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Cake day: June 27th, 2023

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  • Also, William Seabrook.

    In the 1920s, Seabrook traveled to West Africa and came across a tribe who partook in the eating of human meat. Seabrook wrote about his experience of cannibalism in his travel book Jungle Ways; however, he later admitted that the tribe had not allowed him to join in on the ritualistic cannibalism. Instead, he had obtained samples of human flesh by persuading a medical intern at the Sorbonne University to give him a chunk of human meat from the body of a man who had died in an accident.

    Seabrook might have eaten human flesh also on another occasion. When his claim of having participating in ritualistic cannibalism turned out wrong (and he hadn’t yet dared reveal the Sorbonne story), he was much mocked for it. According to his autobiography, the wealthy socialite Daisy Fellowes invited him to one of her garden parties, stating “I think you deserve to know what human flesh really tastes like”. During the party, which was attended by about a dozen guests (some of them well-known), a piece of supposedly human flesh was grilled and eaten with much pomp. He comments that, while he never found out “the real truth” behind this meal, it “looked and tasted exactly” like the human flesh he had eaten before.


  • If they can guarantee that they’ll finish the story, I’m on board with the shows. But most of the time, the story is either cut short or it’s extended indefinitely. In film, you can usually bet that by the end, the major plot points will be resolved. You can’t say the same about television (at least when it comes to series that explore a single storyline throughout as opposed to sitcoms that have more self-contained episodes).

    There are obviously exceptions in both cases, but I’ve been bit enough times by good shows that raised a bunch of questions right before being canceled.





  • My point is that Fahrenheit is not like our other units of measure. 12 inches to a foot, 3 feet to a yard, 1760 yards or 5280 feet in a mile is ridiculous. There’s no benefit to these units with arbitrary scaling factors for conversion. That lack of consistent scaling factor is the primary difference with metric, and it is also precisely why metric is superior. The image’s assertion that these units are stupid is valid.

    But for temperature, there are some aspects of Fahrenheit that work out nicely, and learning 32 and 212 for the freezing and boiling points of water is not that bad. It’s not as nice as 0 and 100, but this difference leads to certain other temperatures being in the range of 0 and 100. My enjoyment for which temperatures fall between 0 and 100 feels about as arbitrary as your enjoyment for water being liquid within this range. At the very least, the difference here is not as clear cut as it is for other units, so I don’t buy into the idea that Fahrenheit is a bad unit of measure.

    To put it simply: I don’t see any redeeming quality for our other units of measure, but I do for Fahrenheit. I’m not saying that Celsius is bad or that Fahrenheit is better. I’m merely saying that the phase changes of water are not enough to convince me that Fahrenheit is stupid.


  • nelly_man@lemmy.worldtomemes@lemmy.worldI'm afraid we've been bamboozled
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    3 months ago

    Right. You learn two numbers for the phase changes of water, and we do as well. It’s easy to remember two numbers and understand when you’ve crossed a boundary. Sure, learning 0 and 100 might be easier than 32 and 212, but I don’t think that understanding whether a number is smaller or larger than 32 is really harder than understanding if it’s smaller or larger than 0. Both are pretty much instantaneous recognitions for a numerically literate person.

    My point was merely that the Fahrenheit defines these two points in such a way that the ambient temperatures that we experience generally fall nicely within the range of 0 to 100, and I don’t think that this fact is any less compelling an argument than having nicer numbers for the boundaries of liquid water. I’m not saying that Celsius is bad. I’m just saying that the range of liquid water is not a convincing enough argument for me.

    For other units of measures, the ease of converting units in metric is a clear win over imperial (or US customary). For temperature, there are benefits to both scales, and neither has as compelling an argument as we see in the meter vs the yard or the kilogram vs the pound. The only really convincing argument for me is that the rest of the world uses Celsius, and I think that is a good enough argument.


  • Fahrenheit is also based on water’s phase changes, but the 0-100 range just falls nicely around the range of common ambient temperatures. The basis in water is nice because it’s abundant and thus makes calibration of a thermometer easy. My contention is merely that the specific values of the phase changes are not so important that it makes the Celsius scale inherently better. I like that the ambient temperatures outside fall nicely throughout the 0-100 range in Fahrenheit, and I think that is just as valid an argument as water being liquid within this range.

