Why do many search engines seem to ignore operators (e.g. exact phrases, term exclusions, OR, etc.)? Is there a good reason for having a dumb 1997-level search logic that I'm not seeing?
Wouldn't it cut down on search queries (and thus save resources) if I could search for "this is my phrase" rather than rawdogging it as an unbound series of words, each of which seems to be pulling up results unconnected to the other words in the phrase?
There are only 2 reasons I can think of why a website's search engine lacks this incredibly basic functionality:
- The site wants you to spend more time there, seeing more ads and padding out their engagement stats.
- They're just too stupid to know that these sorts of bare-bones search engines are close to useless, or they just don't think it's worth the effort. Apathetic incompetence, basically.
Is there a sound financial or programmatic reason for running a search engine which has all the intelligence of a turnip?
Cheers!
EDIT: I should have been a bit more specific: I'm mainly talking about search engines within websites (rather than DDG or Google). One good example is BitTorrent sites; they rarely let you define exact phrases. Most shopping websites, even the behemoth Amazon, don't seem to respect quotation marks around phrases.
He says that, but has no problem issuing pardons, which is about as king-like as it gets. It circumvents the legal and judicial structure of the entire nation, and he can do so on a whim. It's true that, unlike Trump, he's only pardoned people deserving of pardons, but that's not really the fuckin' point, is it?
Epstein killed himself and you're a tedious memebrained dickhead if you think otherwise.
The Dnepropetrovsk Maniacs were delivering free face enhancements to random people back in '07, they were just too ahead of their time for us to know what they were trying to accomplish
I actually feel sorry for him. How's he going to keep up his world-class skincare routine when he's behind bars?
Anhedonia, i.e. the inability to feel pleasure. It's like trying to fill a bucket with water that has a hole in the bottom, letting the water out at the same speed it goes in. Nothing you can do about it. I think this might be where the recklessness comes from; desperation to get any kind of sensation from something. You need to go to extreme lengths to get the proverbial dial to move a millimetre. So you take risks and reach for danger and generally inappropriate behaviour.
Instantaneous, lifelong driving bans for any driver who is found to be texting or intoxicated behind the wheel.
RedCandleGames is on my very short list of 'instabuy' developers. The way they were treated by GOG is why I don't buy from that store anymore.
When a magazine goes out of print and/or out of business, do the original 'master files' for each issue still exist somewhere?
Thinking about the gaming magazines I used to read as a kid in the '90s. Some of them have found their way online thanks to preservationist efforts, but most are seemingly gone forever. (I'm talking about the particular magazine I read as a kid, many others have complete or near-complete collections available online in the form of scanned hardcopies.)
Do the publishing houses keep a digital copy of every magazine they release? If so, why don't they release them? They could probably charge a fee to download them, like other digital magazines do, but of course it'd be great if they just shared them for free for historical purposes on the Internet Archive or something.
It would be an insanely short-sighted practice to not keep masters of these publications forever, no? 🤔 The raw files probably take up a few CDs' worth of space for the entire run of the magazine. Big assumptions on my part, I have no clue how any of it is done!
So:
- Do they retain the files forever?
- If so, why might they not be shared 20 or 30 years later?
Cheers!
I was denied a mathematics education, for real. I can't even do long division, nevermind that squiggly F shit. I thought that stuff was only for astrophysicists.
I want to learn basic maths, but I'm in a 'learned helplessness' mindset where I can't even get through basic sums and equations intended for children (I'm old as fuck now).
I was diagnosed with autism a few years back, which kinda made no sense. I would have expected rainman powers, but numbers just don't jive with my cunt of a brain. Maths is as inscrutable to me as people's faces or social cues.
Seems like a small thing, but it makes the idea of federation seem a bit patchy.
What's the rule for which 'national identity adjective' suffix to use?
[-ish] Ireland, Scotland = Irish, Scottish
[-an] Morocco, Germany = Moroccan, German
[-ese] Portugal, China = Portuguese, Chinese
What rule is at play here? 🤔
Cheers!
I wish Linux weren't completely fucking impenetrable for casual users.
Damn it, the link didn't show on my post. I think maybe because I added text to the body of the post as well, and I guess you can't do both? 🤷 I've added the link to the post's body now though. Thanks for the heads-up!
Katherine Knight: An Australian woman who, in 2000, murdered, skinned, dismembered and cooked her husband, and attempted to feed him to his adult sons
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katherine_Knight
She was the first woman in Australia to be given a life sentence without any possibility of parole.
