I don't mean to find ridiculous comments

[conuly]

They just appear.

"Holy goodness, did we drink a lot of hard liquor in the late 1800s"

The graph doesn't show the late 1800s; it shows the late 19th century. The late 1800s would be 1805-1809.

Two different people corrected him, but he's still holding firm, three years after the first comment:

So, how do you describe the decade betwene the 1790s ("seventeen nineties" and 1810s ("eighteen tens"), then?

I couldn't resist, I made my own reply. That decade is, of course, the early 1800s.

*************************

Amelia Earhart's Travel Menu Relied On Three Rules And People's Generosity

How to pluralize the word "octopus": a flowchart

Scientists are about to change what a kilogram is. That’s massive.

American Reportage: documenting the American experience – in pictures

Chaos Makes the Multiverse Unnecessary

Why Do Stop Signs Have Eight Sides?

City of Sydney is axing fines for overdue library books because they don’t work

Why babies in medieval paintings look like ugly old men

Strange silk: Why rappelling spiders don't spin out of control

Why Coastal Tribes Are Growing Clam Gardens That Look Like Asian Rice Fields

Lynx could return to Britain this year after absence of 1,300 years

Bananas: Scientists Create Vitamin A-Rich Fruit That Could Save Hundreds of Thousands of Children’s Lives (If they're luckier than Golden Rice. Hey, why is it always Vitamin A they add to foods?)

Mexico And U.S. Team Up To Create Low-Cost Wheelchairs

Where did giant novelty checks come from?

For 23 World Cities, a Visual Inventory of Parking Lots

American Cities Are Chipping Away at the Burden of Parking Mandates

Watch Your Mouth Around My Kid

Texas border city considers helping US jail immigrants

Dying In The Desert Is Easy — These Activists Are Trying To Change That

The politics of fire: from Ancient Rome and San Francisco to Grenfell Tower

Teen bit in head by bear wakes up to "crunching sound" (OMGWTF!?)

Turkey’s opposition stages massive rally in a show of strength against Erdogan

Black homeowners struggle as US housing market recovers

Lisa, Laquanda, Machelle, and Kenya Were Sentenced as Children to Die in Prison. Decades later, a Supreme Court ruling could give them their freedom.

Gluten-free bread for Holy Communion is toast, says Vatican (Don't Catholics officially believe in a literal transubstantiation? Seems a bit strange if it doesn't work on gluten-free bread.)

Frustrated with North Korea? Welcome to The Land of Lousy Options This is a longer and more in-depth take, from The Atlantic)

Once Dominant, the United States Finds Itself Isolated at G-20 (And I bet Trump thinks being alone is a sign of strength and "independence".)

Goal of nation's first opioid court: Keep users alive

While Corals Die Along The Great Barrier Reef, Humans Struggle To Adjust

Here’s how hot your city might be by 2100

30 percent of the energy sent to Earth bounces back into outer space. Climate change could upend that. (Is that a Wrinkle in Time series reference in the subtitle?)

Gonorrhea is becoming harder and in some cases impossible to treat with antibiotics.

Teen's suicide emblematic of problems at New Orleans jail

U.S. Air Pollution Still Kills Thousands Every Year, Study Concludes

Comments

[alexseanchai]

If I'm correctly understanding the Vatican's position, GF communion wafers are available on the internet and non-GF communion wafers are not, and the former being true is the problem, not the GF-ness.

Though I did share one such article with one of my GF sisters, the one diagnosed celiac before she stopped being Catholic, to say "The Vatican hates past!you". Because really, what do they expect of celiac Catholics? Particularly if the parish doesn't serve, or the individual doesn't drink, communion wine? (But iirc the wine is the rather less important of the two anyway!)

[conuly]

Wait, is it really the case that you can't get knock-off communion wafers on the internet!?

[alexseanchai]

I suspect one can but the Vatican either doesn't know or doesn't admit this.

[asakiyume]

My desire to speak Swahili (always present as a low background hum) is increased by the knowledge that its plural for octopus is "wactopus" ... I wonder if its singular is also "waktopus."

[conuly]

Isn't Swahili an agglutinating language, where wa- is the plural marker for certain noun classes?

(Actually, I don't think "octopus" is the Swahili word for octopus at all. I think they were just saying "If you apply Swahili pluralization, instead of English, Latin, or Greek pluralization (which are the usual choices), this is the result you get.)

[asakiyume]

You're right about "octopus" not being the Swahili word for octopus; Google Translate gives "pweza" for "octopus," and "pipi" for "octopuses."

... Not that Google Translate is all that reliable, but for single words it's often not bad.

Stop signs:

[ironyoxide]

>though no one knows why the nonagon drew the short stick.
Octagon: Take a square piece of sheet metal, cut off the corners.
Diamond: Take a square, turn it sideways.
Nonagon: ????

Ease of fabrication matters.

[alchemia]

spending a court appt 'chatting' about weather, work and the weekend with a judge? i'd think i'd kill myself. just legalise the stuff, so many 'problems' would be solved.

[alessandriana]

So, how do you describe the decade betwene the 1790s ("seventeen nineties" and 1810s ("eighteen tens"), then?

It took me three re-reads to realize he meant 1800-1809 and not 1790-1819. (Why couldn't he just say that? Eesh.)

[conuly]

Now he's claiming that his usage of the term is widespread British English. Which I guess it might be, but I've polled some Brits elsewhere and they aren't agreeing...

(And anyway, when you're outnumbered 3 to 1, shouldn't you reconsider your position?)

[stardreamer]

Heh. I couldn't resist muddying the waters a bit more. But you see, I remember having the discussion about naming conventions for the first 10 years back at the turn of the century.

I notice that, nearly 20 years in, we're still mostly using the -thousand designation for individual years of that decade (2005 is "two thousand five", etc.). I expect that to change before we get to 2050, and people will start saying "20-oh-5" instead, just as we say "19-oh-5".

[bubblesbrnaid]

Don't Catholics officially believe in a literal transubstantiation? Seems a bit strange if it doesn't work on gluten-free bread.

This actually has nothing to do with transubstantiation, so I'm not sure why every article keeps mentioning it. (The more relevant issue would be that Catholics are obligated to receive Communion at least once a year, preferably way more often.) Canon law states that the hosts must be made of only wheat and water, nothing else. I believe it's based on what the bread at the Last Supper was (matzo, presumably, given that it's traditionally been identified as a Passover meal).

I was surprised to see this show up this week, to be honest, because I could have sworn this was settled five or six years ago. I know I remember reading articles about this. Maybe it was just in the US.

[conuly]

This actually has nothing to do with transubstantiation, so I'm not sure why every article keeps mentioning it

Because a miracle is a miracle is a miracle. If one of them can transubstantiate, why can't it work gluten-free?

[elenbarathi.livejournal.com]

"Literal transubstantiation" is not the same thing as literal transformation. The bread and wine is not thought to transform into flesh and blood in the celebrant's mouth or digestive tract.

In Catholic dogma, it's not true that "a miracle is a miracle is a miracle". Transubstantiation is of the class of miracles that have to be taken entirely on faith because there is absolutely no observable evidence that they occur at all, nor any plausible mechanism by which they could occur. Bottom line: if you have celiac disease and eat the wheat wafer anyhow, your faith will not save you from the physical consequences.