Not necessarily an acronym, but here's a fun one for Japanese: Laughing in Japanese is warau, which gets shortened when typing to just w. If you want to laugh a lot, you would type wwww. That ends up looking like a field of grass, so that in turn gets shortened into 草 (kusa, or grass). Basically, 草 is the Japanese equivalent of lol

Also, in Chinese, thank you is often abbreviated as 3q, because when you say it out loud, it sounds like "thank you" (san kyu)

For example, the Egyptian government knows all too well that the giants built the pyramids, but they won't confirm it because tourism might take a dive

I'm in the UC system as well. It's both concerning and amusing how much college students nowadays go to their parents for permission on minor things. I get it, to some degree. Respect for your parents and all that. But some degree of autonomy would be helpful at that age

Parents' jobs aren't to protect their kids. It's to make sure that their kids are sufficiently prepared for the world when the kids grow up.

There seems to be this rising trend of parents being overprotective of their children, even to the point of having parental controls enabled for children even as old as the late teens. My impression has always been that these children are too sheltered for their age.

I grew up in the "age of internet anarchism," where goatse was just considered a harmless prank to share with your friends and liveleaks was openly shared. Probably not the best way of growing up, to be fair, but I think we've swung so hard into the opposite direction that a lot of these children, I feel, are living in their own little bubbles.

To some degree, it honestly makes sense to me why the younger generation nowadays is so willing to post their lives on the internet. When that's the only thing you can do on the internet, that's what you'll do

Not gaslighting, and from what you seem to describe, doesn't appear to be manipulative either. She just seems to be angry. Not to say that you can't be both angry and manipulative, but I don't see clear intent for her to try to guilt trip or gaslight you.

Gaslighting would be if she lied and said that she sent you a message when in fact she didn't. i.e., lying with the intent to make you question your judgment and perception

Guilt tripping would be if she pressured you into giving her a gift as compensation for ignoring her message. i.e., taking advantage of someone's feelings of guilt to get them to do something for you.

I don't see any lie, and I don't see hee trying to extract anything out of you. Worst case interpretation, she's being a bit petty. Best case interpretation, she's scared of being alone outside.

I noticed your final paragraph, and I would be cautious in general about saying that someone who's trying to convince you that their anger is justified is automatically manipulative. That's kind of just how anger works. People think that their anger is justified. Otherwise they wouldn't be angry. Manipulation occurs when you start to feel like you are being used for their own motives.

Either way, you should probably talk to her about it. It seems like she thinks the issue is more severe than you appear to think, and that is something that should be discussed with her

End of mankind - nothing, really. Even with climate change or nuclear war, the rich will live on. It will be a shitty, greedy, undeserving populace that lives on, but mankind will live on.

End of the world as we know it - climate change. I don't know of anything else more existential

Not a paleontologist, but I think it's a mix of both wrong information being spread back then and also new info being discovered.

I'm pretty sure people knew that birds were dinosaurs for a while, but people just liked the idea that dinosaurs were monstrous lizards. Giant monsters just capture the imagination in a way that giant birds can't.

And then paleontologists started finding fossils that had imprints of feathers still on the body, and it became really hard to ignore that dinosaurs were a lot more bird-like than people would like to believe.

My impression has generally been that once dinosaurs started to be viewed as bird-like, people started to see them as animals rather than as monsters, and that just kinda snowballed into dinosaurs becoming more and more bird-like

No, not weird at all. PhD's are pain, but certain people like the pain. If you're good with handling stress, and also OK with working in a fast-paced, high-impact environment (for real, not business talk BS), then it may be the right decision for you. The biggest thing that I would say is that you should really, really think about whether this is what you want, since once you start a PhD, you've locked the next 6 years of your life into it with no chance of getting out

Edit: Also, you need to have a highly sensitive red-flag radar. As a graduate student, you are highly susceptible to abuse from your professor. There is no recourse for abuse. The only way to avoid abuse is by not picking an abusive professor from the get-go. Which is hard, since professors obviously would never talk badly about themselves. Train that red-flag radar, since you'll need to really read between every word and line to figure out if a professor is right for you

I see that Louisiana is run by Clay Puppington... How many "lost commandments" are they going to include?

It is self-aware ironic cringe. This is from r/laughjokes, which is where people try to make the cringiest, unfunny jokes possible, a la Funwaa (but Funwaa does it unironically)

I can kinda see both ways. I think both systems aren't necessarily mutually exclusive - I think the old system works more intuitively for pipes with low volumes of fluid, and the new system works more intuitively for pipes that are full or near full.

I hope that the developers can mix the two systems, so that pipes function with the old system when pipes are empty or near empty, and it switches to the new system when pipes are full or near full

CV's are expected to be wall-of-text and as long as you can make it. They can easily go for 6+ pages. You are probably thinking about resumes

Windows comes with a secret option to turn off updates with group policies, so you don't need to modify anything or use a script. It works just fine for me. No updates (unless I manually click update).

The option for automatic updates is several layers deep in a nested menu tree, and I don't fully recall what the path to get there is. But you should be able to find it online.

Dr. Stone. It's not for everyone, but if you're into STEM, it's probably the closest you'll get to media accurately portraying science and technology.

It also puts into perspective just how much knowledge, expertise, and experience went into basically everything that we take for granted today. Makes you at least a bit hopeful for the future of humanity

Yup, story goes that the publisher thought it was too scary for children, so Neil Gaiman, the author, told the publisher to read it to her daughter. The daughter said it wasn't scary, and so it was published as a children's book. Years later, the daughter said that she was actually scared but lied about it because she wanted to know the ending

Coraline. The book is significantly creepier than the movie and manages to perfectly strike the uncanny valley

If you want a real answer, it's like living with a roommate 100% of the time, with all the positives and negatives that come with having a roommate 100% of the time.

Don't believe in all the lovey-dovey stuff that you see in media. That's just attraction, not love. In some ways it's similar to war - media always glamorize the emotional aspect of war, while completely skipping over the fact that wars are won through robust logistics networks. Love is similar in that in real life, any physical attraction takes a backstage to the fundamental requirement that everyone needs to be on the same page about basically everything.

In that respect, it is a lot of communication, and oftentimes it requires a bit too much communication than you are willing to provide. It definitely takes a lot of effort to establish and maintain robust communication with your significant other, especially if you are not used to doing so. But as long as you continue to do so, you basically get a close friend who is always there to help with what you might need

Desktop. Gaming laptops end up being the worst of both worlds when it comes to power and portability. Weaker than a desktop, heavier and bulkier than a laptop. Makes it hard to game, and hard to carry.

And as a consequence, quantum bogo sort

Not an expert, but my understanding is that the multiverse (at least, what we today associate as the multiverse) came about due to the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics. Basically, quantum physicists had an observation - particles were moving as though they were being pushed by an invisible wave, and they would pick a random position based on that wave when observed.

The most prevalent explanation for this behavior is the Copenhagen interpretation, which states that the particle is the invisible wave, and the wave collapses into a particle when it is measured. But another common interpretation is the many worlds interpretation, which states that the invisible wave is just a statistical probability of where the particle is. And the reason why the particle seems to pick a random point on the wave when observed is actually because the particle creates branching timelines, and we can only observe what happens in our own timelines. Hence, it seems random to us.

I speculate that the idea of multiple parallel timelines, each slightly different, was probably pretty popular with scifi writers, especially since it's an easy way to portray "what if" scenarios in their stories, and so the concept became popular because of that