Seeker of Carcosa

“Exquisite use of an interrobang, good sir. I doff my fedora to thee.”

You’re thinking of Arthur Jermyn. Innsmouth is the fish people that the neighbouring town thought was simply a product of spending so much time fraternising with the Chinese.

Sounds like we have the same reading of that statement, and I would say a very similar reading applies to “you’re responsible for getting yourself off.” My issue is with people misappropriating the message to assert that it’s somehow okay to be apathetic to your partner’s needs.

That just sounds like a refinement of “you’re responsible for your own happiness”, which is a maxim of selfish people abusing therapy talk to justify their apathy/callousness towards their partners.

Partnerships are collaborative efforts for mutual gain, not zero-sum games where we’re individually responsible for maximising our own output from the system. A good partner should actively want to see their partner happy and fulfilled.

Bravo to the exceptional bravery on display here. I’m sure the majority of PhD graduates, including myself, wish they’d had the gumption to name and shame the suppressing factors contributing to a toxic academic environment. Reading this makes me kind of appreciative that my troubles were only administrative mismanagement and an inexperienced supervisor.

Also what the hell is up with TU Delft? It’s only partway through March and this is the second time this year that I’ve seen a PhD candidate publicly call out the institute.

I’m married and we just have the towel.

Having worked at institutions with “no Friday deadlines” as a rule, but Monday 8/9am deadlines are A-OK, I feel your pain. The “logic” from central management is that us markers don’t have to mark over weekends and have enough time to mark before classes on Wednesday-Friday, but what’s stopping me from just ignoring the assignment marking until Monday?

Baroque: possessing a marvellous proof, which the margin of your book is too narrow to contain.

I have no eye for this, but around 110% looks like a normal person’s face to me.

For me it’s Grothendieck’s prime.

Divisibility by 3 rule is real. If the sum of the digits of a number is divisible by 3, then the number itself is also divisible by 3. Same goes with 9. There’s an 11 rule, but it’s a bit convoluted.

Were you not aware of it at any point? I don’t necessarily mean as part of the GCSE curriculum. I’ve been aware of the Odyssey and the Iliad from the “Ancient Greeks” part of our primary school curriculum back in year 4. Of course we weren’t analysing texts, but I’d expect any ten year old to be capable of rattling off some major plot points like blinding Polyphemus, or sailors plugging their ears with wax against the sirens and tying Odysseus to the mast.

Liam’s a tool. UK schools absolutely do teach the Odyssey, and have done so at least as far back as my youth.

Sorry but that knife screams “mall ninja.”

They’re the same picture.

Depends on your frame of reference. When traversing the surface of a globe, your described concept of a straight line isn’t intuitive.

Forgive the ignorance, but are regular OBGYN appointments a thing in the US? From the media I’ve consumed it appears so. I know people with actual gynaecological issues like endometriosis, and even they find the idea of regular checkups without a cause weird.

That’s the thing: you’re proving the idiom in the way that you’re arguing. Naively, one would expect that comparing fruit is easy; after all, they’re both fruit. Two nations have supposedly, in an official capacity, made the same statement (which I don’t believe without you providing a source, and yes the burden is on you).

The thing is that these are all superficial observations on complex entities. The idiom of comparing two fruits is a common idiom in many cultures, and it’s not for want of an internet commenter pointing out that they’re sweet, have seeds, and are similar colour.

General point: practice making pithy arguments based on well researched points. I’m struggling to see an actual point in the drivel you’re writing. It isn’t a reading comprehension issue; I read and write dense academic articles for a living. Short, pithy sentences are simply better writing.

There’s no reason 2 fruits can’t be compared.

I find it hard to believe that you’re not familiar with the famous phrase “comparing apples and oranges,” which is specifically about attempting to compare incomparable items.

Yes, there are infinities of larger magnitude. It’s not a simple intuitive comparison though. One might think “well there are twice as many whole numbers as even whole numbers, so the set of whole numbers is larger.” In fact they are the same size.

Two most commonly used in mathematics are countably infinite and uncountably infinite. A set is countably infinite if we can establish a one to one correspondence between the set of natural numbers (counting numbers) and that set. Examples are all whole numbers (divide by 2 if the natural number is even, add 1, divide by 2, and multiply by -1 if it’s odd) and rational numbers (this is more involved, basically you can get 2 copies of the natural numbers, associate each pair (a,b) to a rational number a/b then draw a snaking line through all the numbers to establish a correspondence with the natural numbers).

Uncountably infinite sets are just that, uncountable. It’s impossible to devise a logical and consistent way of saying “this is the first number in the set, this is the second,…) and somehow counting every single number in the set. The main example that someone would know is the real numbers, which contain all rational numbers and all irrational numbers including numbers such as e, π, Φ etc. which are not rational numbers but can either be described as solutions to rational algebraic equations (“what are the solutions to “x^2 - 2 = 0”) or as the limits of rational sequences.

Interestingly, the rational numbers are a dense subset within the real numbers. There’s some mathsy mumbo jumbo behind this statement, but a simplistic (and insufficient) argument is: pick 2 real numbers, then there exists a rational number between those two numbers. Still, despite the fact that the rationals are infinite, and dense within the reals, if it was possible to somehow place all the real numbers on a huge dartboard where every molecule of the dartboard is a number, then throwing a dart there is a 0% chance to hit a rational number and a 100% chance to hit an irrational number. This relies on more sophisticated maths techniques for measuring sets, but essentially the rationals are like a layer of inconsequential dust covering the real line.