gobble_ghoul [he/him]

Just a little quibble with your point about Tibetan writing - a better comparison would be Modern English written as it was during the Old English period. So like “lord” might be written as “hlafweard”, for example, because it is a direct descendent of that word put through hundreds of years of pronunciation change. English doesn’t come from Latin and “finally” doesn’t come from “ad ultimum”, whereas Tibetan does come from Old Tibetan, the language the script was originally fairly adequately adapted to.

Feel free to cite your source. If you’re thinking of the idea that chickens may have more conservative genomes than most other birds, then I get where you’re coming from, but we don’t actually know what T. rex’s genome looked like to be able to compare them. It’s entirely possible that the T. rex genome would have changed in a lot of places where the chicken genome is relatively conservative, making chickens no more similar to T. rex genetically than any other bird is. That aside, all birds evolved from the same node on the cladogram, which was already pretty far removed from tyrannosaurs at that point. Saying chickens are more closely to T. rex than other birds are would be like me saying I’m more closely related to my great uncle (whose DNA we do not have) than my biological sibling is because I have 25.01% of his brother’s - my grandpa’s - DNA and my sibling only has 25%. It’s not provable because we will never recover the DNA to know the overlap. Even if we could prove that, it would only demonstrate that we are more related in a very strict genetic sense and ignore that we are exactly as related in terms of shared common descent.

Abraham was from modern Turkey.

They’re wrong lol.

That’s not how it works. All birds share a common ancestor that was a cousin to it, so they’re all equally related to it in terms of when they split off. For chickens to be more closely related to T. rex, they would have to share a more recent common ancestor with it than they do with other birds. That would also make T. rex a bird if you still wanted to count chickens as birds.

It’s decent for a few hours of fun. Not super long and I wish that they had worked in a lot more interesting environmental and Pokemon interactions for the player to trigger, but I enjoyed it. Hopefully we don’t have to wait 20 years for the next one and hopefully it’s more ambitious if and when it does come out.

The snake and lizard branch is wrong. I care very much about the accuracy of memes, and I have to point out that many lizards are more closely related to snakes than they are to other lizards.

stupid asshole

It’s actually so he can listen to show tunes.

There are multiple different concepts for defining species. The long and short of it is that species are not a fact of nature but a useful construct for us to be able to describe it.

Some other factors that are used to distinguish species:

• • The organisms are biologically capable of reproducing, but their genitals are incompatible and prevent it from happening outside of a lab setting.
• • A behavioral difference prevents individuals from different groups from reproducing. For example, several bat species have recently been redefined as multiple species by scientists because they’ve found that they communicate at different frequencies and they aren’t always even capable of hearing the other group’s communication. So even though they can interbreed, they don’t.
• • Geographical separation combined with physical and/or behavioral differences. If two groups never interbreed and you can consistently distinguish them from each other, it might be worth considering them separate species. This comes into play a bit more when it comes to conservation efforts because there is incentive in labeling a unique population as its own species, in order to make it more apparent that the group is endangered even if it is technically capable of breeding with another group that isn’t endangered.
• • Two groups are capable of interbreeding, but have enough differences that hybrids between them are less fit and tend to die before reproducing even if they are fertile. If you have a population of lizards that is good at swimming but bad at climbing and a closely related population that is good at climbing but bad at swimming, their offspring might just be bad at both and struggle to get food. Even if they regularly reproduce with each other, the genetic impact of that on either group is negligible because only the non-hybrids are making babies.
• • Morphological differences. If two things just look really different, we can call them different species. This is especially true for organisms that don’t reproduce sexually and for fossil species. There’s no way to test if a Tyrannosaurus could have a baby with a Velociraptor, but odds are it couldn’t. Truthfully it gets even more complicated with fossil organisms and can sometimes come down to scientists saying “the ankle bone developed a little knob around 76 million years ago and 10 million years is a long time to be considering these fossils all of the same species, so we are going to use that ankle bone knob as a marker of a new species distinct from the species without the knob that came before it”.

Conlanging is great for this because you can make and abandon basic sketches of languages forever.

I think that people will look back on Elon Musk as an utter charlatan and a disaster, and hopefully it will provide people with insight into how the US economy actually functions, and to me that’s a pretty exciting prospect.

Actually Star Trek said he’s still beloved

Works either way for people with non-rhotic accents!

Even with the phonemes of any two given language varieties that are considered to be “the same sound”, there are going to be differences in what the average pronunciation is, so I assume that’s a lot of what’s going on here. The other thing is that English and Chinese have a lot of phonemes that barely or don’t at all overlap in possible pronunciations, so the algorithm is picking the closest match.

It’s absolutely a fair criticism. People get mad because the games were themed around expanding the ocean and expanding the land and see it as justified that it had an equal amount of water and land routes. That thematically makes sense, but they did nothing to make the water routes as interesting as the land routes or to compensate for the fact that types weak to water got hosed for half the game. They should have varied the scenery on water routes, had aquatic Pokemon that weren’t water type, and made the encounter tables as varied as they were on land.

Can I kill one person 8 billion times instead?

In what shows were those remarks made? I don’t remember that but I haven’t seen everything or rewatched most of the ones I have seen.

Is that true tho, or is it more that the writers of the various films had to keep the shows rolling out rather than really explore the ramifications of what happened? I haven’t watched the TV series, but the movies after barely touch in the fact that half of the universe went missing in an instant. That sort of premise cannot behind by a perpetual slop machine.

That’s fair. I’m in favor of being more explicit about it being a stupid idea.

I don’t think his plan is meant to be logical. All the other characters say he’s insane and he’s literally referred to as “the mad titan”. He’s just brain broke. It’s not like fascism in our world is particularly reasonable either.