(Edited to add the link. I did add it originally, but I guess it doesn't post it if you also write in the body of the post? 🤷)
Natalia Grace: Inspired by the plot of the 2009 horror film Orphan, Natalia's adoptive parents legally changed her real age so she would become an "adult", at which point they promptly abandoned her
Natalia was born in Ukraine in 2003, and was diagnosed with a rare form of dwarfism. More or less immediately, she was given up for adoption.
Adopted by a couple in the US, they facetiously but legally changed her birth year to 1989 with a view to skirting child abandonment laws. Her real age - the age she actually was when they adopted her - was confirmed by DNA testing, as well as contemporaneous documentation in Ukraine.
After seeing Orphan, a horror film in which an adopted child is actually a crazy adult with a rare genetic condition that makes her look like a kid, they hatched the idea of fudging the documentation like in the movie - except in reverse. In the film, the character changes her documentation to make herself seem younger than she is. With Natalia, they needed her to be an adult.
They moved her into her own apartment (an 8 or 9-year-old at this point), then quietly snuck off to Canada along with their biological children.
And the evil cunts got away with it. They lied about her, saying she was threatening to kill everyone and was a sociopath (again, taking their cues from the horror film). A fucking 8-year-old dwarf was gonna kill them all, they said.
Truly repugnant people.
Anonymous and untraceable internet traffic tool for paedophiles, data thieves and occasionally a journalist living under an oppressive regime. But mainly paedophiles.
Can a judge sue a defendant for slander/libel?
If a judge is called 'corrupt' by a defendant outside court in front of the media, or if something more unambiguously libelous is said, can the judge sue the defendant?
(from Perplexity AI)
😬 holy moly macaroni
Perfectly concise answer! Thank you :)
Wow, that's an incredible thought. So "ziiiiiiip" there goes the uberobject. 4 minutes later, all of the budgies on earth are knocked off their perches.
Would that uberobject heat up the earth as it passes? Not sure how that would work, but it seems like a good question 🤣
Thank you so much for this excellent write-up! And for providing interesting reading material, too.
It's amazing to me (an uneducated sub-layman) that things like dark matter and dark energy aren't well-understood, but we can nonetheless still do this kind of science and detect black holes colliding through ripples in spacetime 🤯 But then again, it's amazing to me that rivers never run out of water (joking... sort of...).
That LIGO sound clip is for sure going into the intro of a metal song.
That's amazing, thank you! A ghostly remnant of gravity still exerting 8-ish minutes of influence on earth (in the event of the sun's instantaneous disappearance) is something I never heard or thought about before, but it makes sense. It's hard to visualise it though. Like the earth is a marble circling a drain after plug has been pulled and the water is all but gone. Then the minute it is gone, the marble just keeps going in a straight line 👀
[Physics] Does gravity have 'elasticity'? If a solid sun-sized object zooms across space at the speed of light, then abruptly stops, does it take gravity some time to 'settle' around it?
Is it a stable/static effect no matter what, or is it a bit more stretchy/bouncy depending on how the object is behaving?
Thank you!
Damn, 58's nothing. Barely middle age these days. I hope whatever it was that killed her was quick. She worked for some scumbags, but that's hardly a reason to celebrate that a family has a dead wife, mother and possibly daughter to bury.
Is there a name for this sort of object? I need something like this, but don't know what to type into the webs
I'm going to convert my computer chair from pneumatic to static. I'm currently using plastic clasps that are held on with jubilee clips, but they're not great and need replaced (I'm a heavy lad). A sturdy metal version would be better.
I'm assuming the plumbing world would have something like this, but the language of the plumber is arcane and inaccessible to regular goombas like me. What do I type into the search box?
Cheers!
Is there a standard/preferred list order for non-alphanumeric characters?
Alphanumerical lists are sortable by alphabet and number, obviously, but if you have a list where each entry begins with a different punctuation mark (or any other kind of non-alphanumeric character), is there a similar standardised ordering method for them?
I imagine, for example, that a comma will come before whatever this is: ¦
I just tested an A-Z sort in Google Sheets where each cell was a different punctuation mark, and it seemed to rearrange what I'd entered into some sort of order, but is this order shared universally? Is there a global Unicode-compliant ordering method everyone uses?
