Petition to rename the following places:

North Pole → Iaeland
Greenland → Ibeland
Cornwall → Iseland
Brittany → Iteland
Aquitaine → Iueland
Aragon → Iveland
Valencia → Iweland
Oran → Ixeland
Adrar → Iyeland
Gao → Izeland

I was expecting fuckery regarding diacritics*, but this is way worse.

*such as writing ⟨Ç⟩ with the bottom of the cedilla on the same level as the letters, instead of below them. Or an extra-short ⟨Ã⟩ to give the tilde some room. Both look disgusting.

Given it sounds unfortunate in Portuguese too, I also think so.

Oh well, life is suffering. But at least the suffering is bearable if it includes cats 😺

Sometimes I feel like Kika (my cat) might be doing this when I’m sleeping, because of all CLASH KLANK MMMRRRROOOOWN MRRRROOOOWN KPFAF! It’s usually because she rummaged my paper bin for new toys.

Sadly no amount of forehead kisses will prevent it. The most it’ll do is to make her look at disgust, as if saying “EEEEEWWW HUMANS HAVE COOTIES”.

DMZ-Black. It’s one of the cursor themes provided by default by Linux Mint. I see no reason to change.

You can also change it in the settings. Look for “search assist”; values are “never”, “on demand”, “sometimes”, and “often”.

But yeah, to be frank I use mostly DDG nowadays, I focused on Google due to the OP.

There’s an extension called Disable AI that gets rid of those intrusive Google Search AI “replies”. I strongly recommend people to use it, because… seriously, they are convincing but misleading trash.

The two phonemic transcriptions of “disregard” in the first picture are a prime example of that. I could go on a full rant about it, but to keep it short: compare them with the ones provided by Wiktionary, and play “spot the differences”. (Bonus points if you also play “spot the undeclared assumptions”.)

This might be fake but goddammit it’s still funny.

The next episode should clarify most/all of those questions. Just one thing: the contracted spirits have nothing to do with Cecil being the “android prince”, they basically do what their master wants them to.

What a great episode. Even if you know what’s going on, you can’t help but worry about the characters, and cheer for them.

And it shows really well what’s wrong with the heroine and what’s right with the villainess: both are reincarnated and clueless muppets acting as if their new world was still following game logic, while derailing the story with their mere existence; but only Bertia genuinely cares about the others, Heronia only cares about herself.

Sentenced to Be a Hero: initially I thought “meh, yet another series where they fight the Maō”, but right in the first episode there was a “hero” stealing stuff, then I was like “well, this is going to be fun”. And as the series progressed I started genuinely enjoying its cynical and bitter tone.

Mayonaka Punch: I didn’t bother with the series at the start of the season, because you can be pretty sure “arsehole influencer doing dumb shit” is not my cup of tea. But mid-season I got bored, gave it a try because I thought the vampire looked fun (and quickly noticed she was voiced by my favourite voice actress, Fairouz Ai), and really enjoyed it, because the interactions between characters were fun.

Yup, spayed a few months after adoption. I only give her treats rarely though, she’s now overweight. (Kind of weird to compare, she’s heavier than when she was pregnant.)

She has been living with us for almost 10 years now. Even the grumpy older cat got used to her.

I’ve adopted a cat like this. Except she wasn’t simply thrown tomatoes at; she was pregnant, and had both maxilar and cranial fractures. (Dunno if it was an accident or someone beat her up. And she lost the litter.) She got no coffee/chocolate but at least a blanket, plenty food/water and humans to cuddle with.

I always thought they sounded like their name, like “seeeal seeeal”. And then as they evolved they made funnier noises.

…sorry, thinking on Pokémon.

Or something like this. No matter dialect this sequence sounds like a repetititititive mess.

To be clear, since the paper is a bit messy, here’s how they calculated a few variables.

Handedness index, HI: pick an individual. Check how many of the tasks they completed with the right hand (R) vs. the left hand (L). Then plop it into the formula (R-L) / (R+L).

So for example, if Alice used her right hand 60% of the time for any given task, R=0.6, L=0.4, HI(Alice) = (0.6-0.4)/(0.6+0.4) = +0.2.

Now let’s say Bob used his right hand 20% of the time. HI(Bob) = (0.2-0.8)/(0.2+0.8) = -0.6. Note the sign matters.

Mean handedness index, MHI: it’s mean, just like me. *ba dum tss* Just sum this stuff up and divide by the number of individuals. e.g. the MHI for the whole population of my example above would be (+0.2 -0.6)/2 = -0.2. So righties increase the score, lefties decrease it.

Mean absolute handedness index, MABSHI: disregard signal, then mean. The MABSHI for the population above would be (|+0.2| + |-0.6|)/2 = (0.2+0.6)/2 = 0.4. So stronger preference towards one hand (whichever it is) raises the score.

My personal take:

They found correlation between brain size, arm:leg ratio, and handedness… and that’s it. The title implies a cause (“why”), and that it has to do with right handedness, but both things are AFAIR (as far as I read) absent.

I think this is all a big red herring, mind you. We humans coördinate the usage of both our hands for a lot of tasks, where each hand performs a different movement:

• swing hammer with one hand, guide the nail with the other
• hold bow with one hand, pull the string and guide arrow with the other
• hold the mayo jar with one hand, twist lid with the other
• etc.

you get the idea, right? I think handedness encourages this sort of coördination, and it’s essential for more complex tasks other primates don’t typically perform. As such I don’t think it’s necessarily correlated to every instance of tool usage, as in the TOOL variable, but to specific tasks.

And there lies the problem with just replacing cars with buses

That’s not what I’m saying. I’m showing the idea in the OP (exclusive streets for “public” urban transport) is old as fuck and yet those money hoarders are reinventing it in a worse way. That’s it.

If you want my actual take on what’s the “best”: I do not think replacing everything with buses is sensible. I think buses and metropolitan trains are a good backbone, but there should be a mix, including direct transportation (e.g. taxi, regardless of being self-driving or not).

So congrats for building a straw man out of assumptions, and then beating it up. *yawn*

Now factor in that most people are going to need a vehicle in the US […]

Simply put, major bus network don’t work in most of the US […]

Emphasis mine. I’m not from USA, this comm is not about USA, and I’m clearly talking in a country-agnostic way, even if the pic I shared happens to be from my country (and city).

So, lemme be a wee bit blunt: why do you think I bloody care about USA enough to discuss the particularities of transport there? I don’t.

If USA or Kazakhstan or Nigeria or France or whatever have additional challenges against sane public transport, this perhaps warrants its own discussion thread. But it’s certainly not an excuse to narrow a discussion down from “everybody should be able to chime in” into “HOW DO PEOPLE DARE TO NOT TALK ABOUT MY COUNTRY?”, okay?

Not further wasting my time with you.

It depends on how wide or narrow you define “same place”.

If “same place” is “same neighbourhood, at walking distance”, and one of the neighbourhoods is downtown, then it’s quite a bit.

Plus buses are not restricted to two stations. And changing buses in the middle of your path is feasible, as long as the system is designed for that.

Let’s go further:

1. Make streets for self-driving cars.
2. Make the self-driving cars hold a lot more people. Like, a fuckload more.
3. Since self-driving is unreliable, put actual drivers in them. Due to #2 it won’t be a big cost.

And…

That’s exactly what my city implemented in the 90s.

Those sociopathic money hoarders are desperate to reinvent the wheel, and everything else on it.