That opens up all kinds of cans of worms. Let’s say you are put into a medical coma, no thoughts, only eniugh activity to sustain life. You’re scanned, and a perfect copy of you is made. You both wake up in another room, at exactly the same time. Are both versions of you equally “you?” You don’t know which is which. Does the answer change if a 3rd party knows, or there is no knowledge of which is which? If all that matters is continuous stream of consciousness, then I suppose the answer would be you died in the coma, and two people with your memories were born, I suppose.

Most common theory is your brain just decides to dump the short term memory instead of storing it in long term. It decides nothing notable enough happened to keep it.

While this is generally a pretty reasonable ask in most situations, it seems like now is the worst possible time for them to make immigration more difficult. The coming demographic collapse is not a question of “if,” but “how bad,” at this point. Even if their birth rate proportionally climbs to the highest in the world magically over night, they are still looking at severe issues, and now many of those new births will still be dependants when it happens. They should really be incentivising immigration as hard as they can to take the edge off of what is coming at this point.

To be fair, they used that setup first. And PS originally copied it, but for some reason switched the functions of X and O in the West. In Japan, those symbols O often used for agree/correct/confirm and vice versa for X. It is weird that X became confirm here .

I wish they’d post them more than once a year these days…

Yeah, I think it’s part and parcel with the Mary merry marry merger. It’s not just about those 3 words, but those 3 sounds.

I do usually. 90% of the time, if it’s AE, then it means it didn’t allow Æ.

Đere’s no escaping us, broðer.

Once upon a time, English both used thorn, the character you are replacing, and eth, the one I just used here. One was used for words like that, this, there, and the other was used for thin, thank, and throw. That didn’t last very long, linguistically speaking. They quickly became interchangeable, and thorn rapidly became the most popular one. But I think if people want to bring it back, we should bring them both back. And while we’re at it, we should bringing back the “four form system.” IE, we used to have two different ways to say yes or no, those two words were specifically used to answer a negative question. Current English leaves negative questions impossible to answer with a single word wothout ambiguity. “Will they not go?” cannot be answered with only yes or no in Modern English’s 2 form system. But with a 4 form system, we had yea and nay for general usage. “Will they go?” Yea means they will, nay means they won’t. But with the negative form of the question, “Will they not go?” Yes means they will, and no means they won’t. Over time yea and nay were both dropped and yes and no became universal.

Was used all the way up to modern English. It was one of several characters that just got dropped because they wanted to use fewer when the printing press was adapted for English. Back then it was kind of the wild west for spelling, especially when printing words that used those characters. For example, sometimes they would just replace the character with a not often used one that was obviously a stand-in from context because it just didn’t fit naturally, in this case before “th” became the standard replacement, “y” was often used. One of the most commonly used examples that most people don’t realize is “ye,” as in “ye olde pub,” etc. While “ye,” pronounced as it is spelled, was used as a less formal “you,” “ye” in this context was understood to be pronounced as “the.”

Damn, I really don’t have an original thought in my head

Also important to remember most of the traditions about it are pagan. Christ wasn’t even born in December. They just decided to celebrate it then to coincide with the existing solstice traditions. Many places celebrated the solstice as a new beginning, the days were now getting longer, and people needed a pick-me-up in the dark season. It was often one of the biggest annual celebrations. So it was co-opted with one of the most obvious Christian signs matching the theme, Christ’s birth being the beginning of the end of a time of darkness. First by giving a new meaning to Saturnalia, then adding more bits from other regions they were trying to convert.

Not just Saturnalia, that was just the first. More was incorporated from various traditions as they sought to convert them. But yeah, that was sort of the foundation the rest was laid upon.

Hell, 20 years ago when I worked at Walmart we usually had about half the registers open most days. More when we were expecting a crowd. There was a fair amount of downtime, but not an excessive amount.

IIRC, the biggest uncertainty is about the singularity. I don’t know if it’s still true, but my understanding was that the consensus is that it isn’t really a true point of infinitely dense mass. That is how our current models say it must be, but many assumed our current models are incomplete and that more accurate ones will show that it must have some volume. And given the extreme nature of them, any updates to our models might have some significant repercussions in other aspects of them too.

Time is relarive to your frame of reference. You are always the source of your own frame of reference, so you can never feel the effect of time dilation on yourself. At worst, it would look like the universe outside the horizon started to accelerate to unimaginable speeds. But you would never feel trapped in an unending, at worst that is simply what it would look like to us.

Um, they very much did make promises to that effect. Neither were in good position to actually help the Poles when push came to shove, hence the Phony War. Brittain did some good with their navy, but neither could get enough troops to where it mattered to help, so they buckled down on ramping up their own war efforts at home to better mobilize. Did they fo it out of cowardice and throw the Poles to the wolves, or out of necessity because they would have been overrun had they over commited? That’s a question that has been the subject of much study. But they both very publicly and loudly commit to their defense, they simply failed to meaningfully uphold that commitment.

I mean, the obvious answer is instead of trying to divvy the sovereign nation between them, they should have stood up for them and defended them when the Nazis rolled in. Barring that, they should have liberated them, then left them the fuck alone. Even a stopped clock is right sometimes, this comparison is pretty clearly silly. They weren’t lamenting the lives of Nazis lost in the battle to push them out of Poland. They were lamenting the lives of the Poles after falling under the Russian boot, after the battles were won.

Dietary calcium is great for preventing stones, actually. Calcium is bound to a couple different things that cause stones, but the body actually makes those things specifically to bind with calcium. When it happens where it is supposed to, this is a good thing. If you are low on calcium, these things get flushed, and may get trapped in the kidney. Then any calcium that passes through may bind to it. Having higher calcium intake helps prevent them from building up in the kidneys to begin with. Though extremely high amounts of calcium from vitamin supplements etc can increase the risk of getting stones, but high calcium diet is one of the best defenses against them.

It is actually not an excess of calcium that’s usually the problem, calcium deficiency is actually a greater risk for most. While yes, the most common types are both chemicals that are in part calcium, the body is meant to produce them, just in different parts of the body. Usually, a deficiency in calcium allows those other compounds that should be used up in other places to be flushed through the kidneys, possibly building up. Then incidental calcium that does move through the kidney binds to them there. Higher dietary calcium intake is associated with a sharp decline in stone risk, though extremely high intakes from vitamin supplements etc do increase risk. But in general, it is an excess of the things that bind to calcium that are the things to avoid, apparently almonds are pretty much the worse thing ever, with a fairly distant second being chocolate.

Yeah, I have rejected increased cost games for this very reason. But Nintendo is one of the few companies I believe would do it to cover their costs instead of just preying upon general apathy towards inflation since covid to jack up profit. They are too rich for my blood at the time, but if I had the income to splurge this would be one of a vanishingly small number of places I would be willing to put up with it.