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Cake day: August 2nd, 2023

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  • Western Europe used to be much more of a dialect continuum. Every village had their own dialect, and you could understand everyone around you.

    But if you went from Castile to Paris, you’d go from hearing Spanish to hearing French. It’s just that between them, you had dozens of intermediate languages/dialects that transitioned very smoothly. It’s not like today where if you cross a border people go from speaking French to speaking Spanish.

    A large part of the nation-building project in Western Europe was to force everyone in the country to learn and use some standard dialect. So very few people now speak Occitan, Picard, Burgundian, etc., and instead speak standard French.





  • Pipoca@lemmy.worldtoScience Memes@mander.xyzPlant Natives
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    8 months ago

    Grass really, really depends on location and climate. I literally never water or fertilize my lawn; it looks fine.

    The worse thing here is ecological. I keep my mower set to 4", and keep my lawn a bit longer than my neighbors. I see a ton of fire flies in my yard in the summer, and see a fraction as many in my neighbors yard.

    Short lawns are terrible habitat, which makes them good for sports or a children’s play area. But 80% of my neighbor’s lawn is just aesthetic, which is something I really don’t get. Lawns are about as visually exciting as a beige wall. They’re a waste of space.




  • There’s a story in the Talmud about Hillel the elder, a rabbi who died in 10 CE:

    There was another incident involving one gentile who came before Shammai and said to Shammai: Convert me on condition that you teach me the entire Torah while I am standing on one foot. Shammai pushed him away with the builder’s cubit in his hand. This was a common measuring stick and Shammai was a builder by trade. The same gentile came before Hillel. He converted him and said to him: That which is hateful to you do not do to another; that is the entire Torah, and the rest is its interpretation. Go study.



  • The last three third party candidates who won more than one state were Strom Thurmond, George Wallace and Theodore Roosevelt.

    The first two won the south on account of regional anger at the civil rights movement.

    Roosevelt split the vote. 50.6% of the country voted for the Republican candidate or a former Republican, but the Democrat won a landslide with only 41% of the popular vote and 81% of the electoral college vote.

    The closest a third party candidate has ever come to winning is Breckenridge, who got 18% of the popular vote and 23.8% of the EC vote running as a Southern Democrat because the south didn’t like Stephen Douglas (who got 29.5% of the popular vote but only won a single state).

    Voting third party basically doesn’t work. Any time its been significant, it’s just caused a spoiler effect.


  • Dinosaurs are currently defined as anything that descends from the most recent common ancestor of triceratops and the pigeon.

    Which, as others pointed out is mostly due to dinosaurs being originally defined before we found the first pterodactyl.

    If you want to refer to dinosaurs and pterodactyls, you could use avemetatarsalians (anything more closely related to birds than crocs) or ornithodirans (dinosaurs + pterosauromorphs).

    Also fun is that there’s a number of crocodillians that look suspiciously dinosaur- like, like Shuvosaurus. Convergent evolution is wild.