monotremata

As a math nerd, this bothers me way more than it should. The reason we say "hundred" when we read a base-ten number that ends with two zeros is because that is the place value of the final non-zero digit--it is literally one hundred times the number you've already read aloud. But in the military time version, a) the hours are not hundreds of minutes, they're groups of sixty minutes, and b) it's groups of minutes, not hours, so the units also get messed up. If someone tells you it's currently 0 hours and you should meet again at 800 hours, logic would suggest they're asking you to go away for more than a month, but in fact they're saying 8 hours, despite the difference being apparently 800 hours.

I'm aware how pedantic this is, and I'm perfectly capable of understanding what they mean because I've heard it so often in movies and whatnot. But I swear these stupid games with units contribute to keeping us dumb.

Mitchell and Webb have a bit about this. Mitchell's character gets annoyed that Webb's character keeps talking about how "we beat you in the playoffs." He eventually asks "Hey, do you remember that time WE defeated the nazis and recovered the Ark of the Covenant? That's right, you see, I enjoyed watching the film Raiders of the Lost Ark, and so now I have decided that I was in it, and deserve credit for participation in the events of the story."

(Not exact quotes, I'm paraphrasing from memory)

"I've got" seems particularly strange to me because without the contraction Americans would still just say "I have." (There are some circumstances where they'll say "I have got" without a contraction, but it's mainly when they're drawing a contrast with what they "haven't got." E.g., "No, I don't have a baseball... oh, but I have got a lacrosse ball, will that work?")

I think the rule is probably closer to "you don't contract a stressed verb," but that's not terribly useful since there are so few rules about stress patterns. Verbs at the end of sentences are typically stressed, though, so you're right that ending with that kind of contraction is going to sound wrong to most people.

I think it might be more common in British English? Like "I've a fiver says he muffs the kick." Or "I've half a mind to go down there myself." (Curiously in American English this latter would probably still have the contraction but add a second auxiliary verb: "I've got half a mind to..." English is such a mess.)

The cutoff between GenX and Millennial is usually given as 1980, which means there are some 46-year-old GenXers. Sometimes 1978-1982 is described as a "microgeneration" called "Xennials," so if you're making that distinction, you'd still have 49-year-old Xers from 1977.

I think "ct" on this receipt is short for "count" rather than "cent."

Yeah. At least I managed to pick up a used 3070 a couple years ago. I'll just jolly along my old i7-7700k system for a few more years...

GPUs at least are actually not that expensive right now. Aside from the 5090, they're mostly close to MSRP, which is a pretty novel situation. I was waiting to upgrade my whole system for that, though, because my CPU would be a bottleneck at this point, and that's not really an option now because of the crazy RAM prices. The past few years have been super frustrating for PC builders.

I mean, it is also that OpenAI cornered the RAM market, which is a typical price gouging scenario; it's just weird that OpenAI wasn't trying to make money directly through the maneuver. It does seem like they wanted prices to rise, though, to increase the barrier to competition.

Huh, I was misinformed about that. Thanks!

Do we know it plays a role? I thought we basically just knew it was an associated biomarker. I kinda thought the research was leaning towards the underlying problem being some kind of issue that kept glial cells from clearing debris effectively, and that the amyloid plaques were mostly another consequence of that same cause, rather than a key mechanism in the chain that led to the dementia.

Note that it's not an RPG, though.