I’d reward you with an elephant ear sandwich for this joke, but I’m fresh out of those giant buns.

I genuinely did not know that! 😵

This reminds me of a similar factoid.

Did you know that if you took the entire Pacific salmon catch and laid it out nose to tail across the Sahara desert…

…the stench would be overpowering!

I know, right? It’s like irony is a lost art.

There’s also a reason why votes in parliaments aren’t secret.

It’s the lazy drive-by and rage votes specifically that I would love to see eliminated. If you’re too much a coward to defend a position, maybe you shouldn’t express it.

To me the anonymity of voting is the problem, so the solution is to make them public for all, not to find ways of making them more private.

👏

I need to work out a quad-lingual joke sometime: English, German, French, and Mandarin.

This is not even slightly true.

Base 10 was used because people in one influential area counted the tips of their fingers. But there are recorded (and in some cases still living!) finger counting systems where they count using the gaps between the fingers (giving us base 4 or base 8 depending on how many hands are used), using the thumb and the finger segments (base 12), the same as base 12 plus the finger roots (base 16), etc.

There is literally nothing “natural” about base 10. Indeed it’s not even a particularly useful system; bases 12 and 16 are far more useful given how you can do divide them in many more ways than base 10. It just happened to be the one that was used by the cultures that became most influential.

(Western) base-10 needs two hands. Base-12 is one-handed. (There’s a base-10 system used in China that’s one-handed, mind. Or, rather, it’s one-handed until you reach 10.)

Also some maths operations can be done fairly easily (like division) with the base-12 finger-counting system.

Binary finger counting is a pain in the ass, though. Too complicated for most people.

There are a great number of ways you can count on fingers. You can easily support base 4, base 5, base 8, base 10, base 12, base 16, base 19, and even higher (144, say) with finger counting. There’s nothing particularly “natural” about 10.

I hate you. So much.

All these high-quality puns in response are leaving me kinda blue.

Yes. Life is a constant struggle for … the person … who can read without difficulty and not for the one who gets confused by trivial and common formatting. That’s definitely how it works.

“Dissenting” is to the left of “the” in the comic example I gave. Did that confuse you too? If one confuses you and the other doesn’t, I really don’t know what to say. They’re using the SAME FORMATTING. (It’s called “centred text”.) If both confuse you then at least you’re consistent (but very bizarre given how common this formatting is).

…

I don’t even know how to respond to this.

Kirk’s complaint is at the top. Not only is English read from left to right, but it’s also read TOP TO BOTTOM. This fact has been used all over the place in writing, including in comics:

(So ubiquitous is this format that I literally just popped a comic I was in the process of reading up onto my screen and there it was in one of the frames! I didn’t have to go searching.)

You’ll also see it in advertising, in some books with fancier formatting, and a whole bunch of other places.

So remember not only “left to right” but “top to bottom” and you’ll do fine.

Where did you find a picture of my termite!? 😮

French people in general freak me out.

. . .

… Wait for it! …

. . .

I mean they eat pain for breakfast!