palordrolap

My parents recently got rid of a set of encyclopedias that they'd had in the house since at least the '90s. I don't actually remember where they came from or exactly when they were suddenly there, but recently they got rid of them (donated to charity) and I was a little offended - not that I said as much - that they didn't offer them to me.

They weren't even recent. They were printed in the early '50s, but in my parents' (still) no-Internet house, those encyclopedias were a good pastime.

There are usually several sets of the same available on eBay, but 1) the good sets are a bit out of my price range, 2) I have internet here and 3) I'm already hoarding far too much stuff.

Obligatory caution that that can backfire if the recipient insists that the debtor counts the pennies. Or if the creditor refuses the pennies entirely, which is legal in some jurisdictions. (e.g. in the UK, pennies and 2p coins are legal tender up to amounts of only 20 pence. Anything beyond that is left to the discretion of the recipient.)

Well, no, but in a sense, I kind of was. The ovum already existed and had for <mother's age at the time> years, but the exact sperm did not. I came along too much later for that to have been possible. But my DNA was all there. Just not assembled in the right order yet.

Alternatively, if you believe in reincarnation, I still might have been. I have at least one relative who was there who didn't make it to my birth. Maybe I'm one of them come back.

If that was a conscious choice, that may have been a mistake, but that's another story.

The site malfunctioned for me because of the NoScript browser extension, so for a second I thought I'd somehow become colour-blind.

Once I sorted that problem, it loaded the example images properly and they all look different to me, confirming that I'm not colour-blind.

You mean, right-click and save-as the images that are built into the site before uploading them somewhere else? That seems unnecessary. Anyone could grab those from the site themselves. Or use the site.

The site malfunctioned for me because of the NoScript browser extension, so for a second I thought I'd somehow become colour-blind.

Once I sorted that problem, it loaded the example images properly and they all look different to me, confirming that I'm not colour-blind.

Oh man, I was freaking out for a second after clicking one of the simulations and seeing no difference from the regular image. Then I thought to check whether NoScript had blocked scripts from the site. Yeah. So, it hadn't loaded the simulated image and I was seeing the original.

Look, if I'm wrong, I'm wrong, but you're not making a good case here. Brine is also known as salt water. Just how much of a stretch is that? Sea water is salt water. Sea water is also known as brine. Depending on which term we use, either the sea turns into milk or it doesn't. This is a problem.

But then this is all a hypothetical and maybe the real bend is how far we're both getting out of shape over this :p

OK, yeah, you can't control a third party's promises (or hallucinations), but the boss isn't going to fire someone from sales and/or marketing. They'll fire the developer for failing to deliver.

TBH, this is barely any different from marketing promising that a product will have a feature that the development team only find out about later purely by accident when upper management asks about it.

This. The modern mathematical symbols, at least in their current use, are no older than 550 years. Heck, the numerals we use are about as old as that. The Arabic world had a head start with early versions of those numerals, but even then, those are only twice as old as the oldest mathematical symbols still in use.

Prior to that, people wrote things out in words, or, as you suggest, invented their own symbologies and shorthands.

I have a book around here somewhere that shows how Diophantus wrote a particular polynomial equation and it's all Greek letters, some with macrons (overlines), some superscripts that don't mean what we'd use superscripts to mean, and one large upturned capital psi in the middle of it. Mind-boggling.

And they'd be more mystified by our notation than we are by theirs because at least we (or some of us) know what Greek letters and numerals are. They'd have no such head start.

Information paradox detected. You'll somehow die and your own advanced biology will become the trigger you went there to seek.

Another name for brine is "salt water". Now is it water or not?