jadero

Or how to stay the hell out of blind spots. When I rode, I was constantly amazed by the numbers of fellow riders who didn’t understand that in order to be seen, you have to start by not hiding.

I cannot know your experience and won’t pretend to.

Unless your objective is to be even more disliked and disrespected than you are now, being deliberately annoying will not get you far.

If you just want respect as a thinking, feeling human, you’re going to have to be respectful of other thinking, feeling humans, ignoring and blocking those who are too immature to have respect for others.

There are people out there who think that power is the source of respect. They are, of course, wrong. The only path to respect is through the elimination of power structures, so that respect can be mutually sought through understanding, not obedience.

I don’t like assholes, so I don’t seek them out. I try to give the assholes who engage with me the respectful engagement they crave but don’t deserve, then block the ones who stay assholes. If I feel surrounded by assholes, I disengage completely until I’ve figured out whether I’m actually the asshole or I’ve stumbled into a snakepit. (And everybody is sometimes an asshole. The secret is to not make it part of your identity or to assume that it’s part of theirs.)

Life is so much more pleasant when disagreements are respectful engagements with learning opportunities instead of just screaming matches.

Good luck on your journey.

Yes, it was very badly constructed. I had to read it a couple of times to decode it, and I have the advantage of having graded essays :)

That would have been awesome, but I suspect that it was just the arms and that it was powered in some way, hence “pendulum-like”.

Gauges measured stress on the metacarpals during punches and slaps on padded-dumbbell targets created with a pendulum-like device.

I take “a pendulum-like device” to mean they suspended either the arms or the targets and swung them to a collision.

Gauges measured stress on the metacarpals during punches and slaps on padded-dumbbell targets created with a pendulum-like device.

I take “a pendulum-like device” to mean they suspended either the arms or the targets and swung them to a collision.

Oh that’s not good. Obviously, I’ve chosen to allow js, but basic stuff should work without it.

Heh. I gave up trying to figure out voting a long time ago. I find it both fascinating and disturbing that there are people out there who see anything I write as worthy of a dowvote. :)

Anyone who hasn’t followed that link needs to do so now! It’s got human cadaver arms manipulated with fishing line and guitar tuning knobs. It’s got a link to an article titled “Your Face: Punching Bag or Spandrel?”

You can’t possibly find a better way to spend 10 minutes!

I try to figure out what it means from a combination of context and etymological guesswork, then check it a dictionary. If it’s a person or region or concept I’m unfamiliar with that isn’t covered directly or in notes, I hit the encyclopedia or atlas (well, Wikipedia and mapping software, these days.)

That’s how my father taught me to deal with stuff I didn’t understand when I was a kid and I’ve been doing that ever since. It interrupts the flow far less than having to set it aside for other demands on my time, so it’s not that big a deal.

We always had good dictionaries and encyclopedias on hand. Now, of course, it’s all online or downloadable.

One of the reasons I love eReaders is direct access to dictionary, translations, and Wikipedia.

Tell me again why it’s okay to publish this tripe. It’s no wonder that so many women think men are pigs.

Same with my dad. He said that the military liked red/green colour blindness for spotting camouflaged stuff.

Canadian here, with 50 years in the workforce. I’ve never once been paid semi-weekly or bimonthly. Here, biweekly is every two weeks semi-monthly is every half month. Obviously, that latter is often spoken of as twice a month, which just adds to the confusion between “bi” and “semi”.

The reality is that these words, like most words (at least in English), mean whatever the speaker wants them to mean and consensus can be hard to reach.

I give you the phrase “table the discussion”. Sometimes it means to formally bring something up for discussion. Other times it means setting the discussion aside for future consideration.

Or, my favourite from my childhood, “fat chance” which means that something is even less likely than if it had a slim chance. Granted, that might be more in the line of idiomatic slang, but it stands as part of at least the era’s Canadian English that did have broad consensus and still does, I think.

“Semi truck” is not half a truck, but a truck designed to carry one half the weight of the cargo it is hauling. A semi trailer is one designed to have half of its load (by weight) carried by the tow vehicle. A standard trailer gets difficult and possibly dangerous to tow if the weight carried by the tow vehicle (hitch weight) strays too far outside the 8%-12% range.

And just to add to the confusion, Dodge popularized something called the “hemi engine”–an engine with a “hemi head”, not half an engine. And “hemi head” refers not to “1/2 an engine head” but to the approximately hemispherical (1/2 sphere) shape of the combustion chambers cast/machined into the engine head.

Language is a wonderful chaos. You’re just on the leading edge of change! :)

Are you sure about that? I’m from Canada and distinctly remember the travel ads urging us to head on down to participate in the bicentennial celebrations, meant to celebrate the second century of that country’s founding.

I was taught that the “bi” prefix was a multiplier and “semi” was a divider.

That meant biweekly, bimonthly, biannually were every 2 weeks, months, years and semi-weekly, semi-monthly, semi-annually were every half a week, half a month, and half a year.

Then the real world intruded and I’ve been confused ever since. About the only time I hear “semi” and “bi” used on a regular basis the way I expect is with pay periods. Biweekly is every two weeks and semi-monthly is twice a month.

Canada, by the way.

PS: I suppose bisexual and semi trailers also fit my expectations.

And plants.

There were (and are) natural radio waves from things like stars and even something known as the Cosmic Microwave Background, the product of the Big Bang that created the universe.

However, they are not like rivers that we exploit for transportation, irrigation, and energy production. Instead, we have to generate our own radio waves to serve our specific needs.

In this sense, I find it useful to think of something like a lake. There are natural waves created by the wind, but I find it difficult how to imagine we would exploit those waves for communications because there is too much randomness built in and we have no control over the wind itself. On the other hand, it’s relatively easy to imagine how we might create our own waves in patterns that can carry information.

An interesting thing about generating water waves to communicate is that it would be extremely difficult to make it work in practice. The waves degrade quite quickly over distance, so would need periodic repetition and amplification. Natural waves would mess up and possibly overwhelm our nice patterns. Other people trying to use the same body of water at the same time would be creating waves that would mess up and maybe even overwhelm our nice patterns. To get radio communications to work, people have to figure out how to deal with analogous problems with signal degradation and interference.

I don’t know about farms, but I remember having weekly passenger service between Eston and Saskatoon, with stops at Plato, Greenan, Wartime, Elrose, Dinsmore, etc. Technically, they were mixed trains, hauling grain and mixed freight, along with a passenger car.

On arrival in Saskatoon, we could switch to a major passenger train to cross the country or catch a rail liner (self powered passenger car) either North to Prince Albert or South to Regina, with stops at every village along the way. At those terminals, you could then catch trains to Nipawin or Meadow Lake or to other parts of the country.

I’m not sure that a pure passenger service is feasible, but most of the destinations I listed still have sidings in use for grain and oil, so adding a passenger car to create a mixed train might work.