I prefer my mental image.

How so? Why is the alternative killing?

The thing that completely takes me out of the movie / show whenever I see it is people who get knocked backwards by bullets / shotgun blasts. The maximum amount of momentum transferred by a bullet or pack of shotgun pellets is the same amount as the shove it gives to the shooter’s hands or shoulder.

If it’s in a Chinese Gun Fu, Wire Fu, Gun Wuxia type movie where everything is slightly fantastical, I can accept it as a kind of over-the-top element of that style. But, it really bothers me when it happens in something that’s otherwise fairly realistic.

The movie version of being “knocked out”.

Someone is knocked unconscious for long enough to be moved to a new location and probably tied up. And they wake up just fine. They’re able to engage in witty banter with their captor. If they manage to break free they’re able to fight effectively.

The reality? A massive concussion. Extreme disorientation. Likely to puke if they have to move much.

If you ever watch a “knockout” in boxing or MMA, the unconsciousness lasts a seconds at most, mostly not even a second. Someone’s knees go wobbly then they recover, but they’re still disoriented and uncoordinated. If they’re out for longer than a second or two, everyone’s concerned and the fighter is rushed to the hospital.

No one secures the neck strap on motorcycles

It’s been a while since I rode a motorcycle, but apparently things have changed a lot.

They use massively privacy-invading measures to ensure that you don’t do that. I don’t know about Pearson specifically, but there are horror stories from the “proctoring” industry about what people have to put up with.

For example: “facial detection, eye tracking, and algorithms that measure “anomalies” in metrics like head movement, mouse clicks, and scrolling rates to flag students exhibiting behavior that differs from the class norm” As is widely known, facial detection doesn’t work as well for dark-skinned people, and eye and head movement of so-called “normal people” is not fair to people who are not cheating, but not “normal”.

And you can’t leave your desk because you might have something out of camera sight to help you cheat. Straightforward right? Not really: “A University of Florida student felt forced to vomit at her desk when the proctor threatened to fail her if she left the screen (Harwell, 2020). She vomited at her desk in front of the stranger.”

Maybe you can get away with hiding notes on another device or paper, but they try hard to make that impossible. They want to you to get up and show them everything in the room before you start your test. They want to see your hands at all times, and even track your eye movements. If your eyes are always darting to a certain area off screen where you might have notes, they might interrupt your test and demand to be shown what you’re looking at. If you look up or off to the side when you’re thinking, they’re going to demand that you show them what you’re looking at too. If you think you can scroll through notes on your phone… maybe. But, they often demand that your hands be visible on-camera at all times.

It’s an arms race, and sometimes people do manage to cheat, but when that happens the proctoring companies just implement more and more outrageous surveillance.

Mr. Munroe probably didn’t intend it, but the diagram also shows the problem with monopolies, duopolies and similar concentrations of stuff. The original design for the Internet was something that was so distributed that it could survive even if some key nodes were nuked. But, the modern Internet depends way too much on just a few companies: cloudflare, google, meta, amazon, etc.

Maybe, but OP’s found the ideal site if you just want husky bloopers.

X is pretty small.

Elon Musk bought Twitter for something like $41b, and now it’s worth maybe half that. Cloudflare alone is worth almost double the pre-Musk market cap of Twitter. Spotify is a relatively small player in the “Internet Content and Information” space, dominated by companies like Google and Meta, but it’s still worth more than triple the pre-Musk market cap, at more than $120b. Current X is about the size of Zillow, currently valued at about $16b.

As a small company that is focused on spreading propaganda and hate speech, building a robust CDN isn’t a core part of X’s business, so it’s normal they’d outsource that. Companies like Meta and Google are big enough to justify doing that in-house.

Yeah, the other fat chunky leg could be AWS. But neither is that tiny pillar supporting everything.

Whether intentional or not, that XKCD comic also pointed out a problem that even when some of the other things holding up the entire modern internet are huge, they’re still a problem because there aren’t very many of them, so half the Internet depends on them.

A number of high-profile websites, including X and ChatGPT, went down for many on Tuesday, due to problems affecting major internet infrastructure firm, Cloudflare.

Blusky: the social media site where people post bloopers of pet videos featuring huskies. It’s a very small niche.

What about the reed instruments where you have to give your instrument oral, and it’s your tongue and lip control which determines the note you produce?

You also make music nose by beating animal hide with sticks.

I also remember hearing how the Japanese word “ramen” is comes from a pretty different Chinese word.

It’s cool though that a tonal language like Mandarin / Cantonese is strongly related to a non-tonal one. I wonder what happened there historically.

I don’t know much Japanese, but the bits I do know suggest it’s a very different language than English. Not just different sounds, but also just a different approach to expressing things. Like, I think instead of saying “I’m hungry”, they just say “hungry!” Presumably though, they do use “I” when it’s needed for disambiguation.

For, example, if you’re with a friend and someone asks “are you guys college students?” The response would probably be something like “He is but I’m not”, right?

Yeah, well it’s hard to do it without any errors, but it’s an error every 5 minutes or something, whereas a perfectly competent normal person when sight-reading text will probably make an error every 30s.

Watashi wa nihonjo ga wakarimasen.

I’ve heard, and I don’t know if this is true, that voice actors who specialize in narrating books have to be superstars at this. Not only are they expected to be able to sight-read an entire book without making mistakes, they also need to do the required acting so exciting scenes are exciting, happy scenes are happy, gloomy scenes are gloomy, etc. Plus, as they come across new characters in the book, they’re supposed to be able to give them distinct voices and remember and recreate those voices as they show up later in the book.

Of course, a blockbuster book with a big budget for the audio version won’t have an actor wing it. They’ll be able to pay to have an actor and a director read the book first, and then have the director work with the actor to tease out the best possible performance. But, for a smaller budget, you have to deal with tighter margins so every second in the voice over booth counts.

One thing I love doing is to learn to say “I don’t speak <language>” as well as possible in a language I don’t speak. If you’re good enough at it, people will assume it’s a joke and try to speak to you in that language you don’t actually know. Apparently I’m pretty good at saying it in Portuguese, but I wouldn’t know.