• 0 Posts
  • 21 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: June 11th, 2023

help-circle
  • American customary units and imperial units both come from English units, so the US used various inconsistent English and other units in its early days. But the US never used “Imperial” units, which were not codified and put into effect in the British Empire until almost 50 years after the US had gained independence.



  • ParaneopteratoMemesRip
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    16
    ·
    3 months ago

    Many, but not all, of the anti -pasteurization people believe that there is an invisible “life force” in the milk that is killed by processing. This is an old idea, but this unfalsifiable and unprovable “life force” thinking undergirds a lot of pseudoscience. People believe in getting energy aligned and unblocked and so on, and believe that drinking milk with mysterious life force is more natural.



  • ParaneopteratoMemesVesuvius
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    33
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    6 months ago

    “Anglicized” is probably not the best way to think about it. The Latin letter “v” was pronounced “w” through the classical period, but had shifted to β or v (fricative) by the third century, long before English existed. V was pronounced v (voiced labiodental fricative) for many centuries. And though we do tend to give the classical period a lot of prestige, it was just one phase for Latin.





  • This answer is spot on. I know this varies by state but in my state every intersection is legally a crosswalk, regardless of markings, and drivers are required to stop at them and yield right of way to pedestrians. This applies whether the pedestrians are in the crosswalk or appear to be attempting to enter the crosswalk. The area legally designated as crosswalk is the space between the stop sign and the road, and in the vast majority of cases in suburban areas is unmarked. There is no way in most of these that a driver will be able to see pedestrians or cyclists coming, especially from the right, unless they stop at that stop sign. The correct procedure is to stop at the sign, determine that the pedestrian way is clear, and then pull forward to the road. There’s almost 1 pedestrian death an hour in the US and most of these deaths are avoidable from the driver’s point of view just by following this and other legally mandated procedures.


  • I think it goes back to Fannie Farmer in 1896, who wrote the first major and comprehensive cookbook in English that used any kind of standard measurements. European cookbooks mostly used vague instructions without any standardized weights or numbers before that. At this point in the industrialized world standardized cup measures were relatively cheap and available. Scales were relatively bulky, expensive, and inaccurate in 1896. So the whole tradition got started, and most of the major cookbooks owed something to Fannie Farmer. Cookbooks that used standardized weights probably got started in other countries much later, when scales were becoming commonplace.



  • This is true. And in communities around the world where suicide is stigmatized, there is heavy pressure on authorities to record deaths as “accidental” rather than suicide. In fact, this is borne out by statistics in which you see higher rates of death attributed to accident in such communities, once you control for other variables. This is especially the case in societies in which there is social shunning of entire families who have lost someone to suicide. The coroner in these communities may worry with good reason about serious mistreatment of families if there is a public record of suicide. It’s also not unreasonable to think that this misreporting may play into the gender divide in suicides. If different sexes tend to use different methods, some of these methods are much more ambiguous and easier to record as an accident than others.