Sure, but I was responding to someone who was defining wasp (the common word) based on clade (using scientific words).

I’m fine with common parlance words for things. What I had issue with was arbitrarily restricting the definition of wasp to a specific clade, which would exclude ants and bees, and also a whole host of at the very least wasp-adjacent animals which would now be stuck with no real way to describe them.

(Also, yes, fish is a rubbish scientific word. We’re far closer cousins of salmon than sharks are. By any reasonable definition of fish, at least biologically, we are fish. You could redefine “fish” in the same way we define “tree”, i.e. based on structure and not on ancestry, but by that definition whales should still be fish. The word “fish” shouldn’t be allowed within 50 metres of cladistics.)

Just to confirm, you don’t think of jewel wasps, spider wasps, sand wasps, and flower wasps as wasps, since they’re not part of the Vespidae, correct?

I’ve mostly seen wasps defined as basically “Apocrita but not the ones we don’t think count as wasps because there’s too many of them, specifically bees and ants.” Which leads to the same weird reasoning that would somehow make legless lizards lizards, but not snakes. I’ve seen velvet ants referred to as wasps, but not ants, even though true ants are far closer cousins to Vespidae. That just isn’t a viable scientific definition. I’m glad we’ve mostly moved on to grouping avian dinosaurs among the dinosaurs, but it feels like a lot of similar groupings are still lagging.

I’m willing to accept Vespidae as a synonym of wasps, but that excludes a ton of wasps. It also erases the very wasp-like nature of ant ancestors, which is what makes cladistics so fascinating. So why not just open it up to include all Apocrita and be done with it?

I’m also fine with a morphological definition of wasps, like how “tree” isn’t based on ancestry but on structure, but you were the one pulling in the scientific names.

Except many non-Vespidae, both living and extinct, would readily be considered wasps. Look at this thing and tell me it’s not a wasp: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Eusapvertic.jpg If that’s a wasp and a yellow-jacket is a wasp, then so are ants and bees, in the same way that we are apes and birds are dinosaurs. You wouldn’t call a zoo to deal with a loose human and you wouldn’t call dr. Grant to deal with a pigeon, but biologically it makes a lot more sense to deal with ancestry then with how a species interacts with humans.

The aye-aye is also doing much better, mostly because the population size was severely underestimated at the time of writing.

And yeah, the book is amazing. I usually describe it to fans of his other works as somehow being his weirdest book, despite being non-fiction.

Weird comic, why put the punchline in the penultimate panel?

To be fair, based on the (lack of) spelling and grammar in his e-mails, that might actually be how he writes letters.

Eh, vintage has had control and hatebear-style decks as its most prominent decks for years, with combo often being around 1/3 or less of the metagame. Legacy often has a tempo or control deck as the de facto best deck. Combo being this dominant is really only a modern thing. And while some of these decks aren’t A+B combo decks, I wouldn’t immediately consider them interactive in the way tempo or control would be.

Most of these decks are racing for their win-con, which makes them strategically similar in a way a metagame with strategies like death&taxes, hard control, tempo, and midrange wouldn’t be. I wouldn’t consider a hypothetical metagame with 50 different T3 combo decks more diverse than, say, current vintage.

None of these look very interactive, so I’m not sure “healthy” is the right word. Diverse, sure, but a format where almost every deck is essentially a combo deck is probably not especially interesting to play (and I say this as an absolute combo degenerate).

I myself only ever visit chewbac.ca!

This feels like they gave Sakurai carte blache and I’m here for it! Kirby Air Ride was an absolute gem and probably the best showcase of Sakurai’s design sensibilities. Definitely my most anticipated game of the year!

It wouldn’t. A tetrahedron has four sides, hence the name, while an Egyptian-style pyramid has five (if you include the base, otherwise it isn’t even a polyhedron).

No, I agree that independence is necessary, not just because of “always”, but because if, as a crude example, your odds of hitting B halve each time you hit A, an infinite number of tries isn’t guaranteed to give you Shakespeare, even if the odds aren’t technically 0. My problem was that what you originally described wasn’t independence, it’s uniformity, which isn’t a prerequisite. And it’s up to 9 upvotes now so I don’t know what’s going on.

What? That’s not what independence means. They need to be independent, yes, because otherwise you might get into weird corner cases where the probably doesn’t converge to 1, but they don’t have to be equally likely. In fact, weighing the odds based on how often letters are used by Shakespeare should lower the expected timeframe. Heck, Shakespeare doesn’t use “J”, why would that key even be relevant? Where in the world do normal distributions even come into this? How does this comment have 4 upvotes? What am I missing here?

Oh no, I’m so sorry, the microplastics got you too: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Language_and_the_euro&diffonly=true#Written_conventions_for_the_euro_in_the_languages_of_EU_member_states

And Last Chance to See! It’s somehow almost as absurd as his fictional works.

… it’s not really an opinion piece? It’s mostly a breakdown of the church’s dubious history and leadership. I’m sure they also do video game stuff, but that feels like it has no bearing on the actual facts presented.

In case anyone genuinely has this misconception: birds branched off from the other dinosaurs during the Jurassic, probably over 100 million years before the astroid hit. Dinos didn’t suddenly grow feathers and a beak because a big rock hit them.