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Cake day: June 13th, 2023

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  • ninja@lemmy.worldtoMurdered by Words@feddit.ukgotdamn
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    19 hours ago

    I’ve had the ‘can you make water more wet?’ conversation before. The answer we arrived at varies based on the definition of wet so we had to define wet first.

    We concluded that wetness is usually judged by how liquid something is or how much liquid it has with it. Our liquidity was based on viscosity so it’s possible to make a liquid more wet by decreasing viscosity. Viscosity can be altered by adding a different viscosity liquid to it. There are things less viscous than water so in adding them you can make water more wet. Viscosity can also be changed by changing the temperature. As temperature increases viscosity decreases until water becomes a gas and dissipates into the air. We got a bit stuck here since at this point we no longer considered the water to be wet but did think that the air was wet. There was wetness, but since the mix was more air than water the water’s wetness was decreasing. We concluded there was some nebulous level of humidity that would be considered wet, but it would be wet air rather than dry water.

    Then we looked at it the other way. At low temperatures the viscosity of water increases until it eventually crystalizes into a solid. As long as it stayed frozen it had none of the properties we considered wet. Completely frozen water could be considered dry.






  • the ruling, https://www.ca5.uscourts.gov/opinions/pub/23/23-50224-CV0.pdf, doesn’t list all the initially banned books, but has this:

    Loosely grouped, those books are:
    
    • Seven “butt and fart” books, with titles like I Broke My Butt! and Larry
    the Farting Leprechaun;
    
    • Four young adult books touching on sexuality and homosexuality,
    such as Gabi, a Girl in Pieces;
    
    • Being Jazz: My Life as a (Transgender) Teen and Freakboy, both
    centering on gender identity and dysphoria;
    
    • Caste and They Called Themselves the K.K.K., two books about the
    history of racism in the United States;
    
    • Well-known picture book, In the Night Kitchen by Maurice Sendak,
    which contains cartoon drawings of a naked child; and
    
    • It’s Perfectly Normal: Changing Bodies, Growing Up, Sex and Sexual Health.
    
    

    The books to be returned are:

    a. Caste: The Origins of Our Discontent by Isabel Wilkerson;
    b. Called Themselves the K.K.K: The Birth of an American Terrorist
    Group by Susan Campbell Bartoletti;
    c. Spinning by Tillie Walden;
    d. Being Jazz: My Life as a (Transgender) Teen by Jazz Jennings;
    e. Shine by Lauren Myracle;
    f. Under the Moon: A Catwoman Tale by Lauren Myracle;
    g. Gabi, a Girl in Pieces by Isabel Quintero; and
    h. Freakboy by Kristin Elizabeth Clark.
    




  • The plastic tax would have to be insanely high to be effective. The story of California’s plastic bag tax is a cautionary tale. Taxing the bag minimally was ineffective since everyone just paid the extra $2 a grocery trip for the disposable bags. California then tried an outright ban, but had to limit the ban because a large volume of pre-packaged items are already in plastic bags. The limit was based on bag thickness, so all the stores started handing out thicker bags at checkout. Despite the increased durability of the thicker bags, consumers discarded them at the same rate as the old thinner bags. Since each bag was made of more plastic there was more plastic waste than before the tax and ban.





  • “It comes from a very ancient democracy, you see…"

    “You mean, it comes from a world of lizards?”

    “No,” said Ford, who by this time was a little more rational and coherent than he had been, having finally had the coffee forced down him, “nothing so simple. Nothing anything like so straightforward. On its world, the people are people. The leaders are lizards. The people hate the lizards and the lizards rule the people.”

    “Odd,” said Arthur, “I thought you said it was a democracy.”

    “I did,” said Ford. “It is.”

    “So,” said Arthur, hoping he wasn’t sounding ridiculously obtuse, “why don’t people get rid of the lizards?”

    “It honestly doesn’t occur to them,” said Ford. “They’ve all got the vote, so they all pretty much assume that the government they’ve voted in more or less approximates to the government they want.”

    “You mean they actually vote for the lizards?”

    “Oh yes,” said Ford with a shrug, “of course.”

    “But,” said Arthur, going for the big one again, “why?”

    “Because if they didn’t vote for a lizard,” said Ford, “the wrong lizard might get in. Got any gin?”

    “What?”

    “I said,” said Ford, with an increasing air of urgency creeping into his voice, “have you got any gin?”

    “I’ll look. Tell me about the lizards.”

    Ford shrugged again.“Some people say that the lizards are the best thing that ever happenned to them,” he said. “They’re completely wrong of course, completely and utterly wrong, but someone’s got to say it.”

    “But that’s terrible,” said Arthur.

    “Listen, bud,” said Ford, "if I had one Altairian dollar for every time I heard one bit of the Universe look at another bit of the Universe and say ‘That’s terrible’ I wouldn’t be sitting here like a lemon looking for a gin.”

    ― Douglas Adams, So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish