palordrolap

So I reread it and it says “P follows Q”, which I (mis)read/(mis?)interpreted as “P follows from Q”.

I don’t remember if “follows” was ever used for forward implication in this way when I actually did a logic course, but it was a few decades ago now. Maybe it was.

There’s also that the usual joke in this category is that in basic logic, false implies true, which seems to be the punchline of the joke in the comic, just with the arrow backwards.

Isn’t that implication arrow backwards?

“P follows from Q” is P ⇐ Q

Maybe that’s the joke, though.

EDIT: The text says “P follows Q”, which my brain apparently corrected to “P follows from Q”. These are not the same, and I’d argue that “P follows Q” is problematic as a phrase as a result. Grumble grumble.

Well, yes, but actually no. It’s an old analogue “portable” 14" CRT TV with push button channel controls. Haven’t had it switched on in probably a decade at this point, and even if I did, all TV is digital here now, so it wouldn’t be able to show anything without a lot of outside help.

There’s a VCR under it that used to serve some of that purpose, but that’s also analogue only, doesn’t play tapes any more and the remote control is busted, so yeah, no TV.

That said, I adopted the philosophy of the bedroom only being for the main bedroom activities a while ago. You know. Dressing, undressing, testing the mattress and sleeping. This may be your husband’s line of thinking.

I moved the computer out of there for that reason too. The TV and the trolley it’s on only remained because it’s in use as a clothes horse.

For most intents and purposes, they’re no more dangerous than a star of the same mass in the same place.

There’s also the theory that our universe could be the inside of a black hole in a higher-order universe.

Of course, trying to imagine the size of our universe, let alone an entire hierarchy of them where ours may just be itself an insignificant speck, might cause more doom sensation than less. Do with this information what you will.

OK, I’ll bite. Pedant time.

“BSD” isn’t an acronym. It’s an initialism.

Acronyms are pronounced as a words rather than reading the letters, and, well, you’d be beatboxing if you pronounced BSD as a word.

Those of a vintage beyond even my own will know that it stands for “Broken Biscuit Company”, which I believe originated on BBC radio with The Goon Show. Now that’s not an acronym, but it is another word that’s picked up an unfortunate extra meaning in recent years.

To steal an idea I had on something similar once, perhaps on an entirely different site, there’s also where the wings come from in the first place, literally and figuratively.

The equivalent structure to a bird’s wing in humans is the arm and hand. Does this new wing take the place of the forelimb as it does in birds or does the wisher necessarily become a six-limbed creature?

From the naive perspective it’s looping infinitely and it ought to be infinitely old because there’s no “first loop”. Depending on the laws of physics, proton decay could make the pizza slice literally impossible.

Given that it clearly exists and has no rot let alone deep-time decay, I posit that it spontaneously appears/renews in panel three, away from the boundary break, as some kind of near-infinitely improbable entropy break.

He thinks he’s discovered panel time travel, but it’s far weirder than he thinks.

For a certain set of inputs, yes. Good luck guessing what that comprises that set even if 1) there’s documentation and 2) you read it.

Worse, for all we know, double actually adds a thing to itself, which might accidentally or deliberately act on strings. Dividing by two has no such magic.

Reminds me of Tommy Cooper’s joke: “The Invisible Man’s at the door.” “Tell him I can’t see him.”

Pretty sure that became a doctor joke in many school yard repeats, if not also Christmas crackers and other places whimsical jokes tend to turn up.

Hold your breath. I mean really hold it. Keep holding. If you’re the sort of person who can do this until you pass out, do try not to do that. Try for a minute. Minute and a half. Stop before you keel over anyway.

When you finally release your breath, is it steady or do you gasp? Either way, do you feel the relief as you begin to breathe normally again?

Some of what you might feel before that relief, that discomfort, that urge to breathe, that’s a deep set reflex that is about as close as people like yourself can get to feeling panic or fear.

If you do pass out, remember that loss of control. Empathic response is not easily controllable.

Have you ever been really hungry? I mean over 24 hours without food kind of hungry. There’s a bit more of it in there. That yearning. That need.

Ever had an electric shock? The anguished scream of another person in physical or emotional pain has a little something of that to it as well. As blinding or searing as any physical pain.

An empathic response is like being hit in the gut suddenly with pain, panic, hunger and shock all at the same time. Right to the very centre of the being. Like the strong urge to breathe, the urge to be able to do something to ease the other person’s pain and thus ease your own pain is incredibly strong.

