Hacker News: rubberpoliceman

New comment by rubberpoliceman in "How does IKEA come up with names for its products?"

rubberpoliceman — Wed, 19 Aug 2026 01:54:41 +0000

> Brzęczyszczykiewicz

MAUL HALTEN!

New comment by rubberpoliceman in "The hardest working font in Manhattan (2025)"

rubberpoliceman — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 16:23:52 +0000

> hear 50hz

100Hz, actually…

New comment by rubberpoliceman in "Study uncovers lost 'golden age' of languages"

rubberpoliceman — Sat, 01 Aug 2026 19:02:09 +0000

Animate gender didn’t split into masculine and feminine — inanimate collective plural was repurposed as feminine.

New comment by rubberpoliceman in "How Thomas Mann wrote The Magic Mountain"

rubberpoliceman — Sun, 04 Jan 2026 10:56:03 +0000

Excellent. Now do “bürgerliches Gesetzbuch”.

New comment by rubberpoliceman in "How Thomas Mann wrote The Magic Mountain"

rubberpoliceman — Sun, 04 Jan 2026 10:08:10 +0000

This isn’t hard to understand. “Burgher” is a perfectly legitimate translation of “Bürger” as in “bürgerlicher Mittagstisch”, “Der Bürger duldet nichts Unverständliches im Haus”. “Citizen” is a perfectly legitimate translation of “Bürger” when it comes to “Bürgeramt” or “Weltbürger”.

New comment by rubberpoliceman in "How Thomas Mann wrote The Magic Mountain"

rubberpoliceman — Sun, 04 Jan 2026 08:42:06 +0000

> In German it really just means "Citizen".

It most definitely does not — it’s both “citoyen” and “bourgeois”.

New comment by rubberpoliceman in "CIA staffers offered buyout deals to resign"

rubberpoliceman — Wed, 05 Feb 2025 04:48:55 +0000

They are not. In their defense, these people are imbeciles.

New comment by rubberpoliceman in "Why does man print "gimme gimme gimme" at 00:30? (2017)"

rubberpoliceman — Fri, 04 Oct 2024 03:50:34 +0000

I think you’ll find we’re pedants.

New comment by rubberpoliceman in "What’s the difference between an -ectomy, an -ostomy, and an -otomy? (1986)"

rubberpoliceman — Thu, 16 May 2024 09:09:03 +0000

> and mild inflammation may occur without noticable swelling.

Calor, dolor, rubor, tumor

New comment by rubberpoliceman in "What's the fastest language in the world?"

rubberpoliceman — Sat, 06 Apr 2024 21:01:19 +0000

Golf.

New comment by rubberpoliceman in "Vectors from Leibniz to Einstein"

rubberpoliceman — Tue, 19 Dec 2023 16:17:27 +0000

Also, http://www.numdam.org/item/SPHM_1979___2_A1_0.pdf

New comment by rubberpoliceman in "Strange Metals: Where electricity may flow without electrons"

rubberpoliceman — Tue, 28 Nov 2023 10:08:29 +0000

This is not even approximately true. j is not “defined in terms of E”. It occurs as a source term in one of the inhomogeneous Maxwell equations, and consistency with the other inhomogeneous one (div D=rho) requires that div j = dot rho, which means that j is the flow of charge density. So, I guess if electron movement shouldn’t be referred to as current, we shouldn’t refer to electrons as charges, either…

New comment by rubberpoliceman in "LK-99 isn’t a superconductor"

rubberpoliceman — Wed, 16 Aug 2023 19:05:54 +0000

Resistivity is measured in ohms * meter, so this may be a unit conversion issue…

New comment by rubberpoliceman in "We Changed Our Lives Because of Our Remote Jobs. Now It’s All Crumbling"

rubberpoliceman — Sat, 17 Jun 2023 14:23:00 +0000

> Sure there was the odd professor that would call a stack a "Stapel"

“Kellerspeicher”, certainly

New comment by rubberpoliceman in "U-Bahn station in Berlin is decorated with radioactive uranium glazed tiles"

rubberpoliceman — Tue, 07 Feb 2023 19:04:24 +0000

I don‘t think that‘s unintuitive. What goes into a source-free volume element has to go out of that volume element (radiation or field).

New comment by rubberpoliceman in "Why the US and UK can’t stop fighting the metric system"

rubberpoliceman — Tue, 17 Jan 2023 04:44:36 +0000

> You also have the joy of "the hole for a 17/64ths Whitworth tap is 47.2 thou" or whatever other imperial nonsense machinists have to deal with.

It’s worse. The drill size for a 7/16” coarse tap is ‘U’.

New comment by rubberpoliceman in "Old jokes"

rubberpoliceman — Fri, 05 Aug 2022 01:54:49 +0000

> 21. A widower was showing some friendly guests around his garden. "Look", he said, "There is the tree where my three unhappy wives hanged themselves". One of the attendees, who was a husband, asked for a cutting from the tree - that he might plant it in his garden.

That one can be traced back to Cicero:

https://en.m.wikisource.org/wiki/Gesta_Romanorum_Vol._I_(187...

New comment by rubberpoliceman in "When murderers were hanged quickly (2014)"

rubberpoliceman — Thu, 13 Jun 2019 03:47:37 +0000

While I do hold opinions about criminal justice, you can't possibly know what they are. I was pointing out that introducing "free will" into the debate only introduces a layer of indirection. A perpetrator felt as if he wanted to commit a crime, and a judge felt as if he decided that three years of prison was a commensurate sentence. Now, let's just redefine all verbs of volition to imply "feels as if", and nothing has changed. The judge may feel as if he thinks the perpetrator "deserved" the sentence. You want him to want to not feel that way, or rather, you feel as if you wanted him to feel that he should feel as if he wanted not to feel that way, by pointing out that one can't choose what to want.

New comment by rubberpoliceman in "When murderers were hanged quickly (2014)"

rubberpoliceman — Wed, 12 Jun 2019 18:29:50 +0000

Even if free will is an illusion (and I'm not sure how to assign meaning to this statement), how does that change anything? If a murderer had no choice but to murder, then the prosecutor had no choice but to prosecute, the jury had to find guilty, and the executioner had to execute.

New comment by rubberpoliceman in "The Milkman Model Returns, This Time for Shampoo and Haagen-Dazs"

rubberpoliceman — Fri, 24 May 2019 17:55:50 +0000

On their way to the store, most bulk products have been expectorated on by a number of sweaty men in dirty boots. It's not obvious to me how packaging would lower that number.