Cheers!
for a grand total of 3-and-a-half minutes of the sounds of an electrified salmon being recorded over a landline
Really ought'a be illegal to have filler tracks, especially from a band who delivers one new album for every third Pope. Fuckin' heartbreaking.
EDIT: I suck at memeing, so I have to explain: I was talking about the promise of X-number of tracks on an upcoming album, only to get the album and discover that that number is significantly lower when you skip the fizzing and crackling filler tracks. I know the length of the album as a whole is "album length", because the individual songs are often very long, but it still feels like I've been tricked. And I don't wish to deny the band their right to artistically express themselves through buzzes, zips and whizzes 👍
How is surgery safely performed on the rectum and its connected piping?
How do you sanitise the area to prevent infection? If you get surgery on the rusty sheriff's badge, how does it not get infected the next time you lay an otter egg? Do they connect a colostomy bag in that case, to give it time to heal?
You can get a lethal infection from a paper cut if the right (see: wrong) bacteria get into it. Short of piledriving a snooker cue coated with hand sanitiser, I don't know how a filthy corridor of doom like the excretory system can be kept free of bacteria after Dr. Bussy Torn MD has been rooting around in there with his weed whacker.
Surely antibiotics aren't enough on their own to prevent infection? Anywhere else in the body, sure, but the chucklet waterpark is like ground zero for biological malevolence. It would be like wearing nothing but a steel showercap to keep mosquitos from biting you.
What dark arts are surgeons invoking here?
Cortical homunculus - A distorted visual representation of the human form, with body part proportions analogous to the size of the area of the brain responsible for controlling them
The validity of the 'map' of the brain used as the basis for this idea has been called into question.
Murchison Murders: An author's "perfect murder" scenario gives a local real life murderer an idea
Arthur Upfield was writing a novel in which a killer comes up with the perfect murder scenario. In short, the killer puts the corpse of his victim inside a dead cow's gut, and burns both of them at the same time. He removes any metal fragments, such as jewellery, belt buckles and teeth, dissolving them in acid, then smashes up the bony ash and scatters it to the winds.
Unable to think of a way for his fictional detective to actually solve such an ingenious scheme, he starts asking friends and acquaintances for ideas. Word gets about town, and a fellow named Snowy Rowles decides that he'll put it to the test. He murdered three people, the first two of whom were killed exactly as written, and no one suspected him. The third is where he got sloppy, and he forgot to remove and dissolve the metal fragments, and the victim's distinctive ring was found.
Snowy maintained his innocence, but was hanged.
Ever had something spoiled for you in the opening credits?
I was watching a film yesterday (went in blind) and during the opening credits I saw something along the lines of "Special effects artist for the Creature". I had no idea the movie was going to have a creature in it before reading that, so when it was eventually revealed later in the film I was kinda annoyed that I knew it was coming. Would have been pretty cool to have it sprung on me out of the blue, because there were no hints during the preceding part of the film that anything supernatural or weird was happening.
It got me thinking about what other films contain spoilers in the opening credits. Do you have any other examples?
Gong farmer: The people whose job it was to remove human effluent from privies and cesspits in Tudor England. Operating at night to avoid the public, they were generally shunned.
>One notable incident occurred in 1326, when a gong-farmer named Richard the Raker fell into a cesspit whose ceiling had rotted, and drowned while collecting feces.
Possibly the worst death on the job ever?
"I wish Steam let us leave a neutral rating..."
Do you ever notice how 99.9% of the time when a reviewer says this, they err on the side of a negative review? 🤔
[Biology] The umbilical cord: is it 'necessary' to sever it, or is it designed to disconnect on its own eventually?
What are the consequences of not severing it? I imagine you'd have the weirdest bellybutton on earth if nothing else.
Cheers!
Has there ever been an attempt to do a modern "novelisation" of Shakespeare's plays?
We get novelisation of films, but what about plays? I know I can freely read his plays anywhere online, but surely reading a script is less ideal than reading a novelised version written for people who were born sometime after Bach, assuming you're not planning a word-for-word performance yourself of course.
I don't even enjoy reading the scripts for my favourite films, and I understand all of the words, phrasings and allusions in those. With Shakespeare, I need to do a 4-year college course just to know what the fuck he's on about.
This isn't me being anti-intellectual, I respect anyone who can read through Shakespeare and enjoy it, it's more about life being too fucking short and I'd like to experience the stories in a less torturous manner if possible.
If this has been attempted, can you recommend any authors?
Cheers!