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Cake day: July 4th, 2023

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  • marzhall@lemmy.worldtoMicroblog Memes@lemmy.worldRules
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    15 days ago

    It’s a descriptive rule, not a prescriptive rule, and likely one snuck into the powerpoint to try and get the class thinking and laughing. Like calling the descriptions of gravity the “laws of gravity”, it describes something about the world we’ve seen, but there’s no Physics Police enforcing all matter follow the “Laws” - it’s just the term we use for a description of how things work.

    A lot of advanced English classes are much more on the descriptivist side of things - observing patterns in ways we use language - than the prescriptivist approach we get in grade school where we’re just learning rote things like spellings.







  • Invertebrates? No. All out

    I invite you to meet the awesome jumping spider, whose eyes are very especially needed set up to be forward-facing for depth perception for their jumps, and who hunt other spiders, as well as the wolf spider, who are also a hunting (as opposed to web) spider.

    In fact, you can use the chart of spider eye layouts to pretty much identify whether you’re looking at a spider who builds webs and waits or a spider who hunts:

     a drawing of different spider faces to their names

    Anyone with two big forward-facing eyes is probably looking around for their next meal; the rest are building a web, trapdoor, or taking some other approach.






  • marzhall@lemmy.worldtoMicroblog Memes@lemmy.worldCry cry cry
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    4 months ago

    There’s a 1994 interview with Bill Gates in which he talks about how someday in the future we will have what he calls wallet PCs, and which will allow us to pay for things, be cameras, things we can use to hold our tickets to go into shows, etc. One of the best Playboy interviews.








  • The stickers thing has always been an “ick” for me. My friends enjoyed torturing me with this reaction to stickered laptops until I sent them a video of a person giving a talk with a massive minion sticker plastered on top of all their other stickers, to which even they were grossed out.

    That said, I did have a plan to have a battle jacket made with patches like what the stickers on the laptop would be were I to attend a conference. Damn, I just realized I have attended a conference and completely forgot to follow up on that. Regret.