I used to get occasional work helping farm kids pick rocks. We don’t seem to have built any fences in Saskatchewan, preferring instead to just pile them up or bury them.
Never underestimate what happens when thousands of individual people do one thing over and over again, rock by rock, step by step, day in and day out, year after year. Whether it’s building fences, depleting resources, or putting waste into the environment, we always manage to more collectively than we can imagine as individuals.
I made a half-assed guess as to its meaning based on the fact that I’ve heard of an elite basketball player by that name. I got pretty close, according to urban dictionary.
I would draw your attention to the difference between mathematics and reality. Although mathematics is extremely useful in modeling reality, it’s important to remember that while all models are wrong, some are nonetheless useful.
Thus, a household gardener or storage tank owner or a builder of small boats can choose the appropriate diameter of hose, tank, or pontoon very effectively by rounding PI to 3 but cannot do so when “rounding” to 1 or 5. In these cases, it literally doesn’t matter how many decimal points you use, because the difference between 3 and any arbitrary decimal expansion of PI will be too small to have concrete meaning in actual use.
Under the philosophy you are promoting, it would be impossible to act in the physical world whenever it throws an irrational number at us.
I don’t know, but I suspect that there is a whole branch of mathematics, engineering, or philosophy that describes what kinds of simplifications and rounding are acceptable when choosing to act in the physical world.
The real world in which we act has a fuzziness about it. I think it’s better to embrace it and find ways to work with that than to argue problems that literally have no numerical solution, at least when those arguments would have the effect of making it impossible to act.
Interesting. That page says “few vertebrae”, but the image makes it look to me like a full set.
On the other hand, if I found an animal with no ribs and pelvis and only the rudimentary limbs typically found in fish, I’d tend to say that the skeleton was missing. Or at least, ahem, skeletal.
Thanks. My first impression was that there was some funny business, but then I found what I thought was a decent article.
All roads lead to PIE. Or is that from? Oh, and maybe not “all.”
But seriously, I went through a linguistics phase in my reading and came away with the sense that Proto Indo European is a lot closer to us than it seems at first glance.
That, too! I’ve taken to using any autotldr as a substitute for a “proper” title and author summary. If the autotldr looks like there might be based on something I find interesting, I’ll go read the article.
My favourite is the idea that it takes time to build out the “infrastructure” that allows for life. Basically, no supernovae, no life, not enough supernovae, extremely low probability of life. Even if that doesn’t put Earth’s life near the leading edge, we may be on the leading edge of technological civilizations.
And Canada, but we’re really messed up. Most people I know across multiple generations use Fahrenheit for indoor temperature, cooking, and water you might swim in. Celsius is for outdoor air temperature, mostly, I think, because that’s how weather is reported. There is a fair amount of variation, but I don’t think I’ve heard anyone using Celsius for cooking.