I don’t remember where I saw it or any of the specific details, but there was a comment a while back that was something along the lines of, “I love to think about how Spock and Leonard Nimoy would be great friends and chat about logic and science; and how Bones McCoy and DeForest Kelley would be amicably cantankerous and have a great time sharing a drink; but Jim Kirk would punch William Shatner in the face for being an idiot and spend the following five minutes giving an impassioned speech detailing why.”

John Scalzi needs to write a sequel to “Redshirts” with this premise.

Absolutely! I love this stuff. So, etymologically, the English word “toilet” (meaning the fixture where we put pee and poop) derives from the French word “toile,” meaning “cloth used for washing.” It’s actually also the source of the English word “towel.” But the way it got from “towel” to “poop hole” is complicated, and basically predicated on the reality that humans are squeamish about poop but have to talk about it kind of a lot (to find a place to put it, or excuse oneself so that they can put it there).

When indoor flush toilets were first introduced, the fixture itself was called a “sanitary basin.” The room was called a “water closet,” named in contrast to an “earth closet” (which was a… ehm…*non-*flush toilet. Basically, poop in a bucket, burn the contents of the bucket. The “earth” was “night earth,” yet another euphemism for “poop”). People would say that they needed to"go to the water closet" instead of saying “I gotta poop.”

But over time, the euphemism weakened. Instead of seeming like a polite way to say “I gotta poop,” it started to become more rude. This happened around the same time that people were putting the poop fixture into the room where you put on your wig or your makeup or whatever, which was already referred to as a “toilet” (referring specifically to the small cloth used in the process of getting ready in the morning, itself also the result of a bunch of euphemistic and memetic mutation). In that process, the word “water closet” started to apply directly to the fixture itself.

Then, over time, that euphemism also weakened, and the word “toilet” also started to seem rude. But again, this happened as people were putting the bathtub into the room with the poop fixture, so the room became the “bathroom” and the fixture became the “toilet.” That particular one happened pretty recently, so depending on your location or your age your grandmother might’ve still called the fixture the “water closet.”

And there are a bunch of other words that have been euphemisms or reverse euphemisms for the fixture or the room or the process (lavatory, washroom, powder room, crapper, commode, throne, drop a deuce, freshen up, see a man about a dog). One of my favorites is “spend a penny:” one of the first flush toilets (not invented by Thomas Crapper, though he would indeed go on to become a major manufacturer of the fixtures) was on display at a World’s Fair. You could use a freshly-cleaned one, and even get a shoe shine at the same time, for a penny. They’re all memes (ideas with symbolic meaning that spread from person to person), all because people are squeamish about poop but need to talk about it.

Which means that the journey of the word “toilet” is through a bunch of memes: Cloth -> room for makeup -> room with poop hole -> fixture where put poop.

There are a lot of English words that arose from memes. “Toilet,” for instance, is like a four-layer-deep euphemism. The big development the internet brought to it was using more detailed imagery.

Bob Belcher, donning his jacket on his way to the Cake show.

Not on Mastodon. Some of the other fedi microblog platforms have had it, though.

Yep. I have a few hunches about how it works (I would guess that the answer to your original question is “no” or “only kinda,” for instance) but honestly my hunches are likely no better than tea leaves and significantly less tasty.

YouTube doesn’t make public their view counting algorithm so that it can’t be gamed, so it’s anyone’s guess.

I’m pretty sure YouTube randomly “fuzzes” the public view count of videos specifically to prevent this kind of research.

“Brick,” or “charger brick.” Sometimes “AC adapter.”

I don’t know about “nobody.” Nobody likes traffic, and nobody likes being required to drive. But there are some really freaky people out there who enjoy the whole deal with cars, from the engines to the driving to the cruising to the racing. I used to be one of them, though I largely got that out of my system as a teenager.

But the thing is, deprioritizing cars in cities benefits them, too, because the enjoyability of driving has very little to do with speed or convenience and is inversely proportional only to the number of other cars on the road; so reducing car usage by 50% means that, for the people who do drive, their enjoyment goes up by 200%. Car people should be thrilled to see more dedicated bus and bike lanes.

