Definitively Confused

THE PORTAL OPENS

i love explaining the etymology of the word "rickroll" because the story starts with "ok, so at one point 4chan applied a filter to everyone's posts that changed the word egg to duck"

funniest convo ever with a guy who said 2 me "nobody uses journalism degrees" and i said "my mom has a bachelors in journalism" and he smiled like knowingly and said "yeah, but what does she do?" and i said "she runs a newspaper and publishes romance novels on the side." and he literally said "oh" and nothing else. like he ended the whole conversation there.

i've just been informed he has a trombone degree. like the study of playing trombone. which is all well and good, i genuinely think we should all have the opportunity to chase our academic bliss but i do think the trombone studies guy should hesitate to judge the economic value of other people's degrees no

where's that post of someone getting a letter from their bank like "dear keith we realise you're just taking the piss but every time you venmo your mate for 'al-qaeda training camp' we do have to, by law, fill out a lot of boring paperwork for the police so we'd really appreciate it if you'd stop doing that"

I made this post years ago to express my own confusion regarding how smell works and I have since then learned that actually nobody knows how smell works. like the general mechanism is understood, there's a bunch of receptors in the nose that detect different chemicals, but unlike the other special senses there is no model for predicting which things will produce the same or similar sensory experiences. nobody knows how to tell how similar two arbitrary chemicals will smell without just smelling both of them. so yeah I guess it is just magic

I remember an episode of Magic School Bus laying it out about as well as the first two explanations. I mean, you can't know what two sounds will sound like without hearing them either. A waveform doesn't really tell you more than a chemical profile in that respect.

a waveform tells you a lot about what a sound will sound like! you can apply a fourier transform to break it down into its defining frequencies and use that to tell if two sounds are the same pitch or not without listening to them. linguists can train to differentiate vowel phonemes just from looking at spectrograms. none of that is possible with smell

Heard a car horn today that was tuned to a fifth. Fucked up, kinda delightful

Didn't realize they made emergency thermal blankets for babies