    And perhaps I’m particularly swayed by this argument because I live in a place that has cold winters and hot summers, so I see the full range of 0 to 100 in the weather. I’m also not going to pretend that growing up using Fahrenheit is not the main reason for my continuing usage of it.

    I just wanted to point out that I’m convinced by the arguments in favor of the metric system for everything except Celsius. For that one, I just don’t think water is as compelling an argument as is always presented.


  • nelly_man@lemmy.worldtomemes@lemmy.worldI'm afraid we've been bamboozled
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    3 months ago

    I’m in agreement with everything except temperature. I’m not saying that Celsius is bad, but I do think that using the phase changes of water as the sole point of comparison is a bad argument.

    For most people, the interaction with temperature is through the weather, and I don’t think Celsius is inherently better for that. I like that in Fahrenheit 0 is a cold winter’s day, and 100 is a hot summer’s day. I find that more relevant in day-to-day life than the phase changes of water. The big argument I see for preferring Celsius is that everybody else is doing it, so we may as well jump in.

    However, in regards to the other systems of measurement, metric is best. The imperial system was nice when manufacturing measuring tools was difficult, so using easily divisible numbers allowed for easier creation of accurate measuring devices. But it has been quite some time since that was a reasonable argument (and that’s only really relevant for some of the units anyway).







  • Looking at a map with the current polls (and focusing on the toss-ups), it seems that the most viable path to victory for Harris is to pick up PA, MI, and WI. If she drops PA, she’d need MI, NV, WI or AZ, and GA or NC, but that seems like a big ask. If she wins PA, she could lose WI if she picks up AZ, GA, or NC and she could lose MI if she wins GA, NC, or AZ and NV. But winning PA and losing both WI and MI would require winning AZ and either GA or NC.

    So there are a few paths to a Harris win, and a few don’t seem very farfetched, but none of them seem likely enough for comfort. Definitely not how I was hoping to be feeling at this point in the election.


  • Your assertion is that Biden has not tried to contact DeSantis to offer help. You were provided with an article that says otherwise and dismissed it as false. What evidence do you hand that supports your claim that Biden has not attempted to contact DeSantis? Other Republican governors have said that Biden was quick to reach out in regards to Helene, so it’s hard to believe that he hasn’t tried to contact Florida.


  • That’s the big reason why I loved Diablo II, but was lukewarm on the following two. The skill tree was fixed and a had nice synergies between the skills. I used to keep a notebook with plans for different builds that seemed fun and was primarily interested in the skills rather than items.

    In Diablo III, the skill tree was much more limited, and you could swap things out at any time. So planning out a build and starting a new character was pointless. You could just swap the active skills.

    It also didn’t seem to have any hard spots. If you followed the main quests, your character improved just fast enough to keep the challenge throughout consistent. So I never really felt a need to grind. I mean, I hate games that are all grinding, but I also like it when there are walls that you have to spend some time and effort to move past.

    Diablo IV was even worse for this as the areas adapt to your level. So no matter where you were, the challenge was the same.

    Neither of the two were awful, in my opinion, but they dropped the parts that made Diablo so exceptional to me. So I really didn’t spend too much time with either of them whereas I played Diablo II for about 10 years.



  • He was a 19 year old man in the Netherlands talking to a 12 year old child in the United Kingdom on Facebook. He traveled to see her in the UK, got her drunk, raped her, and then attempted to get a hotel room with her. They couldn’t, so they slept under a stairwell and he raped her twice the next day. She had told him at one point that he was hurting her, but that didn’t stop him. After that, he flew back to the Netherlands and told her to go to a clinic for contraception.

    So they were essentially strangers to each other with a significant age gap. I don’t know what her exact intentions were when speaking with him, but she was 12. Even if she were thinking about sex, it would not have been with an understanding of what that actually meant. She wasn’t just under age, she was well under the legal age of consent. There’s a reason that children cannot legally consent to sex.

    Also, he’s never really shown any remorse for his actions. At best, he’s said that it was the biggest mistake of his life, but his overall stance seems to be that he regrets getting caught rather than raping a child. He’s much more angry at people calling him a pedophile than he is at himself for doing wrong. So your final points may be true, but they aren’t really relevant to his case because it doesn’t appear that he could be considered rehabilitated. He’s merely completed a prison sentence which was made lighter by Dutch law not classifying his actions as rape at the time.