Zagorath

An interesting theory, but there are good reasons to doubt the claim, including the fact that woolly sheep are a recent product of human breeding, and that wild sheep are not even native to the same areas blackberries grow.

Turns out they basically did the marshmallow test. So we’re talking toddlers.

Alpha being the elements up to iron?

In astronomy, nearly everything is hydrogen or helium. Like, over 98% of all matter is H or He. So it’s very useful to be able to talk about H, He, and “everything else”. They call that everything else “metals”.

That sounds interesting. Do you recall the name?

It’s not quite the same thing (particularly because of the motivation), but, uhh…I suggest you read about Abu Simbel, if you haven’t already.

Might be interesting, but I’m not taking conspiracy theories (to be clear: this is a conspiracy theory. Even if it’s true, it’s a theory about a conspiracy.) from the Nazi blogging website seriously.

What, like this?

Oireland (pronounced that way)

Is that meant to be making fun of Trump’s accent? Cos I gotta be honest, it comes across to me more like a representation of how Irish people pronounce Ireland. At least, the way I pronounce “oireland” when I see it sounds to my ear much closer to how Irish people say Ireland than to how I say it.

They already have radio and a fairly sophisticated local network. They could definitely do that if they wanted.

Wait, you can donate plasma two times in one week where you are? That feels kinda insane.

In Australia it’s 12 weeks for whole blood and 2 weeks for plasma. Or 4 weeks for switching from whole blood to plasma.

I like their company. Just wish their product wasn’t all these bizarre unappealing flavours.

Are you illiterate?

It’s a common practice in Northern VA for churches to hold worship services in schools on the weekends

For free? I’m aware of church organisations hiring out school halls here in Australia, but they’re hiring them, for the same rate that a sports club or other hobby group would.

AI has been and continues to be used for these sorts of things. Generative AI like LLMs and image generators might be getting all the media attention and attract the techbros at the moment, but they are fundamentally inappropriate for this purpose, but other AI machine learning models are making advancements all the time.

Holy shit it’s that high? Red-green colourblindness is almost as common in men as left-handedness is?

For me, it was this video. It came out shortly after I graduated high school, and though I was pretty good at maths, I struggled to really conceptualise the fundamental intuition behind trigonometric functions and the (polar) complex plane. Instead, I was relying on brute memorisation of the unit triangles. Learning about tau and how it relates just instantly caused everything to click with me.

2 pi is tau, which is what I said it’s less than 0.1 away from, but still not equal to.

What’s the significance of that number? It’s less than 0.1 away from tau, but somehow I doubt that’s it…

The dirty little secret is…there is no “true markdown”. There are multiple different implementations of markdown that have been created by different people at different times, all vaguely based on the original not-very-robust definition created by John Gruber with assistance from Aaron Swartz in 2005. But their definition never mentioned superscript at all.

Because of how unrobust it is, in 2014, some people got together to define a robust specification and called it CommonMark. But again, this does not mention superscript.

The closest you’ll find to an “official” specification for the extra bits of markdown that aren’t in the CommonMark spec is probably here. But this is really more attempting to describe extended markdown as it is used on the web at large already. In addition to super- and sub-script, it also deals with tables (which work the same way Reddit does them) and fenced code blocks (the triple backtick method, which Reddit does not support—instead supporting only code blocks via four spaces). Though both fenced and indented code blocks are actually in the CommonMark spec.

Reddit, obviously, is one site that famously implements markdown, and has done for a very long time. On Reddit, superscript is done with a caret before the superscript text, and whitespace after it. Unless you use brackets, in which case the superscript lasts until the closing bracket. e.g. normal^superscript text would make “superscript” superscript, but nothing else. But normal ^(superscript text) would make “superscript text” superscript. But then there’s a second caveat, which is that Reddit supports double (and triple, etc.) superscript. But in these cases, brackets do not work. They unintuitively completely break things.

Lemmy also uses markdown. The Lemmy specification for how to use markdown is located here. You’ll note that it supports both superscript and subscript, which Reddit does not. It does both of these according to the method explained in the “markdown guide”. Though there are a few issues with inconsistent parsing of the markdown on lemmy-ui (the default web front-end) and some apps (including Jerboa, the 1st-party app).

The big advantage of the markdown guide method is that it is most similar to how other markdown works. You don’t implicitly close italics on a word with just one asterisk; you need two asterisks—one to open italics, one to close them. Likewise, bold with double asterisks. By using a character to both open and close your super/sub-script, you are making a much clearer and more deliberate intention about what you want, and allowing people to learn things more intuitively, because it all works the same way as each other.