I think it’s just not really in the spirit of the event. It’s not meant to be a completely serious athletic endeavour, it’s a bit of fun and fundraising. They’re getting 2,000 people of all ages on to a tiny island with a population of 61 to chuck some stones across a pond. There doesn’t seem to be a big cash prize or anything. There was a raffle to win a wheelbarrow described as doing “0-3 mph in 1 second”

Here was me thinking that Toss Master was the one to go for

I think I can skim a stone farther than I can throw one, given a good stone and flat water… and a few attempts. I’m definitely not getting remotely near 60m though, that’s wild

Aside from that this article only comes to the conclusion of broad implications and the author himself says he used both interchangeably in his book, this is an American source and the headline for this post is British. I don’t know about American Engkish, but there is no expectation of a stone being worked by humans in British English. In common usage here a rock is generally bigger than a stone - I’d say whether you can throw it one-handed is roughly where the extremely fuzzy line is - but you could absolutely just pick up any small piece of stone from the ground in nature and call it “a stone” without anyone questioning it

Most of the Nordic countries do not have those. Norway has a lot, Denmark has a little, the others have nothing significant

I see this as even more reason to use my idea

I like the idea of pieons, from peon (which I promise I don’t mean derogatorily seeing as I’m not on piefed myself)

Just tried this out recently. It’s good fun. I do wish it explained itself a little better at the start - I had no idea that it was essentially a roguelite for about the first hour I played - but it gets that feeling of momentum at the edge of wiping out just right

Enjoy the bean juice when you can get some. I think I’ll go brew some myself

Lovers in a Dangerous Spacetime in particular is hilarious if you get four people playing it

Since OP mentioned it, how may of these can do offline co-op? I don’t think DRG does, and it’s the only one I’ve done multiplayer on (though it is otherwise a great suggestion)

It’s worth noting that there are several other Grok personas besides Ani. If he’s only engaging with / posting the Ani stuff but not the others, that’s something of a smoking gun to me

I’m basing that on just transcribing the text and putting it into google translate with “detect language” turned on. That said I also assumed it’d be a Slavic language too, but I don’t think any of them use the ү character that’s in the second word on the second line, whereas Mongolian, other Mongolic languages, and Turkic languages often do when written in Cyrillic. The first word is “avtomashin”, but Mongolian got that word from Russian

Edit: transcriptions

Автомашин

• тай бүх зургийг сонгоно уу

Roughly Romanised, just using Wiktionary’s versions (I do not know how to pronounce any of this myself)

Avtomašína

• Tai büx zurgiig songono uu

Assuming I’ve got that right, it’s quite definitely not Slavic

And then the machine translation from Mongolian

Car

• Select all images with

It seems like it’s Mongolian, if that helps you figure it out at all

Ahh, good point

That’s definitely Wanker’s Workshop. Clearly they really have been reading a lot of British material

My inner conspiracy theorist is telling me that someone at the DoD described climate change as a national security threat that the department needs to address as part of handling defence and that’s what triggered this

I’m going with “they absolutely did see it coming and are confident that they can make it go away for less money than an actual marketing campaign that gets the same amount of attention would cost”

They’ve got a veneer of plausible deniability, basically no need to expend any money on the material, and just enough of a chance to filter out anything that uses the image of someone that could actually afford to fight them in court about it

Do you have actual data for that? Here are some comparisons of population density and emissions per capita:

The first chart is every country and territory that wikipedia had numbers for on both population density and emissions per capita.

The second has outliers with the highest densities and emissions per capita removed in order to make the rest visible (removed entries are Bahrain, Bangladesh, Barbados, Bermuda, Brunei, Gibraltar, Hong Kong, Kuwait, Macau, Maldives, Moldova, New Caledonia, Palau, Qatar, and Singapore. I hope you agree that these are not particularly comparable to the US or China for a variety of reasons and are okay to exclude).

The third cuts it down to only countries that have a “very high” rating (at least 0.8) on the Human Development Index, as a proxy for advanced economies. As you can see, there is not a strong correlation between high densities and low emissions. Chile, Sweden, Argentina, and Norway all actually have both significantly lower densities than the US and significantly lower emissions (and there are more, I’m just counting some with populations of at least ten million). Same goes for NZ, there are several countries with comparable or lower densities and also lower emissions. The densest countries are not particularly low emitters, and the sparsest cover the full range.

I can think of a few potential factors explaining it. Yes, high density makes transport easier, but it also means less access to land for clean energy (which is generally much less compact than fossil fuels). Additionally, even in very sparsely-populated countries, most of the population actually tends to be fairly concentrated around a few cities anyway. Consider Australia; it’s not like Australians are evenly distributed across the continent, so the very low population density isn’t particularly representative of the infrastructure challenges for most people there

Germany is worse than average for Europe, but it’s far better than America and about on par with China. Per capita emissions are a little lower than China’s, but China is a bit better if you look at consumption-based emissions instead