Random fun fact: back in college, my girlfriend’s best friend (and my best friend’s girlfriend) was named Elisa. This being the early 2000s, I used an old school flip phone that had T9 for text entry. But “Elisa” wasn’t in the T9 dictionary, so I would hit 3-5-4-7 and it would prompt “Elis”—presumably expecting an “e” after—but once I hit that last 2, it would change to “flirc.”

It’s interesting that that’s actually become a thing now.

Whoa. I’m American and I just discovered that I had been using that word…uh…wrong for my region but right for the rest of the world? I thought it was phonemes in general, and that the vowel thing was an archaic usage. Interesting.

I knew it wasn’t alliteration, since it isn’t all the first syllable sound. But it’s always fun to learn new stuff about the language I’ve been speaking for nearly forty years.

SunSCreen SCandal ShoCKing auStralia - the world’S SKin Canc(S)er Capital

Not the point of the post, but–dang, that headline assonance is amazing.

It’s all more or less entertainment for me. I don’t really expect to get any actionable information on it. Alas, I don’t really have the discretionary income for such a hobby.

Oh, that’s a super fair point. It wouldn’t look like a USB port, it would just be a random gpio header or something, wouldn’t it?

I’m not super familiar with building hardware beyond watching, like, Linus Tech Tips.

Fair; I think the one potential oddity might be if you have an internal USB port that’s intended to run to a front-facing IO or something, but it really does seem like the easier way to figure that out would be to just open the case up and look.

I’ve asked questions in this way before because a lot of times it’s easier to get the “how to find out” answer from that kind of query than from asking “how do I know how many USB ports my motherboard has” and then wading through all the ads trying to sell you motherboards, and all the people saying “lol noob rtfm,” and so forth.

It usually depends on how big the road is that you’re driving on. Most state borders are in very extremely rural areas, so sometimes there’s not even a sign. On interstate highways it’s always quite obvious, but little country roads might not have any signage at all.

• There’s usually no obvious change in architecture, no; often the only architecture is farm buildings, and those are more or less consistent architecturally. And broadly speaking architecture is regional, rather than state-specific; the difference in architecture from northern Indiana to southern Indiana is far more pronounced than the difference in architecture from southern Indiana to northern Kentucky, for instance.

• As noted elsewhere, sometimes the infrastructure can be different (usually seen in road quality), but most states tend to number their county roads in different ways, so when you cross the border you’ll often find that the number of the roads you’re crossing tend to suddenly shift from “300W” to “2300E.” The signage may also change very slightly, though if you’re truly out in the middle of nowhere, there might not be any signage to change.

• Agriculture, like architecture, is usually much more defined by region than by state. All of the states around mine farm corn, wheat, and soybeans, just like mine does. Most also farm cows, though Kentucky notably has a lot more horses than any of its neighbors, so that can be a tell. But you don’t get into a ton of ranching until you get further west, and then you see large changes across multiple states at a time.

• Store brands often do change, but again, since most crossings are in rural areas, there often aren’t any stores around to notice the change right away. You’ll roll out of a state with a lot of Meijer stores and into a state where Publix is the regional grocery store, but until you get into a town, there’s no way to know.

• Culture is probably the thing you’ll notice least. People who live in rural areas tend to think of themselves as American before any other identifier, so you’ll find a lot of jingoism anywhere on both sides of any border. American flags, Christian crosses, gigantic emotional support pickup trucks, bizarrely aggressive patriotic bumper stickers, Trump signs and flags, etc. Depending on where you are those sorts of things are accompanied by very clear signs of deep poverty (mobile homes, trash-strewn lawns, run-down houses), but they can just as often be on or around very well-kept houses on huge acreage.

• And if you mean “culture” in the sense of theater, music, etc., you’re unlikely to find any at all near a state border.

I guess the other thing is that Google Maps will tell you “Welcome to (state)” when you’re navigating. There are some times that that’s the only way you’ll know.

This is it. This is the real answer. The same goes for AI. The really good uses for both aren’t lucrative enough, so the people with the money try to shoehorn it into places that aren’t a good fit in order to justify their outrageous valuations. Rinse and repeat until the bottom falls out of the market, then sweep up the pieces and try to come up with a new grift.