Persistent, Niggling Questions

[mudshark]

'Cause "Tru-ki-zo" (name of local mid-19th-century Paiute chief) would cause even more trouble and "Tro-kay!" just means "Hello!"

[LtFielding]

No, I mean Trekkie.

[Nate the Great]

I'd pontificate about the stupidity of rigidly adhering to Trek canon circa late '70s, but since I'm rigidly adhering to Trek canon circa late '90s (no ENT or Nemesis for me, thank you), I don't have an apple box to stand on.

[mudshark]

Originally Posted by LtFielding

No, I mean Trekkie.

Oh. Maybe when Trek does a "trapped in frozen wasteland and eating our redshirts" story?

[Nate the Great]

Why do so many guys insist on using the word "journal," dismissing "diaries" as sissy books that only girls write in?

How come the word "gal" never took off as much as "guy" did?

Ditto for "dudette."

Must cough syrup have that awful metallic taste?

Will we ever have a true unification of all of the nations of the world into a single political infrastructure?

[PointyHairedJedi]

Originally Posted by Nate the Great

Will we ever have a true unification of all of the nations of the world into a single political infrastructure?

Yes. Oh my, yes.


MUWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH!

[Nate the Great]

Oh, I can see the posters now: "PointyHairedJedi for Dictator of the Earth!" You might have to stand in line behind Dogbert, though.

[Chancellor Valium]

Originally Posted by PointyHairedJedi

Yes. Oh my, yes.


MUWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH!

Provided the power-brokering-deal with the Illuminati goes through. The J's may not be too happy about it, though.

[Nate the Great]

Do people really have nothing to post about? No links, no PNQs, nothing? I thought that these two threads could sort of be perpetually active, if only so you could say "I checked out that link, it was nice!" or "I've thought about that, too!"

[NAHTMMM]

Why do we open cans, bottles, toothpaste tubes, etc. by turning counter-clockwise but increase the volume on a radio by turning the knob clockwise?

Seems a bit inconsistent to me.

[whoiam]

I think because with a clockwise groove on the bottle lids, twisting clockwise increases the tightness, therefore it's an anticlockwise turn to remove it...

Which does kinda make sense if you associate taking the lids off with turning the volume off...

[mudshark]

Originally Posted by NAHTMMM

Why do we open cans, bottles, toothpaste tubes, etc. by turning counter-clockwise but increase the volume on a radio by turning the knob clockwise?

Seems a bit inconsistent to me.

I think that's two separate things, really. Twist caps and such open with a counter-clockwise (or anti-clockwise, if you like) twist because someone (Archimedes, maybe) decided that a right-handed thread was The Way We Will Do Things (unless it really, really had to be left-handed.)

Volume knobs and other potentiometer-type controls work more in the reading-left-to-right sense -- Left = Lo/Min ---> Right = Hi/Max -- even though a rotary motion is used, it's a linear function.



Nigel Tufnel: [pause] These go to eleven.

[Nate the Great]

Do they say anticlockwise in Canada? Putting aside my Americentrism, it seems to me that "counterclockwise" is just plain easier to say. Less mouth movement and all that.

[Nate the Great]

I'd create a new thread for this, but I'm not really sure it's worth it. I have no idea how many TVTropes fans we have here in the forums, but a major event just happened over there. I'll let the newspost explain it, but technical difficulties have deleted a huge chunk of the site. I'd help with the effort (I LOVE the site), but as I've established several times, my webpage authoring skills stink.

In any event, the PNQ is this: how come webpages today aren't automatically backed up? As in, if the page is modified a certain number of times in a day, a backup point is automatically generated that the administrator can access. Even keep a few backups: last change, a day ago, a month ago.

[whoiam]

I could type out a nice, long, disjointed rant on this point, but essentially it comes down to: "Most hosting packages and prebuilt servers come with weedy little allocations of disk space and/or restrictions on permanent scripts or data transfer, which, together, make regular/multiple backups unfeasable for any site not backed by a decent amount of money"

[Nate the Great]

So how come the Wayback Machine can keep track of this stuff?

To change direction...

If there was one set of homonyms that you could just snap your fingers and POOF they'd be represented by different words? Its and it's? Their and there? Heck, "bank" is a financial institution, an array of terminals, the area of land on one side of a body of water, etc.

Would it be neat or worthwhile if the tropics could get one decent snowfall a year, with the northern latitudes getting one decent hot summer day a year in return (a la The Year Without A Santa Claus)?

Would it be easier to get ten random people to agree on pizza toppings or ice cream sundaes?

Okay, this is a BIG one: how come we can't get pronounciation guides (whether print or online) that actually consists of letters and phrases that we can understand? To whit: I go to the page for Wikipedia itself and see:
"Wikipedia (IPA: /ˌwɪkɨˈpiːdiə/, /ˌwiːkiˈpiːdiə/, /ˌwɪkiˈpiːdiə/ or /ˌwiːkiˈpeɪdiə/)"
Putting aside the fact that a site shouldn't have four official pronounciations for its own name, what does "wɪkɨˈpiːdiə" sound like? I don't know. What's wrong with phonetic pronounciation guides? "wih-kee-pee-dee-ah." You can pronounce that, right? Oh, I'm sure Professor Henry Higgins knows exactly what each symbol means, but I don't have a clue.

[whoiam]

[long, long, long rant] -I used greater and lesser than, and it thought it was a tag...

Pass

HELL YES. I've been waiting to see a summer's day that didn't have rainclouds in it since my last holiday to America.

Ice-cream, probably. Last I checked pizzas tended to get shared between more people, so more people have to agree on one set of toppings... (Unless this is the 10-person version of each, in which case, probably still pizza.)

As for the wikipedia pronounceation guide, I think it's part of their not-so-secret conspiracy to keep control of the wikipedia in the hands of 14-year-olds with too much time on their hands.

As for in general, beats me. Maybe the guide authors are afraid they'll be considered the idiots of the pronunciation-guide industry if they don't use at least three defunct symbols per every 2 syllables...

[Nate the Great]

At least you Canadians get pleasantly warm (not boiling) summers to correspond with frigid winters, right?

You're right, ice cream and pizza are bad to compare. How about ice cream and coffee? Even though I don't drink coffee, I can see all of the options available...

Joe Fox (Tom Hanks, You've Got Mail): The whole purpose of places like Starbucks is for people with no decision-making ability whatsoever to make six decisions just to buy one cup of coffee. Short, tall, light, dark, caf, decaf, low-fat, non-fat, etc. So people who don't know what the hell they're doing or who on earth they are, can, for only $2.95, get not just a cup of coffee but an absolutely defining sense of self.

[whoiam]

I'm not a Canadian, I'm English. And in England. And it's raining. Again.

I'm with you on the Coffee. Where'd I leave that Anti-Starbucks Revolutionary Army recruitment poster?

[Nate the Great]

I use Canada as a convenient catch-all for 5M.net forumgoers on the assumption that if I don't know otherwise, Canada is a safer bet than anything else.