Getting rid of excess rupees is the real strength of the Malo Mart magic armour.

It’s not as red as Palestine. Israel has been killing more journalists than the dark red countries combined, yet still gets to be medium red.

What the hell is this metric? Israel has been killing journalists in Palestine, but those stats mostly influence Palestine’s score, not Israel’s. 0 journalists killed in Israel, while true, hardly paints a correct picture of the situation… Basically, if you can export your journalistic suppression, you’re in the clear.

Ravens are equally close relatives, as are parrots.

Doesn’t make him not ace.

Sure, but I was responding to someone who was defining wasp (the common word) based on clade (using scientific words).

I’m fine with common parlance words for things. What I had issue with was arbitrarily restricting the definition of wasp to a specific clade, which would exclude ants and bees, and also a whole host of at the very least wasp-adjacent animals which would now be stuck with no real way to describe them.

(Also, yes, fish is a rubbish scientific word. We’re far closer cousins of salmon than sharks are. By any reasonable definition of fish, at least biologically, we are fish. You could redefine “fish” in the same way we define “tree”, i.e. based on structure and not on ancestry, but by that definition whales should still be fish. The word “fish” shouldn’t be allowed within 50 metres of cladistics.)

Just to confirm, you don’t think of jewel wasps, spider wasps, sand wasps, and flower wasps as wasps, since they’re not part of the Vespidae, correct?

I’ve mostly seen wasps defined as basically “Apocrita but not the ones we don’t think count as wasps because there’s too many of them, specifically bees and ants.” Which leads to the same weird reasoning that would somehow make legless lizards lizards, but not snakes. I’ve seen velvet ants referred to as wasps, but not ants, even though true ants are far closer cousins to Vespidae. That just isn’t a viable scientific definition. I’m glad we’ve mostly moved on to grouping avian dinosaurs among the dinosaurs, but it feels like a lot of similar groupings are still lagging.

I’m willing to accept Vespidae as a synonym of wasps, but that excludes a ton of wasps. It also erases the very wasp-like nature of ant ancestors, which is what makes cladistics so fascinating. So why not just open it up to include all Apocrita and be done with it?

I’m also fine with a morphological definition of wasps, like how “tree” isn’t based on ancestry but on structure, but you were the one pulling in the scientific names.

Except many non-Vespidae, both living and extinct, would readily be considered wasps. Look at this thing and tell me it’s not a wasp: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Eusapvertic.jpg If that’s a wasp and a yellow-jacket is a wasp, then so are ants and bees, in the same way that we are apes and birds are dinosaurs. You wouldn’t call a zoo to deal with a loose human and you wouldn’t call dr. Grant to deal with a pigeon, but biologically it makes a lot more sense to deal with ancestry then with how a species interacts with humans.

The aye-aye is also doing much better, mostly because the population size was severely underestimated at the time of writing.

And yeah, the book is amazing. I usually describe it to fans of his other works as somehow being his weirdest book, despite being non-fiction.

Weird comic, why put the punchline in the penultimate panel?

To be fair, based on the (lack of) spelling and grammar in his e-mails, that might actually be how he writes letters.

I don’t know of any television series, but Maple from Zelda Oracle of Seasons/Ages eventually swaps out her broom for a vacuum cleaner:

I myself only ever visit chewbac.ca!

This feels like they gave Sakurai carte blache and I’m here for it! Kirby Air Ride was an absolute gem and probably the best showcase of Sakurai’s design sensibilities. Definitely my most anticipated game of the year!

It wouldn’t. A tetrahedron has four sides, hence the name, while an Egyptian-style pyramid has five (if you include the base, otherwise it isn’t even a polyhedron).

I guess if those are your only two choices, but the VW scandal is one of those things which should be completely unforgivable to any conscientious buyer.

No, I agree that independence is necessary, not just because of “always”, but because if, as a crude example, your odds of hitting B halve each time you hit A, an infinite number of tries isn’t guaranteed to give you Shakespeare, even if the odds aren’t technically 0. My problem was that what you originally described wasn’t independence, it’s uniformity, which isn’t a prerequisite. And it’s up to 9 upvotes now so I don’t know what’s going on.

What? That’s not what independence means. They need to be independent, yes, because otherwise you might get into weird corner cases where the probably doesn’t converge to 1, but they don’t have to be equally likely. In fact, weighing the odds based on how often letters are used by Shakespeare should lower the expected timeframe. Heck, Shakespeare doesn’t use “J”, why would that key even be relevant? Where in the world do normal distributions even come into this? How does this comment have 4 upvotes? What am I missing here?

I’ve heard him (accurately) being referred to as a serial one-hit wonder. He also did Mouth Sounds, made the comic about Ariel getting 8 legs, and did the Guide to the Races of Star Trek and its spin-offs.

… it’s not really an opinion piece? It’s mostly a breakdown of the church’s dubious history and leadership. I’m sure they also do video game stuff, but that feels like it has no bearing on the actual facts presented.