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Emojis, however, are a Japanese invention (related but different from emoticons).

BTW, even the word emoji (from Japanese e = picture, moji = character) is unrelated to the word emoticon.


It seems TM SGNL also works when you're messaging with somebody using the genuine Signal app. They aren't gonna make a group chat with your archive bot to message you, and they might not be pleased when you add them to such a group chat.


Maybe but if that’s their opinion, I don’t think they’d be pleased to know that you are archiving their chats in any case. I guess it would depend on who the user base is.


NetHack does have ghost files (where you find the levels previous characters died on, including their ghost and their possibly-cursed loot). It's definitely not the same kind of progression as in modern rogue-lites, but it can be a boost to pick up the equipment you found on a previous run.


Do note that enemies can also pick up that old equipment and use it against you. I lost a promising character during the last November NetHack Tournament [1] because a gnome picked up a wand of fire from someone’s grave and blasted me with it.

Yeah that’s another difference. When you play NetHack online [2] [3] you run into the ghosts and graves of other players, not just your own previous characters. I have run into levels online with the ghosts of 3 different people who were all killed by various dangerous monsters that kept accumulating more powerful equipment from each victim. It can be quite ridiculous!

[1] https://tnnt.org/

[2] https://alt.org/nethack/

[3] https://www.hardfought.org/


Mercaptan is a group of compounds, more than one of which are used as gas odorants, so in some places, gas smells of rotten eggs, similar to H2S, while in others gas doesn't smell like that at all, but a quite distinct smell that's reminiscent garlic and durian.


If the reason someone wanted to learn Arabic was because they thought they could learn one language to do all of those things, it's clear why they might just drop the idea when they learn they can't.


No they would learn standard arabic as everyone understands and can speak to some extent.


Rust itself cannot cause tetanus but it can include unsafe blocks which can activate tetanus spores by FFI.


Excellent comment!

As a historical tidbit I'll add that Romans did develop two ways to write larger numbers.

1. Writing a line (vinculum) over a numeral to multiply its value by 1,000. This was in fact extended to writing a line to the left and above a numeral to multiply its value by 1,000,000, and could in principle be extended to lines below and to the right to multiply by 10^9 and 10^12, and even nested boxes for larger powers.

2. The use |), |)), |))), ... for 500, 5,000, 50,000, ... and (|), ((|)), (((|))), ... for 1,000, 10,000, 100,000, ... These can be continued indefinitely.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_numerals#Large_numbers

Both require an ever increasing number of marks just to write the increasing powers, as well as an ever increasing number of powers being summed, but both increase only logarithmically, so we end up using O((log n)²) marks to write n. This is quadratically worse than positional notation, but exponentially better than just writing M over and over.


Wow, that's amazing! I had somehow never heard of this before despite being into numeral systems. Thank you for sharing!


If you like numeral systems, you might be interested in packages that let one do arithmetic using continued fractions: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/6158099


Note that our use of D and M for the "Roman numerals" 500 and 1000 is a misinterpretation of their |) and (|).


Can you really argue that this use is a "misinterpretation" and not just the usual evolution of written symbols?


Yes, D and M are letters.


Symbols like that can represent all sorts of things, and numbers are no exception! In fact the Romans had been using other letters to represent their numbers since Etruscan times. Wait until you hear the torrid history of the character V (and its "misrepresentation" U).


The berries (but not the seeds!) are apparently edible, and I have myself eaten one without noticing any ill effect. IIRC it was indeed the berries that were used in the Agatha Christie novel, so apparently a mistake.


Moreover, in a later picture on the page you can see an example showing a -dóttir name in that field (I had wondered if perhaps it was only used for people who happened to have a "real" surname as opposed to a patronymic, e.g. foreign-born citizens) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Icelandic_passport#/media/Fi...


Facepalm. I don't know how I missed that.


Just a technical nitpick: Hitler was appointed by President Hindenburg, not directly elected. However Hindenburg was directly elected and Hitler was leader of the party that received the most votes (though still a minority).


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