TIL: Today I Learned

It's stuff like that that kicks ass. Also, facts like that every beam of light that hits your face on a sunny afternoon is older than human civilization.
 
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It's stuff like that that kicks ass. Also, facts like that every beam of light that hits your face on a sunny afternoon is older than human civilization.
haven’t head the one about beam of light and sunny afternoon. I also can’t figure it out. It takes about 8 minutes for light to get from the sun to earth. I could see it being more or less true at night for starlight.
 
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haven’t head the one about beam of light and sunny afternoon. I also can’t figure it out. It takes about 8 minutes for light to get from the sun to earth. I could see it being more or less true at night for starlight.
Yeah, but that photon originates during nuclear fusion at the sun's core. That photon takes 10,000-100,000 years to make it's way to the surface and then 8 minutes to Earth.

Hmm, that makes me wonder if photons take the same amount of time to wind their way of out supergiants like Betelgeuse or if because they're so much less dense that it doesn't increase the amount of time from core to surface.
 
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TIL my favorite Farmers market used to be a train station! Wild.
Please don't tell me you mean "Reading Terminal Market", because... I mean, it's there in the name.

Unless you thought they meant it in the other definition of "terminal", as in "extremely or hopelessly severe; leading to death", which, okay, it's Philadelphia. It could have that vibe.
 
Please don't tell me you mean "Reading Terminal Market", because... I mean, it's there in the name.

Unless you thought they meant it in the other definition of "terminal", as in "extremely or hopelessly severe; leading to death", which, okay, it's Philadelphia. It could have that vibe.
NO-that one I knew about...and am pretty sure my dad combined stories when I asked about the farmers market on the Black Horse Pike during conversation, thought he meant BOTH of them.

The Black Horse Pike one was just a farmers market with this really big stone thing.
 
Today I learned "Dunkin' Donuts" was ALWAYS called "Dunkin' Donuts", and was never called "Duncan Donuts" until they changed the name to what I THOUGHT was the new name, but was apparently the original name this entire time.

Full on Bearenstain effect.
 
YIL that "rizz" is a shortened form of "Charisma." From context, I understood it to mean something related to presentation, bearing, style, appearance, and/or influence, but I had always assumed it was a term invented for the purpose, and had never entertained the possibility that it might be the corruption of an already existing term.

--Patrick
 
YIL that "rizz" is a shortened form of "Charisma." From context, I understood it to mean something related to presentation, bearing, style, appearance, and/or influence, but I had always assumed it was a term invented for the purpose, and had never entertained the possibility that it might be the corruption of an already existing term.

--Patrick
I’m around teens all day. Most modern slang seems perfectly fine to me, but I especially feel that “rizz” makes a lot of sense. It fills a small need in language, and it does that well.

Fucking “skibbidi” and “skib” are the dumb ones that I cannot stand. I especially hate when my students unironically say something like “What the skib?”
 

GasBandit

Staff member
I wish I could find it now, but I read the MOST BOOMER ARTICLE EVER a week or two ago with fogeys complaining about Gen Z. It was the most "kids these days" bs ever. And a lot of it was focused on the slang. "What do you mean you're serving? Serving what?!" Oh grandma, if a zoomer leaves out a word, you can assume it's a word you don't like.

Thing is, though, a lot of Gen X humor is referential, us being the first "raised by mass media" generation. The 20yo in my house looks at me like an alien whenever I tiredly moan "time to make the donuts" in the morning.
 
The 20yo in my house looks at me like an alien whenever I tiredly moan "time to make the donuts" in the morning.
Ah, but you're doing it because it's not just about getting up in the morning, it's all the context around it that matters...context that 20yr-old just doesn't have. I'm reminded of how The Mask deliberately changed "I'm not gonna pay a lot for this mufflah!" into a Yosemite Sam-esque "Hold onto your lug nuts, it's tiiime for an overhaul!" presumably due to worry about this happening, or rights issues, or whatever.
Boomers had their own phrases they could use ("It tastes good like a <CLAP CLAP> cigarette should!"), and there are a few they held onto ("It takes a licking and keeps on ticking!"), but I assume the reason they kept so few is due to the idea of a "meme economy" not existing at the time, so the concept of routinely using an idea-with-dependencies to metadeliver an encapsulated Darmok-style allegory payload is foreign to them.

--Patrick
 
It's you. I think having an 18 and 22 year old still keeps me semi-current on the nonsense, but we're all getting old and out of touch.
 

figmentPez

Staff member
Today I learned that speech to text will compensate for a lisp by changing the word thumping to something.
It took me far too long to realize that when you said "something" you were being specific, and not making some sort of censored reference.

Anyway, I learned about the geography of southern Canada.
 
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