The phrase "Java coffee" is found as far back as 1764 [OED]. An ellipsis is the omission of a word or phrase that can be inferred from the context. It's quite common in language, such as shortening "microwave oven" to "microwave".

With the recent Travis Scott event in mind, how was the 1991 Metallica Moscow show able to keep upwards of 500k people from incident? by [deleted] in AskHistorians

[โ€“]pengo 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Firstly, I'm not going to confirm that no one died at the Metallica concert, but one obvious difference from photos is the use of a D-barrier.

From this photo of the event, you can see they have what we call in Australia a "D-barrier". In Australia we use a physical barrier for the mosh pit area in front of the stage (picture). In Moscow, they have a line of military people making a semi-circle to separate what appears to be a VIP area in front of the stage, as well as other military folk making lines throughout the crowd to form pens or breaks.

The D barrier means no one can get pinned to the stage if the crowd surges forward. In Moscow I'd guess the crowd would not even try to run forward into a line of people in military uniform.

I'd also speculate that they weren't understaffed with medics as Travis Scott's event was according to reports (where untrained people were attempting to perform CPR)

A brief history of the D barrier in Australia: In 2001, Jessica, a 15-year-old girl from Sydney was killed during a performance by Limp Bizkit at a Big Day Out festival. Jessica suffered a heart attack when she was crushed during the performance when the crowd of 65,000 people surged towards the stage. She died five days later in hospital. The festival promoters were found responsible for her death. As a result of this incident, substantial changes were made to the safety procedures at major music festivals. These include the introduction of the D-barrier. (more info here)