This is WAY better than the “Does X kind of game count as IF” conversation.
And of course hot dogs are sandwiches. Although in my neck of the woods, the taco is the major food. And that’s a sandwich, too. But it better be on a corn tortilla; flour tortillas are an abomination.
I was going to suggest that next. I have definite, strongly held beliefs on this topic. Unfortunately no one cares. The same with my contention that today’s music sucks.
I agree for the most part. I’ll eat burritos, but tacos on flour tortillas is like putting sugar on your grits.
His Dark Materials kind of has all of these…maybe not the drugs
If a runaway trolley goes off track into the woods and fells a tree, and no one is around to hear it except for a brain in a vat sitting at a picnic table nearby, and the tree knocks over the picnic table such that a hotdog falls to the ground, does the sandwich a) fall on the sausage side like a toast on the butter side, and b) make the sound of one hand clapping?
Yes, yes. But what if a woodcutter chops down the tree before the trolley hits it? Is then the woodcutter not responsible for the state of the hot dog?
…no soft tacos? Or delicious quesadillas??
In the historical linguistics class I’m teaching, I set aside at least one but usually two days for this topic. I divide the students into teams and give them the task to define “sandwich” in a way that includes all sandwiches but excludes all non-sandwiches. Then the other team has to try to find some counterexample to this definition (“so you’re saying an ice-cream sandwich is not a sandwich?”). It goes back and forth like this for a while as they try to rack up points. Eventually they come up with a perfect definition.
Then during the time between one lecture and the next I get together with some friends and family and try to brainstorm one more exception to their perfect definition. This time it was a slice of pie.
The point is, of course, to convince them that it’s effectively impossible to capture the usage of words in logical definitions. So the next question is, how should we define them? How do words actually mean anything at all? What even is “meaning”?
It’s usually a big hit. I’m proud of that class.
Depends: yes, if he cuts the tree with Occam’s razor; no, if he’s a lumberjack who sleeps all night and works all day, who just skips and jumps, and likes to press wild flowers, whereby he disturbs a butterfly whose wings cause a storm which fells the tree.
I’ve been teaching mathematical proof techniques this semester, and I run up against the same thing. At some point I find myself almost saying, “see? Isn’t that right? Doesn’t the law of universal instantiation just make sense? FOR GOD’S SAKE HOW COULD IT BE ANYTHING ELSE?”
What in the world is a “chip butty”? Is this some kind of Canadian thing?
Oh yes, and I’m Lawful Neutral on this chart.
I think it’s British. Chips in that context are french fries, possibly.
Next topic, and it’s a serious, heavy one. Life and death, ethics, etc.
If you see a junebug flailing around on its back on your porch, do you help it, leave it, or squish it? I mean, I hate to squish a junebug because they are just so pathetically dumb. They were definitely standing behind the door when the brains were passed out. I honestly can’t think of a dumber creature, and maybe I should be kind to them because they just can’t do anything right. But it feels wrong to flip it back over because 10 seconds later it will be trying to get into my nose. And leaving it there means the ants will probably get it.
It’s a conundrum.
Everyone here is clearly violating the author’s copyright. Please STOP it.
Well, if they’re the same creature down South as they are up North, then they’re a vehement pest species and I mercy stomp squash 'em in one go. They don’t need to suffer, but the garden doesn’t need to suffer them either, they’ll take out the whole scape, and we’ve naturalized it.
I’d help it. I often find myself helping bugs even if they have found their way into my home. Except wasps and hornets, which I will go out of my way to kill mercilessly anywhere they are found.
Ah, but the bug is just doing what it does, eating to survive. It’s hardly the bugs’ fault humans moved them somewhere they shouldn’t have.
Fair enough to the junebugs, but I’ve spent a lot of money and energy in restoring our backyard so that native species can flourish, and it’d be a real bummer if it got wiped out because of the junebugs munching up all of the roots!
We have lots of cute chunky wildlife (bunnies, groundhogs), lots of creepy crawlies (giant orb weavers, stone centipedes, rolly pollies, ants, grass spiders, wolf spiders, the occasional black widow spider, assorted bees, some wasps) and plenty of butterflies (monarchs, cabbage whites, swallowtails, skippers, red admirals, painted ladies, and more, and moths of all sorts, though the most common one I’ve found are plume moths) and so on.
The monarchs especially could do with the bump- their populations have been really impacted by global climate change and OE (Ophryocystis elektroscirrha, a commonly introduced issue to wild populations from butterfly farm bred ones due to the poor, cramped conditions, which is why local representatives encourage instead the growing of helpful plants, like milkweed).
Plus all the native plants! Butterflyweed, lupine, primrose, vervain, asters, trefoils- and a whole rash of clover to act as foot cover and reduce watering needs from like, non native grasses. We have the odd splash of wild daisies, dandelions, bull thistles, and plantains, though I don’t really need to do much by the way of weeding anymore, since the desirable plants are well adapted to our climate and can out compete them naturally, so we don’t douse the place in pesticides or herbicides or anything. No fertilizers even! And we have space to garden, both in the ground and in elevated buckets- some lettuces and peppers get nibbled by the adorable bunnies, but that’s their taxes, haha.
The HOA absolutely hates our backyard- they did win on the front yard: they demanded that it be maintained as like, grass, or scaped- so we spited them with hardy shrubs (was allowed under the same allowance for fencing) and a bunch of stone paving and gravel instead, rather than needing to go out and water our front yard chunk. Moss has begun to creep over it, which is quite lovely.
UGH. I’ve heard stories of people trying to get rid of their lawns, because manicured lawns are just so evil and horrible, and their HOA fines them.
That’s one of the reasons we moved out to the middle of nowhere. There’s no code to tell us what to do or how to do it, no HOAs, and really very few people. We never have to wear pants here, because it takes some travel to get where anyone could see you.
When we moved here from the city, I had idyllic dreams of peacefully gardening and growing butterfly plants and veggies. And the previous owners left big beautiful fenced garden areas with great soil, and I was all starry-eyed and planted all the things. The butterfly plants worked great, but the veggie gardening was like a horror movie called The Wormening. The worms were so awful that for the first time, I really got the concept of pesticides. One day I just closed the gate on it and never went back in.
