Ooh, did you read Grágás? It’s a shockingly entertaining read for a legal code. The section on Wergild is great, and you can learn a lot about the attitudes the Icelanders held toward different behaviours. Also, it strongly implies that there were at least a few people in Iceland who were training polar bears (which they must have either imported from Greenland, or found stranded on passing ice floes), and those trainers must have lobbied pretty hard, because it was specifically illegal to import trained brown bears from Norway.

There are a lot of gems in there. Simultaneously insightful and very metal.

It comes from Portuguese, it seems, meaning “big head” https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/cachalot

Isn’t that also, literally what skyrim is? Like, I love minish cap, and it certainly plays a lot with the idea of how settled areas can be pretty wild if you look at a nonhuman scale of existence, but in skyrim, most houses are involved in at least one quest line, while also housing a SIGNIFICANT number of people, and many literally have entrances to dungeons inside them, from collapsing walls leading to caves and tombs, to sewer system connections. Also, most towns still have enemy spawns, or are within a 2-minute walk from an “outside” POI, without a loading screen. Staying in the Zelda line, Breath of the Wild certainly did this to an extent, but I feel like most modern RPGs, e.g. The Witcher 3, do this to a great extent.

Finishing old games for me:

• Opus Magnum
• Mages of Mystralia
• Trying (and failing) to beat the attack helicopter level in Teardown.

And orpiment (arsenic sulfide) tastes like garlic!

Orpiment looks citrus-flavored, but when you lick it, it’s actually garlic-flavoured! These secrets have been hidden from us! Add crushed orpiment to your dishes instead of garlic!

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.