Mariah Carey unfrozen for the Christmas season

And Trump’s health plan should be ready in just a couple more weeks by then

I assume your comment is very tongue-in-cheek, in which case it was a fun read. What follows is my response if it isn’t.

Well, the top-level comment said μg, which was the basis of my questioning the second-level comment. Not sure where your millicentigrams came from.

Also, your math is weird. You wouldn’t multiply your exponents like that, you’d add them. As noted at the top, though, I suspect your whole comment is in jest and the math is meant to be the giveaway aimed at the literal-minded like me.

Are you using “mig” as milligram or microgram? For that to be a term you’d use, I assume you recognize you’re responding to a quantity in micrograms.

Apparently, S04E08, “You Don’t Want to Know” is the one you’re thinking of, so, yes.

I generally agree with offering sources; I just wanted to add a funny.

IvyTortle

One of my favorite counter-arguments (so to speak) against Toxic Masculinity being the “true” masculinity is that it’s based so much on toughing out emotions, denying them, not showing physical or emotional weakness, etc. Yet, this misses the incredible display of deep confidence and self-image that come from being able to display humility, compassion, and sadness without feeling like that’s a risk to your “manliness”.

If what defines someone as a man is based so heavily on what others think of them or code them as, they are actually saying other people control whether or not they are considered masculine/manly, which is not very Alpha Male of them.

On Parks and Recreation, Ron Swanson wins an award and teases Leslie Knope about it. She ends up saying to him, “That’s not really the attitude I’d expect from an award winner.” He responds, “Everything I do is the attitude of an award winner, because I have won an award.” I feel like this can be adjusted for anyone self-identifying as “masculine”, “feminine”, or any other such thing - “Everything I do is inherently manly, because I am a man.” (adjust as appropriate)

I dug around for a little bit, and it seems like the answer might be yes. Take what follows with a grain of salt, as I skimmed or read a few sources focused on different things and have done my best to reproduce a full picture.

First, some basic facts. Sponges anchor to the seabed (freshwater ones anchor to the dirt at the bottom of a lake/whatever). Sponge cells can move around each other and rearrange, part of their normal functioning, to keep water flowing through themselves efficiently for respiration and food capture.

Next, the mechanisms of reconstruction from a soup of sponge cells. As they bump into each other and recognize their own kind, sponge cells manage to hold together and hope for ground to attach to. They flatten out, presumably both to improve grip to the ground and to provide a large surface area for more cells to join. As long as the new colony ends up with enough of two specific kinds of cells (one makes connective mesohyl, the other makes everything else), it can grow.

The main thing I couldn’t (quickly) find is specific confirmation that two healthy, stable colonies coming from a single halved source sponge can reattach, or if the reaggregation process only works following injury or during some kind of stress. Since the cells normally move around, though, it seems reasonable that this could work.

Based on all that and assuming their aren’t other factors for sponge cells recognizing each other not entirely based on DNA, then presumably clones could also be attached.

Note that sponges don’t actually stop growing. Their main limits are resource needs and predation, since some sea life likes to take nibbles or bites out of them (that’s possibly a factor to why they are so adept at reorganization). So if your question involved cloning (rather than reattachment) only to get around a rough maximum size or early-life growth period that stops, it shouldn’t be necessary.

So, my assumption is: separated cells with the same genetic code, or some other biomarker of “individuality” that might not technically be unique, will attach to each other given the chance.

Super quick research suggests they don’t have organs or a nervous system, but do have specialized bits like flagella to move water through their pores/tunnels. The majority of the cells just … are. Sounds more like a colony of genetically identical cells than a single multi-cellular creature (to me), but I assume biologists have much more information and reason to consider them the way they do.

Ed… ward…

Right alongside Kombucha Combat

I mean, the spirit of the “superpower side effects” game isn’t to render the superpower fully unusable, but to make it thoroughly annoying or to have a big downside/cost. Teleporting to a random point in all of the space of the universe is just a death sentence. My only reasonable read of this is “random location on Earth (not mid-air, underwater, or embedded within solid matter)”.

I appreciate the sentiment, but probably not. The genie would just scoff af my argument and say nothing was guaranteed to be “fair” about the situation. My only saving grace in talking about it here is that fellow humans are more likely to share a similar base point for reasoning.

Please elaborate, because there’s a at least a couple different things you could be referring to, and I’d rather not write something out on the wrong topic :)

First, the use of “communicate” in the original superpower description is presumably referring to communication that couldn’t happen without the power - and the side effect uses the same term. As it stands, my dog can tell me she understands I intend to walk her by jumping off the back of the couch and being excited at the door.

So if the superpower only refers to novel communication, I’d interpret that to mean anything more than I could reasonably communicate to my dog, and more than she could communicate to me (confirmation of understanding).

If the side effect, despite using the same verb, actually renders animals LESS able to communicate with me than they already can, that seems an especially uncharitable interpretation.

Alternatively, I can ask the animal to wait until I was out of the room before performing the action for the third party. At that point, only that third party would end up communicating having seen the comprehension/performance.