The throne has been abdicated ever since Comet Drop. They’re just making video versions of the old ones. Someone’s gotta give serious answers to absurd scientific questions!

I’m the other guy, wolframhydroxide. my comment was originally going to be a response to this person.

Indeed, my own comment was originally going to be a reply to this comment.

Let’s consider what it would take to have unbreakable (effectively infinite) surface tension:

Either existing intermolecular forces would need to be dialed to infinity, or a new intermolecular force must come into action. In either case, it would make it energetically favourable for gaseous water to immediately condense into liquid whenever a gaseous molecule interacted with another water molecule. It would be an ice-ix scenario. All water would fall out of the atmosphere within hours, everything which uses lungs would find them filling with fluid. No water could be poured or create any droplet smaller than itself or otherwise separate from other water. However, that’s not even the weirdest bit.

If this new or altered intermolecular force functionally increased the attractive forces between molecules of water, and only water, to infinity, all water would immediately collapse such that the individual atoms would undergo fusion, breaking the bonds of the molecules in a conflagration of nuclear fire.

But let’s assume that it reaches just before the point at which the atomic bonds break. The water will likely take on the properties of a glass, becoming effectively solid, everywhere, just like ice-ix.

So let’s be more generous and assume that the intermolecular forces are increased to be only strong enough to make it effectively impossible to break surface tension. We’d see a significantly higher viscosity, but what else?

Well, the intermolecular forces will probably still SIGNIFICANTLY decrease the solubility of pretty much everything, everywhere, all at once (but especially covalent gases, which do not dissociate).

This means that, in every living thing, at the same time, bubbles of oxygen and nitrogen will be coming out in the blood/hemolymph/cell membranes, not only making respiration functionally impossible (or at the very least far less efficient), but also embolizing every living thing with the precipitated gases. Everything alive dies, immediately.

If those two gases aren’t enough, it will probably also significantly change the dissociation constants of pretty much every ionic compound, making them far less likely to dissociate in water, effectively causing large portions of the salt in the sea and other dissolved solids to precipitate in a cloud of powdered solids that would make the banded iron formations of the great oxygenation event look like a child’s sandbox.

Depending on the interrelation of water’s own dissociation and the intermolecular forces, which I can’t recall at the moment, all acids and bases may suddenly neutralise in a similar event.

No matter what, I don’t think anyone would be worrying about swimmers not being able to break the surface of the water.

Look at this guy, thinking he’s worthy of “respect”! The fucking temerity, the absolute gall of these poors!

RNGesus, be my guide, keep the dice gods on my side…

Fair enough

This is the plot of an episode of the anime “mushishi” called “tree of eternity”, IIRC.

Dragonflies are likely to be with the mantids at the “we will rip your head off if we like you, you don’t want to know what we do to our enemies” table.

You nearly convinced me, but I can’t get over how difficult it is to read when hovering above it, so even though it may be what the rotten things deserve, I shouldn’t bear the punishment for the crime of their existence.

This is the exact plot of the movie “The Net”, starring Sandra Bullock.

It does not.

I could be wrong, but I’m fairly sure that, while ‘f’ is a function, ‘f(x)’ is the function’s output, not the function itself. So f(x) is a meme (as.long as x is a meme), because function f’s output is a meme. The function itself is a mathematical operation, not its output.

f and F are not memes, but functions which output memes.

Without a nervous system, the only thing it can feel is ANGER.

One of your precepts is flawed. f is not a meme any more than the word “all” is a meme in “all your base are belong to us”. f is defined by text within the overall meme, but while it is part of the meme, it is not the meme itself, as it lacks the context of the remainder of the meme. Your precept is like saying “9 is prime, because it is the prime number ‘19’”.

9 is not prime. It is part of the representation of the number 19.

f is not the meme. It is part of the context which defines the meme.

For those who are not aware, ^^this^^ is how you turn cheese into american cheese. (Though I think they just use water, not butter. Maybe it wouldn’t taste like shit if they used butter)

There is nothing more damaging to the narcissistic dictator’s fragile ego than emasculation. Let us merely hope that the hits keep coming.

“Mexico” is one of only two cases where I don’t follow the “correct” pronunciation as often as possible (the other being ‘axolotl’, because if I pronounce it with the correct Nahuatl ‘sh’ sound, nobody knows what I’m talking about). If the topic is brought up, I wait to see how someone else says it. If I’m speaking to my largely-latina students, many of whom are from mexico, then I’m obviously going to pronounce it as an ‘h’/‘j’. However, many of them also pronounce it with an x when speaking in English, so I just tend to go with ‘correct’ unless one of my interlocutors says it the american way first. I don’t feel particularly bad about this, since the word “Mexico” also comes from Nahuatl, but nobody actually pronounces it the original way in mexico, so I go with whatever my interlocutor goes with first. (For the same reason I’m not going to call Germany “Deutschland” unless I’m speaking to someone whom I know to be German.)

In general, I try to pronounce loan words the correct way in their mother tongue, whether they be Maori, Xhosa, or French. And yes, I know this makes me sound like a pretentious dickwad when I say "Kwah-sahn’ ", rather than “cruh-sahnt”, and I’ll take sounding like a pretentious dickwad over giving in to my American exceptionalism any day.

It may get louder, but does it go to eleven?

A fair criticism. Consider: what keyboard do you think they’re using to type all those thorns? Are they putting in the Unicode for it each time? Copy pasting it? I’d be willing to bet that they’re using an Icelandic keyboard, and then they’re just ignoring the fact that they are using it wrong. There is only one language on earth that still uses the thorn, and that language doesn’t use it voiced. So no, I maintain that they are using it wrong, objectively, because the only living language that does still use it doesn’t use it that way. It irks me in the same way that I am incensed by stupid Americans pronouncing Central American or Chinese names containing the letter “x” as if it’s in the word “mix”. If it’s from Mayan or related languages, or in Chinese, that shit is pronounced “sh”. It’s just offensive, as someone who studies languages, to see these graphemes being tortured.

Can jou imagine if someone just kept insisting on tjping in Englisj, but tjej replaced everj instance of “h” witj “j”, because “tjat’s jow it is in Spanisj”, but tjen tjej would ALSO use “j” instead of “y”, because “tjat’s jow it’s used in Icelandic”, even wjen tjose letters aren’t being used to represent tjose sounds?

Wouldn’t jou tjink tjat person was a bit of a prick, and probablj just doing it to grab attention, and, oj jeaj, definitivelj wrong?

Indeed. There was a time period when people decided that they didn’t need to make the distinction anymore, then they started using “th” entirely. However, my issue is that, as someone who reads both old English and old Norse texts regularly, in both of these languages the eth represents voiced, the thorn voiceless. It churns my guts every time I see them torturing the thorn like that, and so I downvote.