Things you were shockingly old when you learned

XP I think I need to get around to reading that book on emotional vampires I picked up a few months back

The time clock face scanner at work also takes temperatures...

― Hideous Lump, Sunday, May 21, 2023 5:14 PM

The what?

[working with international students in the UK, this is absolutely one of the top complaints they have, it is not normal outside the UK.

― the world is your octopus (Camaraderie at Arms Length), Saturday, May 20, 2023 3:56 AM (two days ago) bookmarkflaglink

Actually, the only place ive seen NOT have hot and cold taps is the USA. (Of course ive only been the australia and europe)

And that fucking stick that turns the water from bath to shower. Fuck that stick.

Also, your tiny toilet pipes. Fuck those too.

I think I've gone my whole life believing that internment referred to both imprisonment and burial. Turns out interment is not a spelling mistake, but the correct way of referring to burials.

putting into the ground like.

Yeah, I've always been aware of "the body has been interred" etc, but for some reason my brain just rejected "interment" as a viable word.

Terra = earth is how I remember this

hard to forget that when you've done tedious exams with questions about the earthing arrangements of electrical distribution systems, like Terra-Neutral combined etc...

Make that "time clock/face scanner"

Yeah, I've always been aware of "the body has been interred" etc, but for some reason my brain just rejected "interment" as a viable word.

I think I've gone my whole life believing that internment referred to both imprisonment and burial. Turns out interment is not a spelling mistake, but the correct way of referring to burials.

― emil.y, Monday, May 22, 2023 5:10 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

WHAT

oh ffs

When wiring a UK 3-pin plug, you can remember which wire goes on the left and which on the right because it's bLue on the Left and bRown on the Right.

How often does anyone rewire a plug these days? It's probably about 10 years (at least) since I last did it, I remember rewiring plugs and changing fuses all the time when I was younger.

it's because back in the day lot's of houses still had the old bs3036 cartridge fuses. In the RCBO era you are more likely to have your switch trip than a blown plug fuse.

and also lots of houses had dodgy white goods/electrical equipment back in the day. My mum had a twin tub washing machine which used to become completely live! And with the old cartridge fuses if people didn't have any replacement fuse wire sometimes they'd stick a tack nail in there, lol I have actually seen this a few times - well 20 odd years ago.

hahaha yes

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/B7AY-GCCAAEaelQ.jpg

The interment/internment thing reminds me that sometime in my 20s I noticed that somebody had spelled "raspberries" with a p between the s and b and thought "huh, what a weird error" only to soon realize that everybody was making this error except me.

As usual, I'm going to use my "English is not my first language" excuse here.

Internment in a grave: Poe to thread

I love these sorts of misunderstandings, like how loads of people think it’s “elegaic”

or 'for all intensive purposes'

oh god

what does intensive even mean that intense doesn't

i think it’s “as opposed to extensive” ie over a small area.

the entire state of Florida is further west than the nation Colombia

"Intense care" sounds wrong, maybe just because we're used to "intensive care."

To go full patrician mode for a moment, Fowler's Modern English Usage has this:

Intensive.

Just as definitive & alternative are ignorantly confused with definite & alternate, & apparently liked the better for their mere length, so intensive is becoming a fashionable word where the meaning wanted is simply intense. It must be admitted that there was a time before differentiation had taken place when Burton, e.g., could write A very intensive pleasure follows the passion (lol); it there means intense, but the OED labels the use obsolete, & its latest quotation for it is from over two centuries ago; the modern relapse had not come under its notice in 1901, when it issued letter I. Intensive perished as a mere variant of intense, but remained with a philosophic or scientific meaning, as an antithesis to extensive ; where extensive means with regard to extent, intensive means with regard to force or degree:

The record of an intensive as well as extensive development. /Its intensive, like its extensive, magnitude is small.

This is the kind of word that we ordinary mortals do well to leave alone ; see POPULARISED TECHNICALITIES.

