Category: Misc
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Why are German numbers backwards?
My German is relatively basic, but this is true for Dutch as well. 42 is pronounced twee-en-veertig (“two and forty”). Spoken language was in existence before written language. Many numerals existing today were created long before reading was practised, so if there is any direction in a language at all, German does not “read” “backwards”,…
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Omicron
[…] Even if you did succeed, what then? How long are you going to keep your borders closed? A restriction to a few countries might help the first week, but within a month it won’t even much matter, because there’s too much spread elsewhere. It’s not like a variant worse than Delta is going to…
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The World’s Deadliest Thing
Around 1895, whilst investigating the case of a group of musicians who had died after eating cooked ham, a Belgian scientist called Emile van Ermengem identified the bacteria at the heart of Kerber’s sausage poisonings, a disease that had been coined Botulism, after bolutus, the Latin for sausage. Later work showed that these bacteria, which…
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Octopuses, crabs and lobsters to be recognised as sentient beings
Octopuses, crabs and lobsters will receive greater welfare protection in UK law following an LSE report which demonstrates that there is strong scientific evidence that these animals have the capacity to experience pain, distress or harm. The UK government has today confirmed that the scope of the Animal Welfare (Sentience) Bill will be extended to…
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Singapore’s tech-utopia dream is turning into a surveillance state nightmare
[…] [migrant workers] labor and their identities are clearly commodified, something which is, at times, heartbreakingly visible. In a country that’s notoriously obsessed with safety, where jaywalking and failing to wear a seatbelt can be punished with jail time, migrant workers can be transported on the expressways in the back of goods vehicles. Calls for…
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#PGHomeStories | Yeri Tiete & Shan Wong’s Home Refinancing Journey
Shan and I recorded this a few months ago for PropertyGuru. Didn’t know it was also on YouTube (they were mostly using it in ads and on facebook/Instagram). Keeping it here as archive. 🙂
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Science YouTuber Philipp Dettmer: ‘Getting cancer was super-interesting’
Probably my favourite YouTube channel. My poor parents sent me to a school outside the system, where people like me are put by worried parents to get any sort of degree. And there I had one teacher, an older lady, probably in her 60s, and my God I was afraid of her. I was 17…
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King Air spins
Some damn scary shit right there. The jumpers blocked the airflow and shifted the gravity balance: The stall and subsequent spin happened when we allowed too many jumpers on the outside step, causing an aft center of gravity and excessive blocking of the airflow to the left horizontal stabilizer. The nose then pitched up beyond…
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You Are Immune Against Every Disease
