I should email him and ask if three days a week is infrequent enough to avoid burnout. That’s pretty often to maintain such an incredible level of quality. (Tom Scott had enough after 10 years.) But maybe since it’s his full-time gig, it’s optimal - he can spend most of the week reading cool stuff that gives him tons of good ideas and he actually wouldn’t want to publish any less frequently.
I mean Randall has been doing the comic since like 2004 or something so I feel like if he was going to burn out, he would have by now. At this point him burning out would just be him retiring.
I used to frequent the same IRC channels as Randall; I always got the impression it's a case of "do what you love and you'll never work a day in your life"
In several European languages like French and Danish, 20 is used as a base, at least with respect to the linguistic structure of the names of certain numbers (though a thoroughgoing consistent vigesimal system, based on the powers 20, 400, 8000 etc., is not generally used).
"Eighty-seven" in English is "quatre-vingt sept" in French; "four twenties seven", which is basically what he's saying.
The second one is arguably not vigesimal but instead just an echo of the Germanic way of saying numbers that English has all but lost. You'd be surprised how long things will lurk around the fringes of a language despite not being the most popular way of saying things.
I'd totally be up to magnet fish, but our bomb disposal department finds enough explosives from ww2 as is. Though I could use a pair of rusty bolt cutters used in some crime, as shown on the Wikipedia article ...
Magnet fishing, also called magnetic fishing, is searching in outdoor waters for ferromagnetic objects available to pull with a strong neodymium magnet.[1] Recovered items may be dangerous, such as firearms, ammunition, and bombs.
I'm not getting the 'better' part. You're much more stationary and whatever you pull up will be coated with muck and slime and, as what I pasted said, it might also seriously hurt or even kill you.
I'd say finding a bomb on a beach that no one has discovered yet is less likely than finding one in a river.
There isn't even one instance of an active bomb exploding... And magnet fishing is a pretty common thing. Plus generally people will call the police if they find something potentially dangerous or used in a crime. It's probably fine.
I remember watching a video where some people pulled a landmine out of a river and the cops were so annoyed to have to deal with it. Apparently this wasn't the first explosive that's come up out of that river and the cops basically blamed the people for pulling out another one.
xkcd
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