Maybe that’s why I misremembered it. I agree, it does seem like the exact opposite to what scientists actually do upon finding something they can’t explain

Ahh my mistake

Bunch of dickheads apparently feeling attacked in these comments

Wasn’t the whole thing about the scientists in the Three Body Problem that they recognised that their work was being sabotaged by something enormously more powerful?

Couldn’t Biden in turn just pardon the killer?

Wait, when was it an independent Chagossian state?

Wait, people actually avoid Australia because of it? I mean, I do think of Australian wildlife as dangerous, but to me that means “don’t fuck about” rather than “don’t go at all”. And I live in the UK, where we killed everything that was even slightly dangerous to humans long ago

Ahh okay, that makes sense. Thank you!

Most of my brewing is for beer, so I have heaps of 500ml bottles that I use to make cuts, thankfully. I don’t actually own any tools to properly measure the content of spirits, though. I’m currently going on “is it flammable” and “what does it taste/smell like”. If I can actually get into it a bit more I’ll invest in the gear, but I feel like I need to get over the mental block first

I appreciate the advice though. It’s good to have some reassurance, because man it just fucking sucks to wait weeks to brew something and then totally fuck up the distillation. What’s the thinking behind covering the jars with a paper towel rather than just the lid of the jar (or the stopper of the bottle, in my case)?

The trick is that in German it’s fine to just take several words and delete the spaces between them if they’re expressing a single concept. Like if in English, we took the concept of Germans having a word for everything and just called it Germanvocabulary

80% of Israeli Jews were born in Israel, they do not have an “actual home” to go back to

I do really worry that America would put boots on the ground in the event of an open Iran-Israel war. Especially if Iran starts winning.

I have finished the brewing stage of what will hopefully be my first gin and now need to gather up the mental fortitude to stare at a thermometer for several hours and potentially ruin all the prior work. I’m not very good at distillation yet.

Isn’t a khopesh sharp on the other side of the curve from a shotel, though? It seems like sharpening the inside was the big innovation that makes shotels distinctive

while a western sword was like the size of a grown man and very heavy. Because of this western swords just didnt need to be that sharp.

I’m afraid these are both wrong. For a start, there’s no one Western sword. There’s not even, like, one sword used by professional soldiers from 15th century Germany. Some of them were going around with zweihänders (literally “two-hander”), which were straight blades and really could be 2m long and 4kg, while others at the same time were using the messer (literally “knife”), which is curved, half the length, and a quarter of the weight.

They were also absolutely kept sharp. There was little point in maintaining an absolutely razor-sharp edge because that’ll just get damaged, but if it’s not sharp enough to effectively cut stuff then you wasted a whole bunch of your money buying a really ineffective hammer. And you absolutely would have just used a hammer if that was what you wanted.

There were techniques for using swords as bludgeoning weapons, but these evolved as methods to counter increasingly effective armour, not because the swords weren’t effective cutting tools. Holding the blade of the sword and using the crossguard as a hammer is one of the better-known examples of this. But that’s something you do if you do not actually have a hammer with you and nonetheless need to fight a guy wearing plate armour. If you’re carving through the four hundred peasants he brought with him, you want to cut stuff. Even against the guy in armour, rather than bludgeoning it you might prefer to hold your sword with one hand on the hilt and one halfway up the blade so that you can effectively direct the tip into the tiny gaps in the armour, at which point sharpness is very important again.

European cultures absolutely did have refined martial arts for wielding swords. We just didn’t put much effort into to preserving them once guns replaced the swords.

“content warning: bad” is my favourite part about this

It is technically spoilers for Outer Wilds and also the DLC

Not to mention the disingenuousness of leaving out how they lost to Hindenburg and Ludendorff in between those two

Ethnic Russians were the largest proportion of the killed in action by quite a margin, let’s not pretend that they weren’t doing their part. Ukraine was too, of course - the people that pretend Ukraine just jumped ship and shacked up with the Nazis at the first opportunity are doing an unbelievable disservice to the millions of Ukrainians that died fighting the Nazis - but the huge population disparity between Russia and every other Soviet republic does show in the data.

.ch and .cg are already taken, so maybe .cs would fit? Still, with .io being as popular as it is, I think it’d be well worth keeping around if the proceeds from it could go towards the Chagossians