palordrolap

Gutei's finger.

Also: He who thinks he understands Zen does not understand.

I get 1132 spoonfuls as a lower bound.

Big assumptions:

1. Soup is considered identical to water for the sake of molecule count and density.
2. Soup and water are evenly mixed before each spoonful.
3. Each spoonful is guaranteed to contain the correct fraction of soup to water from the mix.

There are ~1.666×10^25 molecules of water in 500 ml (source: WolframAlpha). We seek what power of (500-25)/500 [= 19/20] is small enough to counter this number in order to get to the level of single molecules. This is about 1132.

But like you point out, it's going to be tasting watery a long, long time before that happens. It's 50% rainwater after about 14 spoonfuls (Sanity check: That would be 10 if the container was big enough and no spoonfuls were being removed.). ~90% at 45 spoons and ~99% at 90 spoons.

Define "musician". Basically I'm that guy who will play the first few bars of Für Elise on a piano, can't read music, and doesn't give any sign of knowing much more than that. This comment is a manifestation of that mindset, tbh.

Music theory interests me. I used to play a bit of keyboard and can strum a few chords on a ukulele, but I'm a billion light years away from being good enough to perform for people. Maybe I'd be OK in the background in place of a bass player, but you'd be better off with a prerecording or a computer standing in. Wrong sort of brain for practise, practise, practise.

But since you might like something interesting to look at, I have occasionally watched people like Heart of the Keys or There I Ruined It on YouTube, and dream that maybe, one day, I'd be able to do something like that.

HotK has done "1 minute, 10 minute, 1 hour" practise challenges with pieces she doesn't know, something that actual musicians might like to try and then discuss, and TIRI is just plain musical silliness.

Also Jacob Collier is a freak of nature and I wish I had his superpowers.

The genius move would be to do that but keep a couple in stealth mode. As to whether the very stable genius would do that is another matter.

And maybe the Russians would see right through that, because they're not stupid. Hmm.

How much slack did you have in your 10.* network? Or was it literally 16.7 million devices?

To me it seems about as likely an Iranian would spy for Israel as an Afghan would, i.e. not very likely at all. They'd be highly atypical compared to the majority of people in their home country, that's for sure.

There's a simple solution to dine-and-dashers and I was happy to deal with it as a customer when one of my favourite eating places implemented it: Have the customer pay up front before the food arrives.

Heck, they may have implemented that for my group specifically because we clearly had a few drinks in us and we might have looked like the sort of group who'd try it. The meaning was clear, but we weren't bothered. We paid. We ate. We thanked. We left. In that order. Perfect.

Of course, it would turn a tipping system like the US one on its head because the service charge would have to be baked in to the price, but anyone unhappy with service could be given something back after the meal. That is, once the customer's story of woe has been confirmed, and how much food they ate has been noted.

(If the manager still comps the meal and punishes the server, that's a different problem entirely. Let's face it, a terrible manager would have done that anyway.)

Hard to say. I tend to opt for safe things most of the time. Twice as a child I was conned into taking a spam fritter under the belief it was fish. I like battered fish. It was not fish. I do not like spam.

Texture-wise, I cannot abide kidney. Used to love steak and kidney pies but something changed when my adult teeth came in.

Thirdly, I still have flashbacks to a serving of whitebait I ordered out of curiosity in a restaurant one time. They didn't taste terrible that I remember. Just... whole little fish cooked and to be eaten whole. Never again.

And then there was the case of the Kit-Kat that I was eating blind, piece by piece from my coat pocket, and one of the pieces was hard and unpleasant. I am still not sure there wasn't something else in my pocket that I grabbed and ate by mistake, but that's pretty up there.

POTS isn't quite dead in the UK, but it's very much on the way out. The transition is slated to be complete by the end of January 2027.

30? I'd just changed jobs, was nearly four years into a mortgage, and was in a long-distance relationship with someone who was probably a catfish (which I suspected but didn't want to believe), so I had a lot on my mind at the time. The tens digit of my age changing was the least of my concerns.

In fact the most enduring memory from the time would have to be my new boss taking retribution for me being able to carry over pre-booked time off from my previous job. I got my birthday as a day off, but not before I'd been sent out in a torrential downpour to post mail I later learned the postman would otherwise have taken.

Silliness aside, phantom pregnancies are a thing, but you generally don't get a placenta without something else besides. If there didn't seem to be anything, it was probably so non-viable that it dissolved or was reabsorbed, kicking off the rejection process.

Most don't even get to that stage though. Super early miscarriages are said to happen incredibly often and the carrier doesn't necessarily even know that they'd conceived in the first place. A big hint is a delayed, heavy period, but most people who get periods won't bat an eye at things like that happening. That'll happen for a number of - occasionally hard to explain - reasons even without being sexually active.

Then you find out the genie uses a signed data value and you now owe him a wish. You're not granted magic. You're compelled to grant the wish. The only restrictions on the genie's wish is that it must be within your (soft, squishy) mortal power.

I can imagine you being reset to the point of the genie's wish every time you die (naturally or otherwise) without succeeding. This could well turn into a Groundhog Day type situation.