And in that last sentence you can see, from a detached perspective, why the empathic response evolved, even if you can’t feel it yourself. Humans are a pack animal and those in your pack carry your genes. The empathic response preserves the self, just indirectly. And for most people it has the “unintended” side-effect of extending to everyone, not just relatives.

Finally, there’s a joke about wishing that someone unpleasant would put a toothpick under their big toenail and then kick a door.

Put yourself in the, uh, shoes of that person - I’m not saying you’re necessarily unpleasant, only to imagine yourself doing that. What would stop you from doing so in real life? Any discomfort from thinking about doing that? Explore that feeling.

That’d be self-preservation. Imagine that, outside of your control, extending to other people.

I have no idea if any of this helps as my own empathic response is often crippling, but I hope it does.

You can’t tell me there isn’t a coprophilia / coprophagia forum out there somewhere.

I seem to recall liking the Doctor and the Medics cover of that, even if my age could be counted on one hand when it was released.

The oft-stated did-you-know question being “Did you know the guy who originally wrote and sung it was Jewish?”. Quite the surprise when I learned that one.

But to simultaneously bring this back around and buck the trend a little, Shine, Jesus, Shine used to slap as a hymn back when I dabbled in God-bothering.

And to buck things even more, Hava Negila kind of slaps too.

Interesting. Any sufficiently powerful magic erases all conventional weapons, so the magic of the fantasy world can’t be all that powerful in the first place.

AFAIK, “gyatt” is from the way people say “g-d damn”. As in, it’s what certain people said when they saw the thing the word has now been associated with.

This is a bit niche but is the first thing that sprung to mind: I strongly dislike the Ubuntu font family. It’s one of the first things I remove from Mint when I reinstall.

I don’t use the default Cinnamon look either, and picked one that looks even more like Windows 7, which is what I was using before I switched. Now it ‘s just a case of old habits dying hard, I guess. The icon set I use is blue though. Way better than Windows’ yellow or Mint’s default of green, IMO.

Dark mode? Check? Custom shell prompt? Check. Old school Minecraft grass block icon because the creeper one is awful? Check. Shell aliases, ~/bin dir and custom keybinds? Check.

More generally, there are a few websites that store what ought to be user-attached session-spanning settings in short-lived cookies. That means that certain things go back to defaults when I restart the browser, even though my login persists. Grumble, grumble, etc.

If endl is a function call and/or macro that magically knows the right line ending for whatever ultimately stores or reads the output stream, then, ugly though it is, endl is the right thing to use.

If a language or compiler automatically “do(es) the right thing” with \n as well, then check your local style guide. Is this your code? Do what you will. Is this for your company? Better to check what’s acceptable.

If you want to guarantee a Unix line ending use \012 instead. Or \cJ if your language is sufficiently warped.

Sounds like you have some aspect of synaesthesia, but there’s no way to be completely sure about that. Numbers usually come with attached context, which may even be specific to the individual, and can affect how people feel about them whether they have crossed senses or not.

As for me, uh. I like numbers, but I think if I had any feelings about specific ones, practical concerns have long since overridden any of that, so my feelings can’t have been that strong in the first place.

Practical concerns like a preferred number being too quiet or too loud on a volume setting, for example, which people often cite as having to be on certain values with certain properties. Likewise, temperature settings, where that’s even possible to control in the first place.

I see I’ve forgotten to put on my head net today. You know the one. Looks like a volleyball net. C shape. Attaches at the back. Catches things that go woosh.

Those “almost completely forgotten” characters were important when ASCII was invented, and a lot of that data is still around in some form or another. There’s also that, since they’re there, they’re still available for the use for which they were designed. You can be sure that someone would want to re-invent them if they weren’t already there.

Some operating systems did assign symbols to those characters anyway. MS-DOS being notable for this. Other standards also had code pages where different languages had different meanings for the byte ranges beyond ASCII. One language might have “é” in one place and another language in another. This caused problems.

Unicode is an extension of ASCII that covers all bases and has all the necessary symbols in fixed places.

That languages X, Y and Z don’t happen to have their alphabets in contiguous runs because they’re extended Latin is a problem, but not something that much can be done about.

It’s understandable that anyone would want their alphabet to be the base language, but one has to be or you end up in code page hell again. English happened to get there first.

If you want a fun exercise (for various interpretations of “fun”), design your own standard. Do you put the digits 0-9 as code points 0-9 or do you start with your preferred alphabet there? What about upper and lower case? Which goes first? Where do you put Chinese?