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Post by Tiger on Sept 10, 2014 13:42:22 GMT -5
*blows the dust of this dead but awesome thread* The white spot on the back of a tiger's ear is called an ocelli...which is weird because otherwise the term refers to "simple" eyes (basically eyes with a single lens, like those of humans (or tigers!)). Mammal eyes aren't ocelli. Ocelli are simple eyes that can only detect light from dark, and they're mostly found on invertebrates. *rereads article* ...So they are. Thanks for going on a random tangent about human eyes in the middle of your explanation, wikipedia =P (This is why you should not do your fact-checking at work, because you get hesitant about looking up stuff about eyes on your company internet and don't read all the web results)
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Post by Deleted on Sept 11, 2014 19:32:46 GMT -5
Spinosaurus is apparently the first semi-aquatic dinosaur ever found.
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Raichi
Fan
Sketching Ninja
Posts: 77
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Post by Raichi on Sept 24, 2014 13:16:36 GMT -5
I learned that being hungry plus a back-ache results in a nausea that is hard to fix. I also learned a couple cool tricks for maya
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Post by Stephanie (swordlilly) on Sept 25, 2014 0:55:12 GMT -5
Didn't learn this today (learned it over the summer), but I'll share anyway: Socializing with a big group of Canadian academics usually means drinking. If the drinks aren't being paid for by an event sponsor, then the way that it works is: Somebody volunteers to buy a pitcher. Everybody gets a glass, the pitcher is emptied into the glasses, and then somebody (not the first person) volunteers to buy the next pitcher. The social rhythm in terms of who volunteers is very subtle, but usually it's expected that every person ends up buying a pitcher in the end, if not this time, then next time the group gets together. So if you're a very slow drinker, there's an implicit pressure on you to drink faster, because if you don't drink your share, then people can't refill since it'd look like they were taking a bigger share than you. The solution to this crisis, if you're a slow drinker, is to just not drink. Simple as that. People respect individual lifestyle choices here. They will always ask at the beginning, "Do you drink?" If you don't, then you just buy your own fruit juice or whatever and sit down to chat with everybody else, and people respect you the same way they respect vegetarians. I wish somebody had told me that! But, I'm proud of figuring this stuff out on my own.
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Post by Breakingchains on Oct 24, 2014 12:56:22 GMT -5
So we went over this in my history class today:
At the battle of Bunker Hill during the American revolutionary war, the devastating 50% British casualty rate was largely from tetanus. The colonists had famously low ammunition ("don't shoot 'til you see the whites of their eyes" and all), but they had several firearms on hand that (1) had some serious scattershot, and (2) could use anything that could fit in the barrel as ammunition. This resulted in nails and broken glass being fired into the oncoming soldiers.
Feel free to go hide under a rock now, I sure am wait don't you might catch tetanus
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Post by Coaster on Nov 29, 2014 18:07:31 GMT -5
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Post by Stephanie (swordlilly) on Nov 29, 2014 18:55:49 GMT -5
Hindi and Urdu both share connections with Arabic. For a Hindi speaker, it can be easier to understand spoken Urdu, than to understand other Indian languages. When an Indian person whose native language is Hindi converses with a Pakistani person whose native language is Urdu, they slip into a kind of mish-mash which is informally called Hindustani. While the linguistic differences are relatively minor, though, the political differences are huge. Urdu has way more consonants than English, and some of the distinctions are very subtle. There are two sounds that both sound like "d" to me, but one is a hard one and one is a soft one. The vowels, though, are very few and very pure. That's why the language sounds so rumbly, because when you say "Urdu" you don't go "er-du" and change the vowel sound, you keep the vowel sound the same and instead pronounce the consonants, like "oo-lr-doo" In the written script, the alphabets change depending on if they are independent, or at the beginning, middle, or end of a word. They aren't static like in English. They look curly and alive. There are also morphological forms based on subtle differences in social positioning, which are not emphasized so much in English, e.g. when a person you are talking about is present or absent. what the language sounds like
what the script looks like
It's such a fascinating language. ;-; I wish I had the time to learn all the languages in the world.
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Post by izzywizard on Nov 29, 2014 20:32:41 GMT -5
You know... I'm ok with this. That is what I learned today.
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Post by Jae on Nov 29, 2014 21:08:24 GMT -5
so you're saying I should actually be offended when my friends say "Jae is bae"
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Post by Coaster on Dec 20, 2014 13:54:48 GMT -5
Apparently, "toward" and "towards" are 100% interchangeable with each other.
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Post by Coaster on Jan 5, 2015 19:36:33 GMT -5
The concept of "hygge". (Look it up. <_<)
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Post by Coaster on Feb 22, 2015 4:13:45 GMT -5
The name of the old professor dad guy in Disney's Tarzan is Archimedes Q. Porter. (He says it outright, but it's super easy to miss in the movie.)
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Post by Breakingchains on May 2, 2015 15:53:34 GMT -5
There are oil-cooled computers that actually run with most of the major components submerged in mineral oil. Submerged. Like fishtank submerged. You can't stick hard drives in there, nor a couple other components, but apparently big chunks of computery goodness are perfectly happy with it. Mineral oil is non-conductive and running most of your machine dunked continuously in a lubricant increases efficiency.
...Which makes perfect sense when you think about it, and yet for me there's still the AHHHHHG NO NO NO effect of seeing a computer immersed in any kind of liquid. xD
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Post by Coaster on Mar 15, 2021 0:10:22 GMT -5
Necro-reviving this thread since it's wholesome and positive, it seems to be the longest thread of its kind on the forum, and I learned (or remembered?) that this darn thing has a Wikipedia page with a title that seems dubious and yet makes all too much sense. en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cool_S
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Post by downrightdude on Mar 19, 2021 0:11:07 GMT -5
Apparently Neopets got rid of the color-swapping Random events!
I never knew this!
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