Comic Discussion > QUESTIONABLE CONTENT
WCDT 22-26 August 2011 (1996-2000)
Method of Madness:
--- Quote from: pwhodges on 28 Aug 2011, 09:24 ---That's leaving aside words in which some or all of the popular "plural" forms are actually completely wrong - like octopi (octopuses or octopodes) or virii (viruses - virus has no plural in Latin).
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As for "-us" nouns, it depends on whether or not it's a second declension or a fourth declension noun. (Most nouns are the first three declensions, fourth and fifth ones are rare). For second declension, singular plural is -us/-i, for fourth declension, it's -us/-es. It's not that virus doesn't have a plural, it's that it's a fourth declension noun. That being said, while English isn't a Romance language, a lot of our words come from Latin. Unless there's an actual reason (like viruses), it makes sense for -us to turn to -a by default. Also, there are three genders in Latin (masculine, feminine, neuter), and all neuter plurals end in -a.[/classics major]
tl;dr, Both can be considered right, so no reason to give people shit for using the one they prefer.
Akima:
--- Quote from: Is it cold in here? on 28 Aug 2011, 18:20 ---Nuclear propulsion for the really hardcode
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There are proposals for surface-to-orbit nuclear rockets that are less loopy than Orion, but they're well beyond our engineering capabilities (and certainly well beyond my capacity to evaluate properly). Maybe, if Carl-E's friend could have got some funding to work on them...
Is it cold in here?:
If your computer is sentient, and can be damaged by sketchy web sites, is it domestic violence to expose it to them?
Carl-E:
Why was she using Momo for that, anyway? She has the other computer, with a monitor, so she can see the pretty pictures...
Is it cold in here?:
--- Quote from: Akima on 28 Aug 2011, 18:58 --- well beyond my capacity to evaluate properly
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I'd be stunned if there's anyone in the world who can evaluate them properly. The real killer in high-risk technical projects is finding out, the hard way, answers to the questions you didn't know you should ask. There is a lot of terra incognita in those designs.
Which, maybe, are in use in the QC world? Hannerdad's space station is big enough to spin for 1-g without making everyone sick, and big enough that they use golf carts to get around (based on Hannelore's Formspring). That's a lot of material to lift if all you have are chemical rockets. Maybe there's a space elevator? They do seem to have made more progress than we have on carbon nanotubes.
(Or maybe it's all a joke by a webcomic author, but that hypothesis is no fun).
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