welp, there goes my Tuesday.

While i do think life exists elsewhere in the universe, I think the chances of extraterrestrial biological entities coming to our planet is exceedingly unlikely. Space is just too big, and there isn’t any hard evidence that faster-than-light travel is even possible.

Although, the universe isn’t just big – it’s old. There could be some ancient civilization from an ancient planet that became uninhabitable long ago. If they were technologically advanced enough to escape their solar system before things went tits-up AND were able to live multiple generations fully in space AND they just so happened to set out in our direction, I guess it’s possible that they found us. Even then, i would expect any UFOs or whatever would merely be probes, not the actual biological entities themselves.

I agree that it’s nonsense, and thanks for pointing out that I can look up European nutrition facts – i’m gonna start doing that. I wish we’d do the per 100g thing, but we don’t which makes it easier for companies to game the system. My point was that nutrition facts don’t always tell the whole story, especially if your country’s regulatory bodies have been lobbied into submission by the companies they are supposed to be regulating, so finding out if your tea has added sugars may not be as simple as looking on the box.

Tic Tacs say 0g sugar in the nutrition facts, even though they’re mostly sugar. They can do this because they aren’t required to report quantities of sugar below 0.5g, but the serving size is 1 tic tac or, conveniently, 0.49g.

indeed. i like to believe he hates when we do that

I was, but I’m making ANUSTART

Then you’re gonna hate my use of “lololol” instead of “hahahah”, both of which i use essentially interchangeably in texts.

Well, now I know what to ask from Santa for Christmas.

The only thing that makes sense is that they honestly DO believe a big pile of money will save them. Their big pile of money has been getting them out of trouble their whole lives, why would they expect it to all of a sudden stop working in this case? They’re wrong, but they don’t know that (yet).

I think it’s because English isn’t super consistent with the spelling of vowel sounds. Consider also “choose” (rhymes with “lose”) and “chose” (which doesn’t rhyme with either).

I guess really the vowel sound in loose/lose is basically the same; the difference is whether or not the “s” makes a “s” sound or a “z” sound… It is admittely odd that the presence or absence of an extra “o” would affect the sound of an adjacent constant (especially when we have a perfectly good “z” character available).

Which reminds me of my pet peeve: when people use “breath” or “cloth” instead of “breathe” or “clothe”.

Wow. Well fucking said, my friend. You are absolutely right.

a nature preserve with fancy radiaton-eating mushrooms, to boot! (the jury is still techinically out on whether or not they are “eating” it, but in the immortal words of Fox Mulder, I want to believe)

Chernobyl had such a far-reaching environmental impact. Beyond even the radioactive pollution stuff, it scared everyone away from nuclear power and back to fossil fuels for energy production. I sometimes wonder where we’d be wrt CO2 levels if nuclear energy adoption had continued along the same trend as it was before Chernobyl. Would we have had substantially more time to mitigate climate change? Maybe we’d have been in the same boat (or an equally bad boat) due to other factors; maybe it would have stymied renewables even more due to already having a readily available and well-established alternative to fossile fuels in nuclear power. Idk. But if someone wrote one of those what-if alternative history novels about the subject, I’d read the heck out of it.

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There’s also a long list of descriptions from sightings over the years, as well as summaries of scientific hypothesis attempting to explain the phenomenon. There’s even an emission spectrum published in 2014. I for one can learn stuff without having all the answers completely figured out (which is good, since almost everything has something unexplained about it if you dig deep enough). For example, I learned I can make plasma balls in the microwave! Very cool.