Skua
@Skua@kbin.social
- Comment on Spain, Ireland poised to back Palestinian state 5 months ago:
Spain is a particularly interesting one. They're not normally too keen on recognising any sort of breakaway region so as not to legitimise the Catalan independence movement. Take a look at a map of recognition of Kosovo for an example. Not that I'm complaining by any means; it's a welcome surprise
- Comment on World’s largest compressed air energy storage project comes online in China 5 months ago:
Round trip efficiency of modern pumped storage hydro is about 80%. How is that horrible if 72% is decent?
- Comment on Do you hate it? 6 months ago:
Painting by Jennifer Dunn
- Comment on this picture is 27kb 6 months ago:
we clearly haven't brexited hard enough yet
- Comment on Boring ass planet 6 months ago:
To add to this, we apparently always knew. The famous blue image is more or less the correct hue, but the saturation has been absolutely blown out like a clickbait youtube thumbnail in order to show faint features more clearly. Somewhere along the line we stopped mentioning that that had been done. Irwin and co just just re-calculated it to get the most accurate version yet, because we've got a lot more data to work with now than we did back when Voyager 2 did its fly-by
- Comment on Gas stoves increase nitrogen dioxide exposure above WHO standards – study 6 months ago:
Having used all three types a fair bit, holy shit yes a good induction hob is leagues above the old electric coil ones
- Comment on [Serious] Any high-quality right-wing media, books, explainers? 6 months ago:
Fair enough. The whip is a reasonable point to bring up, though I would suggest that if it bothered him that much he wouldn't have stayed in the party for ten years. After all, he had switched parties beforehand. I get where you're coming from though.
- Comment on [Serious] Any high-quality right-wing media, books, explainers? 6 months ago:
I'm not sure that makes him not right wing, surely that just means he wasn't the kind of right wing that succeeded in the political landscape of the UK in the past 20ish years? His voting record is generally in favour of less regulation (outside of a few issues), lower taxes, military intervention, isolation from the EU. He's pro-environmentalist, but that hasn't always been an exclusively left-wing thing. Similarly, anarchists and Marxist-Leninists are both left wing, even if they wouldn't necessarily get along well in a single political party together
- Comment on [Serious] Any high-quality right-wing media, books, explainers? 6 months ago:
I will have to preface this with the fact that I have not read any of his books, but former British politician Rory Stewart is one of the people that comes to my mind when reading your description. I don't think that he comes to the right policy positions, of course, but whenever I listen to him he does seem to at least have a degree of empathy for all people. He seems to at least generally see the problem even if I think that his solution wouldn't work. He has an effective way with words in interviews and his writing is generally very well reviewed too.
- Comment on ‘They Are Just Pissed Off’: Scott Galloway Warns Young People Are ‘Opting Out of America’ As Older Generations Failed Them 6 months ago:
It's not one or the other. You can do both. The French do. Vote for whatever the least bad realistic option is at the election, and then you have years of time to do the other stuff
- Comment on How to Escape From the Iron Age? 6 months ago:
The hybrit process that some Swedish steelmakers (including SSAB - not a typo, it isn't Saab) are using looks promising. They've been testing it with Volvo and are apparently making it part of Volvo's regular process in 2026
- Comment on In movies a strong woman is manly. (big muscles, aggressive, punches people, etc.) Is that really the way it is? 7 months ago:
I'm not sure about that characterisation of Ripley in Alien. She doesn't survive by fist-fighting the xenomorph, she's not Arnie in Predator. She's just determined and resourceful.
