SwingingTheLamp

I’d have to say Reason from Snow Crash. Not terribly practical in many situations, but it’s got panache. For everyday practicality, probably a PPG pistol.

Naw, the picture is just a coincidence.

Well, would this joke have worked as Malcolm X’s Only Fans? Would anybody have bothered to message a friend to share that Warpigs username? There’s no connection to what Parks is known for, no parody or subversion of expectations, other than the transgression of presenting a respected, famous person as a low-status sex worker. And it only works for a woman.

(OTOH, Henry Kissinger’s Only Fans might work based on the incongruity of anybody thinking of such a ghoul in a sexual context.)

Or he’s using the gray-rock technique to confront pretty blatant misogyny.

This right here is how toxic masculinity is done. One of its main rules is: “Men don’t complain.” Height privilege is real, as described by another Lemming in this thread. But a shorter man lamenting that he’s on the wrong end of it is breaking the rule, so instead of sympathy, he gets told that he’s defective for having a natural, human reaction.

(Yes, I know I’m breaking the rule, too.)

It’s the same here in the US, and I’m not sure that everybody realizes it. We officially adopted the metric system, too, but we haven’t undertaken the massive effort needed to replace all of the legacy systems. For instance, all of our food labels have the volume in (milli)liters, and weight in grams; true, mostly that’s listed as the conversion of the fluid ounces or ounces, but a few products have only the metric units. The required nutrition information label on the back is entirely in (milli)grams. Electricity is metered in metric units, and the electromagnetic spectrum is demarcated in them, too. All of our cars, motorcycles, bicycles, computers, and electronics use metric dimensions. (Hence the joke among mechanics about the 10mm socket always going missing.) Randomly, I’ve been looking for a couple of different light bulbs to buy online; every specification of a US bulb (base size, globe size, electrical requirements, luminous flux, color temperature) is a metric unit. Our money is metric, not just the denominations, but US law specifies the size and weight of coinage in metric units. (The dollar coin, for example, is 2mm thick.) Heck, even the US customary units are now officially defined in terms of SI units!

It’s pretty much the units that people interact with day-to-day that we’ve kept the US customary system. Except for, y’know, drugs and ammo. The most-American of all things, cars, food, money, drugs, and ammo, all metric. What more do you want from us?! 😉

I’d like to see the X-ray of that.

Why do non-US people get weirdly emotionally invested in it? I mean, if we’re criticizing, it’s worse that US recipes use cups and tablespoons (measures of volume) for ingredients (like flour) that should be measured by weight.

Oh, man, when it comes to nautical idioms, I could go on all day. There are so many, and they’ve lost their literal connections so thoroughly, you probably don’t even think of some of them as idioms. A few that occur to me immediately:

• taken aback (wind on the wrong side of the sails)
• give a wide berth (extra space for a vessel to maneuver)
• leeway (unwanted downwind slippage of the vessel when in motion)
• above board (on deck, the board being the section of the hull running fore and aft just above the water line)
• onboard (to load onto the deck of the ship)
• go by the board (to fall off of the ship into the water, passing the board on the way)
• hand over fist (two-handed motion to pull in sails, ropes, etc. as quickly as possible)
• high and dry (above the tide line)
• loose cannon (a gun insufficiently secured would cause havoc on a warship when fired, or as the ship rolled in waves)

Honestly, I’m not sure that I want modern equivalents, since many are so rich in imagery.

It’s synecdoche, those two names a stand-in for the surveillance-state apparatus, which is much larger. But, by all means, start organizing the armed resistance.

So do the cops. Guns, and drones, and APCs, and tanks, and bombs, and weapons of mass destruction, and no hesitation about using them on citizens. They also have Flock and Palantir, so forget about organizing to take them on.

I particularly enjoy the “stolen technology” line about Russia and China, because it’s a tacit admission that capitalism works by keeping people deliberately poor and miserable so that a profit can be extracted from them.

Not a bad idea. The protesters should at least incorporate, and appoint themselves executives. Then they won’t be prosecuted for anything.

And celiacs thank you, because that’s sometimes the only thing at a potluck that we can eat.

JAQing off in public, eh?

It’s about 1 BTU per fluid ounce per degree Fahrenheit, so:

128 fl oz × (212 - 68)°F × 1BTU/fl oz•°F = 18,432 BTU

Add in the enthalpy of vaporization:

7.5 BTU/fl oz × 128 fl oz = 960 BTU

So, about 19,392 BTU.

I’m cooking pasta for dinner, and I didn’t do any calculations. I just put the water in the pot on the stove, and waited for it to boil. Which was kind of the point of my question. Metric is all neat and elegant, but that’s irrelevant in daily life, because if I did have to calculate the energy requirement, I’d have to look up the enthalpy value, because it’s not memorable, as well as figuring in the actual atmospheric pressure to determine the actual boiling temperature. It makes all the sense in the world to use SI where it matters (e.g. science experiments), but customary units persist because in so much of daily life, it doesn’t matter.

Why is the third sister, squash, given so little respect here?

Okay, then, how much energy does it take to boil 1mL of water from room temperature? (Note that I said “boil,” not raise it to 100°C.)

Indeed, and it’s a good reminder that trying to improve myself based on the things that women complain about in their sexual partners is like armoring up combat aircraft based on the bullet holes in the ones that come back. It took me way too long to figure that out.

NOOO!!!

America has its own laws of thermodynamics!

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