She notes, “I know phase changes, and expect someone else will immediately understand the bouba and kiki part, but I do not.”
Not sure “immediately” is the operative term, but it did sound vaguely familiar; Google finds https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bouba/kiki_effect, now alles klar. Even more interesting is searching “kiki bouba english”, which reveals that it’s not just an English phenomenon, although it does vary somewhat.
Oh, and hovertext is:
Even when you try to make nice, smooth ice cubes in a freezer, sometimes one of them will shoot out a random ice spike, which physicists ascribe to kiki conservation.
Radio has certain requirements. Sports announcing, too. Dead air is the enemy. Some of the most painful examples to me are long bicycle races (4+ hours) that end in a sprint stage. So until the last kilometer, not much is going on if there’s no breakaway. But 4 hours must be filled with announcing, regardless. Particularly painful if there’s only one announcer, not two.
A quick look around my dwelling shows 6 books that I’m partway through but intend to finish, a couple of which I haven’t make any progress on in at least a year. (Not counting ones I don’t intend to finish, or haven’t started.) Should I invoke a statute of limitations on these 6?
This cartoon by John Jonik was first published in the New Yorker exactly 41 years ago today, but I discovered it too late to add it to the Thanksgiving collection for 2023.
… The headline above is modeled after a quote by Sepp Herberger, coach of the German national football soccer team: “After the game is always before the [next] game.” Of course, discussing football (of either variety) can sometimes be even more explosive than discussing politics.
Mark H. submitted this XKCD (#2858) last year; although it did get embedded in comments (such as in the No-Politics Zone), it’s still worth a repeat in a post:
… P.S. The “mouseover” or “title” text reads: “An occasional source of mild Thanksgiving tension in my family is that my mother is a die-hard fan of The Core (2003), and various family members sometimes have differing levels of enthusiasm for her annual tradition of watching it.“
P.P.S. The link to the HuffPost article in the second panel still works (I already typed it in, so that you don’t have to).
… In Germany, it’s called “Erntedankfest” (literally: “harvest thanks festival”), and is celebrated on the first Sunday in October, but it is primarily an event for the liturgical calendar (both Catholic and Protestant), and is not (generally) celebrated by families at home.
… Several decades ago, my grandmother just happened to include a leftover bowl of (homemade) mac&cheese on the Thanksgiving dinner table, which resulted in some amused needling from my dad and uncle. However, both my sister and my aunt vigorously defended it, so that for many years thereafter, (fresh) mac&cheese became a standard component of my grandmother’s Thanksgiving menu.
… The final panel reminded me of the last scene in the song “Christmas Wrapping” by the Waitresses.
No cranberries? Frank and Ernest have suggestions:
This is close to a CIDU, as there doesn’t seem to be a single best / obvious answer to the question.
Tim Harrod sends this in: “Whether you laugh or not, Jim Davis is historically reliable at coming up with a punchline. But here, the joke is apparently that the eggs are really spicy… and a lot of people ordered them. It could have been a scheme to sell a lot of milk, but then Irma should have more of a sly grin in the last panel.”
The gag seems straightforward, but Tim’s right: she should have a sly, knowing grin on her face.
Continuing the metaphor: orange traffic cones are like the Legos strewn around the floor for the enjoyment of our feet. Potholes are teenage acne. Tickets are tuition bills.
A little cross-strip banter –
Hey, I don’t care that it’s been debunked, we can still have jokes based on it!
Alt text: Sorry to make you memorize this random set of digits. If it helps, it can also double as a mnemonic for remembering your young relatives’ birthdays, if they happen to have been born on February 5, 2018.
In case anyone was in doubt, there really is a very popular periodical called Wine Spectator.
Pi Day (March 14, or 3/14) gets a lot of play in the U.S., but doesn’t work in other countries that write dates as DD/MM/YYYY, so it becomes 14/3. An alternative in those areas is e day, after the base of natural logarithms, e, (2.71) on 27 January. So, we’re going to avoid the Pi Day rush and post some math cartoons today.
Like pi,e shows up in a variety of places in mathematics, and is associated with some of the greats in mathematical development. From Wikipedia:
“The number e is sometimes called Euler’s number …—after the Swiss mathematician Leonhard Euler —or Napier’s constant—after John Napier. The constant was discovered by the Swiss mathematician Jacob Bernoulli while studying compound interest.”
Some fuzzy math from websites. The first is from Kiva.org.
This one is from MyVirtualMission.com, a site where you can virtually pretend to climb Everest or complete the Camino de Santiago as you run/walk/bike around your neighborhood. Somehow, their counter of missions (trips) has gone awry. Or maybe I did one backwards?
Comics I Don't Understand 