Send me bad puns. Good puns welcome too.

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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 13th, 2024

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  • I.e. the volumes of gases under the ideal gas law scaled linearly with degrees celcius by about 1/273rd between 0-100C - which led to the prediction that the lowest possible temperature a gas could be was -273C (because that would be the point where it theoretically would have absolutely zero volume).

    No horse in this race, but this is cool as fuck. So that’s how the first tries at measuring absolute zero were made.


  • For either Mandarin or French to supplant English as the world’s most widely spoken language we would need not just a large and wealthy segment of the world that natively speaks it, but a mechanism that encourages people who know neither French nor Mandarin nor English to learn one of the former and not the latter.

    The latter usually follows from the former. Wealthy people buy things, sell things, create things and go to places, all of which requires those on the other end of the deal to be able to talk to them. China is also investing in its global image, and in a few decades they’ll be forced to import immigrants to make up the shortfall in their labor force.

    Similarly, Mandarin is the second language of a bunch of non-native speakers who live or work in China, most of which are presumably Chinese natives whose first language was a different dialect like Cantonese.

    Chinese is also gaining steam in Russia and Africa, though admittedly it’s probably going to be at least a generation before it becomes an actually popular language to learn.