I think your wife’s case was actually significantly different from “flat earthers”, as a community. There’s ignorance, which can be corrected with knowledge and information and reasoning, and there’s willful defiance, which cannot. The very fact that she was freaked out and had a crisis, which enabled facts to enter her head, demonstrates that.

Flat earthers don’t believe in a flat earth. What they actually believe is that Satan is fighting a war for the minds of people, and education is a tool of satan to lead you away from god. All other nonsense they spew stems from that— they don’t believe the earth is flat because evidence shows it, they find evidence to support the earth being flat because the education system, which they believe to be from Satan, tells you it’s spherical.

And most (but not all) flat earthers have moved on to the next conspiracy that supports their central belief (Satan is fighting a war for your mind) and don’t care much about flat earth anymore. Flat earth was never the point, not being swayed by Satan is always the center.

Can’t you swap out DMEM for sports drinks anyway (with the Japanese brand Green Dakara being the best replacement)? That implies DMEM is basically a sports drink itself, if you think about it.

The correct GREEK plural, which would be used because the root of octopus is Greek, could be octopodes. However, in ENGLISH, people have started intuiting that words ending in “~us” pluralize to ~i, akin to cacti. So this isn’t about being a Latin rule, it’s actually an emergent English rule.

The emotional flashback against the definition of a planet was probably foreseeable, and I think the framing of it as a “demotion” was what makes people bitter to this day. People’s mental model still has an orrery of 9 objects spinning around the sun, with that last one “cast off” because it’s “too small”. That garners pity.

But note that mental model… it doesn’t even include Ceres. That got “kicked out of the club” too, and no one cares. Why? Because it’s part of the asteroid belt. That’s not a demotion, it’s a reassignment to something different but just as cool!

And yet…… that’s EXACTLY THE SAME CASE AS PLUTO. Pluto isn’t just the 9th and smallest object circling the sun far far away, it’s a member of the Kupier Belt! And that’s awesome, there’s a whole second belt! But Kupier is hard to pronounce from the spelling, and Kupier isn’t a sci-fi common word like asteroid…

Not to mention that using the adjective “dwarf” just sounds insulting.

Sigh. Pluto is definitely not a planet, but the terminology definition conference definitely screwed up the framing bad.

This IS the descriptive approach. Trying to wrangle fish out of ghoti is simply not how people read.

Reminder that according to the actual rules of English orthography, “ghoti” can never be pronounced as “fish”, because said rules feature “position within a word/syllable” very prominently. An onset g simply can’t be pronounced the same way as a final gh, and in fact, any “gh” followed immediately by a vowel must be pronounced with the hard /g/ sound. “ti” is only ever allowed to fricitize to the “sh” sound if it’s followed by another vowel. Ghoti can only be pronounced the same as “goatee”, and English speakers know this intuitively even if they can’t articulate why they know this, the same as we internalize hundreds of other language rules without knowing that we know them.

I agree with you, except that I think the time system is great. It was deliberately designed to be maximally divisible, and makes a lot of sense in that manner. 12 hours of daylight— a highly divisible number, with 60 small (minuscule, or “minute”) divisions of the hour, which is even MORE divisible than 12. Then when time keeping got more accurate, they added a second division of 60 more parts, and… well, called ‘em seconds.

Basically, 12 and 60 are just so divisible they make really good bases.