- Comment on If Hitler was captured, what would have been his punishment in the Nuremberg Trials? 7 months ago:
Scaphism, although the historicity of it is questionable
- Comment on Satellite images reveal China built a replica of Taipei’s presidential district in remote Inner Mongolia, fuelling speculation that Beijing uses the site as training ground for an invasion of Taiwan 7 months ago:
Don't be ridiculous
It's just really close to the sun
- Comment on The existence of Sloths implies the existence Wraths, Lusts, Gluttonies, Prides, Envies, and Greeds. 8 months ago:
If cats are any sin, it is pride without a doubt. Hell a specific kind of big cat is already called a pride when they're in a group
- Comment on You ain't stabbing anyone with this shit 8 months ago:
The paper's introduction actually does explain it:
In his book, Shadows in the Sun, Davis (1998: 20) recounts what is now arguably one of the most popular ethnographic accounts of all time:
“There is a well known account of an old Inuit man who refused to move into a settlement. Over the objections of his family, he made plans to stay on the ice. To stop him, they took away all of his tools. So in the midst of a winter gale, he stepped out of their igloo, defecated, and honed the feces into a frozen blade, which he sharpened with a spray of saliva. With the knife he killed a dog. Using its rib cage as a sled and its hide to harness another dog, he disappeared into the darkness.”There's also the story of Danish explorer Peter Freuchen, who claims to have used his own frozen shit to make a chisel to dig himself out of some ice. The paper takes the time to say that it is strictly about knives, though, not chisels
- Comment on Britain’s Social Security has banned its staff from using ChatGPT—but it’s okay with Microsoft Copilot 8 months ago:
They aren't trying to force "social security" on us, it's an article primarily aimed at an American audience using the term Americans will be familiar with in the headline. The article body calls it the Department for Work and Pensions
- Comment on English may be a hot mess but at least we don't have to worry about this nonsense 8 months ago:
Swahili and it's eighteen noun classes strides above it all like an eldritch god
- Comment on How do I brew this brick of tea? 8 months ago:
Let's be honest, taking other country's culinary traditions and doing them wrong is our culinary tradition
- Comment on Financial dispute leads to suspension of more than 100 .af websites 8 months ago:
Use the Australian football one neat.afl and hope that nobody notices the L that the Taliban have inflicted on the rest of us
- Comment on Why do some languages use gendered nouns? 8 months ago:
Your cat example works because it shows an example that is ambiguous in English but not in German. Zezhin's example was showing something that wasn't ambiguous in English, a language with no noun class distinctions, so there's no benefit to having noun classes in that example
- Comment on Why do some languages use gendered nouns? 8 months ago:
Pretty sure that OP is referring to noun class systems. English doesn't use one, but most other European languages do and English used to. Like German's three equivalents to English's "the": der, die, and das, which German changes depending on the noun class (gender) of the noun in question regardless of its actual gender or whether it even has one
- Comment on Why do some languages use gendered nouns? 8 months ago:
These bits of grammar don't always actually communicate any extra information about anything other than the grammar of the language you're speaking, though. The "gender" of the thing in question can't reliably be distinguished from grammar since even in the Indo-European languages where the noun classes are typically thought of as masculine or feminine, the word's grammatical gender can contradict its actual gender. The Old English word for "woman", back when English had grammatical gender, was masculine.
- Comment on Why do some languages use gendered nouns? 8 months ago:
While I don't actually know a goddamn thing about the history of this, that doesn't seem to work too well once you look at more languages. While a male/female or male/female/neuter system is common in Indo-European languages, other language groups use versions that have more distinctions and haven't traditionally been associated with gender. Most languages in the Atlantic-Congo group that a lot of the southern half of Africa speaks have between ten and twenty different categories of noun in that sense. That's why they're more formally called "noun classes" rather than "grammatical genders"
- Comment on Indeed it is. 8 months ago:
A narwhal
- Comment on What's going on with kbin.social? 8 months ago:
That's the default "kbin is down" message, I wouldn't put much stock in the specifics of it
- Comment on Microsoft Flight Simulator x Dune - Official Launch Trailer 9 months ago:
an Idaho
- Comment on Just 137 crypto miners use 2.3% of total U.S. power — government now requiring commercial miners to report energy consumption 9 months ago:
I have some bad news for you about the environmental effects of burning lots of oil
- Comment on Just 137 crypto miners use 2.3% of total U.S. power — government now requiring commercial miners to report energy consumption 9 months ago:
can always just pump up more oil out of the ground.
No, this is actually exactly the fucking problem
- Comment on Unnamed island 9 months ago: