Poll time!

[conuly]

Poll #22004

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 100

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There's no rest for the

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weary
27 (27.8%)

wicked
70 (72.2%)

Let's compare!

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Apples!
50 (55.6%)

Oranges!
40 (44.4%)

I like

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Coffee
32 (36.0%)

Tea
57 (64.0%)

We're as different as

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night and day
76 (76.8%)

chalk and cheese
23 (23.2%)

I'd rather something be

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easy as pie
34 (35.4%)

a piece of cake
62 (64.6%)

There are 10 types of people in the world...

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those that understand base 3
13 (14.0%)

those who don't
5 (5.4%)

those who assumed this was a binary joke
75 (80.6%)

Ticky?

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Ticky
90 (100.0%)

****

The Elite, Poison Ivy–Munching Goats Taking on New York’s Invasive Weeds

Total Edutainment Forever

“Magic: The Gathering” is officially the world’s most complex game

The Company Behind Gore-Tex Is Coming for Your Eyeballs

For These Muslims, Learning the Quran Starts With YouTube

Mother Tongue

When an Argument Over Macbeth Incited a Bloody Riot

Ban Right on Red for Drivers

How Rwanda Could Be The First Country To Wipe Out Cervical Cancer

Centrist Utopian Novel Premises

A Dying Teenager’s Recovery Started in the Dirt

Liberal America’s Single-Family Hypocrisy

A teacher battling cancer must pay for her own substitute. In California, it’s the law.

It's time to break up Facebook

‘Run, Hide, Fight’ mindset making way into US schools

Young Arabs Say Religion Plays Too Large a Role in the Middle East

Muslims afraid, resentful as ethnic divide deepens in Sri Lanka

Inside China’s Surveillance Crackdown on Uyghurs

Teenage Pricks: Trumpism’s brand of boy power

At Jezebel, Esther Wang reports on the close ties forged between conservatives and trans-exclusionary radical feminists (TERFs) along with the transphobic legislation they have been able to push through together. (From the comments at MeFi we also get this comic)

Venezuelan troops turn blind eye to routes into Brazil - at a price

For thousands of asylum seekers, all they can do is wait

A serial killer at the border – and the women who stood up to him

Comments

[unfavorableinstigation]

I skipped the Coffee/Tea question, because I don't like either. =P

Be appalled.

[jtthomas]

Out of curiosity, is hot cocoa more suitable?

Yes! ^^ Thank you for asking.

[unfavorableinstigation]

It's not a very summery beverage, though. :(

Re: Yes! ^^ Thank you for asking.

[conuly]

There's always chocolate milk.

Why, yes!

[unfavorableinstigation]

We have it so rarely in my house, though. :(

Lemonade is more common - and I do like that!

[chomiji]

I like both, so balance is maintained!

[unfavorableinstigation]

;)

[jhetley]

How about coffee *and* tea? False dichotomy.

[conuly]

YOU MUST CHOOSE.

[gingicat]

Nooooo!

[jhetley]

The only way to win is to stay out of the game.

[bibliofile]

Do not mix them together! Unless your goal is to make everyone unhappy.

[fred_mouse]

I raise you the idea of the dirty chai.

[jhetley]

Why should people be happy? And I have this pain in the diodes on my left side.

[rhoda_rants]

Okay, but what IS base 3? I'm dying to know now.

As for the Run, Hide, Fight thing--I hate hate hate hate haaaaaaaaaate that this is our Normal now. We've been trained on this at the library too and I HAAAAAATE it. I hate that we're now training LITERAL CHILDREN to throw themselves on bullets to take the fall for their classmates. That is not heroism, it is a broken system that would rather let people die than pass any kind of legislation that could help.

(Seriously though, what's base 3?)

[buttonsbeadslace]

Base three would be a system of writing numbers where you count by threes. Instead of the second spot to the left of the decimal being the "tens" place, it would be the "threes" place. You'd write three as 10 and count up from zero as 0, 1, 2, 10, 11, 12, 20 ...

[rhoda_rants]

Oh god, numbers. Okay. *full body cringe* It hurtssss usssss!

I mean, thanks!

[conuly]

Channeling JKR and her math phobia there?

[rhoda_rants]

Just myself and my wicked combo of dyscalculia and synesthesia! Didn't realize JK was not into the math, actually.

[buttonsbeadslace]

lol oops, yes, it's numbers. Confusing ways of writing numbers, that's all it really is :)

[conuly]

Base N just means a number system where you have N numerals.

So base 2 is a number system with two numerals - 0, 1. Starting from 0, you count 0, 1, 10, 11, 100, 101, 110, 111, 1000, 1001, 1010.

Base 3 is a number system with three numerals - 0, 1, 2. Starting from 0, you count 0, 1, 2, 10, 11, 12, 20, 21, 22, 100, 101.

Base 5 is a number system with five numerals - 0, 1, 2, 3, 4. Starting from 0, you count 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 20.

Base 10 is the system we're most used to, and I won't recount it.

Base 12 would use, yes, 12 numerals, and in some cultures they do count in base 12. It makes division and multiplication easier, that's for sure.

[rhoda_rants]

Oooookay, I kinda remember this now. Dad tried to teach me binary code when I was like sixteen, and I was kept whining, "It's Tuesday, my homework's finished, why am I missing Buffy for this???"

[greghousesgf]

Oo, I want to know what cultures use base 12!

[conuly]

You can count by 12s yourself by running your thumb along your phalanges of that same hand, starting with the top of the index finger. If you also keep count using the other hand you can actually use a base 60 system. I've read - though don't quote me! - that the Babylonians used that system, which helps to explain why every bit of math we get from them involves numbers divisible by 60. (The fact that the year is very close to 360 days also ties into this, I suspect.)

Base 60 is very convenient for math, having the prime factors of 2, 3, and 5 (making the times tables of 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 10, 12, 15, 20, and 30 very simple) but it has the downside of requiring 60 numerals if you want to use a place value system to write it.

All that said, there are some cultures in Africa and India that use a dozenal system for counting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duodecimal#Origin

[mtbc]

The goat story's cool, thanks.

In play I find that I have to think about more at once with Yu-Gi-Oh than Magic (and for that reason I prefer the latter) but I guess that's measuring something different and it's not like I'm expert in either anyway.

[jack]

Those options are all reasonable except for "no rest for the weary". I know that's a phrase in long standing, but isn't that what weary already means?

[conuly]

Well, if you're weary you hope you'll get to rest soon.

[thewayne]

OR 'easy as pie' and 'piece of cake' if I'm recalling the movie 2010 correctly. Been quite a number of years since I last saw it.

[elenbarathi.livejournal.com]

Um. TERF is a slur (https://terfisaslur.com/). Note that I am not a radical feminist, certainly not a lesbian, and have no interest in policing either the restrooms or other peoples' private lives. I'm sorry for people who experience gender dysphoria, as I'm sorry for those who experience body integrity dysphoria, and I have no particular opinion as to what any of them ought to do about it: that's between them and their doctors.

All that said, I will freely state that I don't consider people with penises to be women, and also that I'm pretty damn tired of women's issues being dominated and derailed by trans issues, when trans people make up less than 1% of the population.

[conuly]

You know, Ana's transgender.

[elenbarathi.livejournal.com]

Yes, I know. So are two members of my own family, including one nephew who was born a niece, and several close friends. My own status on the QUILTBAG continuum is nobody's damn business, but it isn't what people tend to assume.

None of which is pertinent to the question. 'Gender' is a wholly artificial construction, and I am not willing to play that game. There are two SEXES - one that produces ova, one that produces sperm - plus a very small percentage of genetic anomalies that produce neither, or (very rarely) both. I see no reason why a person's reproductive organs should have any bearing whatsoever on their social roles, and that WAS the original point of feminism.

People own their own bodies, and can modify them however they wish. There are plenty of people who like to dress up, and a fair number who are willing to pay for surgery to make themselves more the way they want to be, and that's fine. I am not a doctor specializing in dysphoria, and the doctors who do specialize in dysphoria are divided in their opinions about its etiology and treatment, so I don't actually have an opinion on it.

I WILL say that I've watched people go through the transition process - both MTF and FTM - and in my observation, transitioning did not make them noticeably happier or more functional. I've also watched two people transition back, and that didn't seem to help them much either. Obviously, it's far easier to change one's gender than to change society's gender-role expectations, but doing so does absolutely nothing to address the harm those expectations do to everybody, particularly to women.

*shrugs* All of this identity-politics stuff will be rendered utterly moot within the next couple of decades anyway, as human society falls apart preliminary to our near-certain extinction along with the rest of the Anthropocene.

EDIT: Did you see this link supergee posted on May 7, Is Gender Binary? (https://cakmpls.wordpress.com/2019/05/07/is-gender-binary/)? My answer to her final question would be that 'gender' serves precisely the same purpose as 'race', which is to distinguish Sneetches with stars from those with none upon thars.

[conuly]

*shrugs* All of this identity-politics stuff will be rendered utterly moot within the next couple of decades anyway, as human society falls apart preliminary to our near-certain extinction along with the rest of the Anthropocene.

Way to make this gloomy.

[elenbarathi.livejournal.com]

How does one make near-certain extinction not gloomy? It's why I'm not an 'ally' of any human identity-politics 'cause', including the ones that arguably might pertain to me and/or my progeny. I sympathize, yes; I would sympathize a whole lot more if we were not fucking doomed, in light of which, the question of who gets to use the Ladies Room is very small potatoes indeed.