Unfortunately, a particular technical application of the philosophic use emerged into general notice, & was misinterpreted — intensive method especially of cultivation. To increase the supply of wheat you may sow two acres instead of one — increase the extent — , or you may use more fertilizers & care on your one acre — increase the intensity — ; the second plan is intensive cultivation, the essence of it being concentration on a limited area. Familiarized by the newspapers with intensive cultivation, which most of us took to be a fine name for very hard or intense work by the farmers, we all became eager to show off our new word, & took to saying intensive where intense used to be good enough for us.

The war gave this a great fillip by finding the correspondents another peg to hang intensive on — bombardment. There is a kind of bombardment that may be accurately called intensive ; it is what in earlier wars we called concentrated fire, a phrase that has the advantage of being open to no misunderstanding ; the fire converges upon a much narrower front than that from which it is discharged ; but as often as not the intensive bombardment of the newspapers was not concentrated, but was intense, as the context would sometimes prove ; a bombardment may be intense without being intensive, or intensive without being intense, or it may be both.

I don't think this really covers intensive care tbh, though it looks like that only arrived as a phrase in the '60s.

i scoff condescendingly at those who write, like apes, of "all intensive purposes" but what about those of us who use the actual, correct, expression? it's also bad

it's dead, isn't it, and usually misleading. 'it is, to all intents and purposes, the same thing' is one of those phrases that means 'not'.

intensive care means the medics have stuck you in a small room full of machines by yrself (it's bad but may turn out well)
intense care means yr nurse is kathy bates in misery (it's bad and will turn out worse)

am I right in thinking that at the height of covid if you were sent to hospital, and they were feeling the rush, you might get stuck in an external ward and get your care intent-sively?

Puts one in mind of the venerable joke about how there was a fire in a Boy Scout camp, the heat was in tents, yuk yuk.

I still want to hear about Hideous Lump’s face scanning time card machine!

xp I've always heard it as "for all intents and purposes," not "to all intents and purposes." That may be a U.S./U.K. difference.

And I've always thought it meant "not exactly, but close enough."

fits most criteria without being the specific part like

We had a face scanning time card thingy at the museum I worked at. We each had an ID card. When we clocked in/out we would hold the card up to the scanner to register the time and then it would take a pic of our face. A coworker who was indigenous and highly political and distrustful of tech kept a pic of Sitting Bull in his wallet and would hold this up in front of the camera for his picture.

The point of it is to be able to go back and review if something seems fishy. Person A clocked in but they didn’t actually work that day, so who clocked in for them?

Scan the ID card! Seems less expensive and less intrusive than a camera.

Hell, I'm not trying to encourage this kind of behavior, but put cameras on the entrance/exit. You can see folks come and go while treating it like a security camera.

> Scan the ID card

but id cards are transferable. what's to stop me clocking in my mate using his card?

A coworker shared a story of a contractor who thought carrying an id badge to get into the building was too onerous, so he duped the RFID tag into a chip he implanted into his hand

Seems like a bit much, but to compound that lunacy, the same guy wrote an anti-corporate manifesto and quit after his second week when he was told he couldn't vape at his desk

I'm told he made some good points in said manifesto, but ragequitting over vaping was what people remember

He couldn't just do it in the bathroom like the rest of us?

pretty sure someone would notice since there aren't any single-person restrooms but idk

I think it was the principle of the thing, being told not to do it

Oh I'm sure it was; I was just kidding.

Meow-Ludo Disco Gamma Meow-Meow had his conviction for implanting his train ticket chip into his hand overturned, mh's brief coworker just loves quitting obv

I was thinking back to the first couple years that mass-market nicotine vapes were becoming commonplace and work had to keep mass emailing the building to tell people to stop vaping in the stairway

That the dude behind Dave's Killer Bread (he sold the company in 2015) was a goddamn maniac and multiple felon. (The bread is excellent.)

By geological definition glacial ice is actually rock, made up of the crystal ice compressed with some other stuff. By this definition, the liquid form of the crystal’s compound, which is called water, is actually molten ice crystals, and therefore actually lava.

10 y/o Hunt3r would have enjoyed this piece of work soooo much, shame I just found it.

xp Can Dave Dahl actually shred on guitar or do I need to switch to another bread?