Posted by DarkWitchClaire

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why would i need permission to meow?

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It's not that I'm granting permission, but it's important to let people know that if they want to meow, they can just meow.

Posted by Danika

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Meow meow?

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Nya~

Posted by AtomicAstro

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We can meow if we want to, we can leave your friends behind.

So your friends don't meow, and if they don't meow, are they friends of mine?

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It's the safety meow!

Posted by Epele

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Is this title trying to bait me?

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Look, it's fine, you're among friends, we won't judge

Posted by Danika

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Birthday girl got any plans?

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"having plans" is forbidden due to the coronavirus

Posted by DarkWitchClaire

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are you out of touch or out of time?

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time is not an illusion

Posted by Danika

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Would you ever want a Lappy 486?

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Sure! Might need a friend to help me carry it up the stairs, though.

Posted by DarkWitchClaire

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if time is not an illusion, then why can we only go in 1 direction?

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Okay first off, this is just me rambling, I don't think my views are representative of the mainstream of physics or whatever... and remember that while I do have two physics degrees, neither is a PhD, and my work was mostly in condensed matter and biophysics.

But in the end I think that's just how it works; three spatial dimension one time dimension (negative sign in the Lorentz transform) is fundamental, I think people who blame the arrow of time on entropy have it backwards; entropy increases because time is unidirectional.

Also, this is partially why I don't think string theories that require extra dimensions will be the end-all and be-all of a unified theory. (I'm skeptical of string theories in general)

Posted by DarkWitchClaire

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favorite early pc clone?

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The Tandy 1000 is early enough to count, right?

If not, I'll go with the Hyperion PC the 8-bit guy showed once because it looks kind of like a toy company decided to copy an Apple Lisa.

Posted by Danika

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Where did the whole Karen thing originate anyway?

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"Karen" originated as a Danish variant of "Catherine". "Catherine" gets its name from the goddess Hecate. Hecate, the goddess of witchcraft, was also the patron goddess of Byzantium. Constantine the Great moved the capital of the Roman Empire to Byzantium in 330 AD.

In the provinces of the Western Empire, people would complain about wealthy Romans from the capital coming in and acting like they owned the place. Since these sorts of jokes were disliked by the Roman aristocracy (since they were the ones being made fun of), they insulted them by using the old patron goddess' name. Since Constantine had made Christianity the state religion, insulting someone by associating them with paganism was fine.

This fell out of use until Catherine the Great became the Empress of Russia in 1762. Her detractors decided to revive the ancient Roman insult, since Russia has generally seen itself as the successor to the Roman Empire. (the "Third Rome") They used the Danish variant "Karen" as a further insult because Catherine the Great was part of the Holstein-Gottorp-Romanov family, which was a branch off of the royal family of Denmark.

Calling someone a "Karen" in Russia, therefore, marked you out as an opponent of the monarchy, and therefore certain death awaited. The insult outlived Catherine the Great; the Okhrana was known to use people's reactions to the name to prove their disloyalty to the Tsar. Eventually, word of this caught wind in the west. To mock the Russians, they started calling people "Karen" as an insult, with the meaning of a petty tyrant.

The revival of the insult in Russia occurred during the Sochi Olympics, where heavy-handed local authorities trying to clean up the city were branded as "doing it for the Karens". The meme jumped from Russian social media to American social media, where it was associated with the tyrannical behavior of some middle-aged women.

That all probably isn't true, though.

Posted by AtomicAstro

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Isn't Catherine a nice name?

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It is! Thankfully pretty much no one will make the Karen connection these days.

Posted by DarkWitchClaire

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favorite name you've seen for someone else's cat?

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Foone on Twitter has a cat named SCSI, which happens to work really well as a cat name despite being the worst way to connect a hard drive

Posted by Danika

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Isn't Bella one of the most common names for a female cat?

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Bella will soon be one of the most common names because all of the people who loved Twilight are old enough to have kids

Posted by Danika

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Should Friday the 13th be a holiday?

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You know, my first thought was "no", but then I wondered: it's likely that more accidents do occur on the 13th because of superstitious people behaving differently. It's possible that making it a holiday could actually be good for the economy if it cuts down on expensive accidents...