Real answer: the term used in the original Greek is μάγοι, which in Roman letters would be represented as mágoi. This appears to derive from the Persian magush and ultimately from the Avestan magâunô, terms for a priest or cleric, though the Persian word is poorly attested in surviving Iranian sources.

I any case, they are also described as coming “from the east”, which in Roman-occupied Judah would have meant Iran. Matthew doesn’t spell this out, but the implication is that the Wise Men were Zoroastrian priests who, as other commentators have noted, would have been knowledgeable of astronomy. It should be noted that Matthew doesn’t strictly refer to them as “wise men”, instead using a technical term for Zoroastrian clergy; “wise men” is a later translation choice which gets across some of the meaning to a reader to whom magush would be meaningless jargon.

In any case, the appearance of the magi seems to be an attempt to equate Christ with the Saoshyant and thus bolster the argument that he was tge prophesied Messiah. Zoroastrian tradition prophesies that at some point a virgin will get pregnant by sperm Zarathustra left in a pool somewhere and give birth to a son, the Saoshyant. After Iran conquered Chaldaea, this idea of a saviour figure born from a virgin filtered through to the captive Jews at a time when both Judaism and Zoroastrianism were shifting toward monotheism.

So when Jesus’ sect proclaimed Jesus as Messiah, having magi make the same proclamation when he was a baby reïnforces the Christian claim

He’s an Indian American. An American Indian would be an Indian of American descent.

That’s Guugu Yimithirr, spoken by the Aboriginal Australian nation of the same name.

I can’t find it, but I seem to recall back in the day this one absolute legend of a chanced got a contract from his bank. He wrote a new contract, which he carefully designed to be visually similar to the one he received, but which gave him incredibly favourable terms with massive penalty fees on the bank should they try to renege on it. Nobody at the bank noticed the signed contract wasn’t the one they had sent out, leaving them on the hook. And since they had freely agreed to it, a judge ruled it was valid and enforceable.

Oh wow, I thought I was the only mbinaut here.

There is nothing so permanent as a temporary solution.

A few thought he was serious. Most understood he was making fun of them. Some thought he was making fun if how liberals and lefties view the right.

Mu.

This answer is based on watching a bunch of PBS Spacetime videos. I am not remotely an astrophysicist.

When you delve into black holes, the concept of “sphere” eventually becomes ambiguous. A black hole is an infinitely-dense region of spacetime, called a singularity, which has only three properties: mass, angular momentum, and electric charge.

What most people think of as a black hole is a region bounded by the event horizon. The event horizon isn’t an actual thing, it’s a mathematically-defined radius around the singularity. You would no more notice crossing the event horizon than you would crossing the boundary of a timezone on Earth. If the black hole’s angular momentum is 0, then the event horizon forms a sphere, because all points on the event horizon are by definition the same distance from the singularity.

But things get weird when the black hole is rotating. Because of some stuff I don’t quite understand, rotation causes the singularity to turn into a ring rather than a point, so you could theoretically drive a spaceship through the hole in the middle (you could not actually do this because by the time you get there your spaceship will have been vaporised by the accretion disk and torn apart by gravity). In this case, the event horizon forms a sphere that is squashed along its axis of rotation, kind of like Earth.

But black holes are weirder still! Scientists say that they break physics, but it’s even more fundamental than that. A bit below the event horizon, time and space themselves swap, so that the singularity changes from a point of irresistible attraction to an inevitable point in the future. The maths suggests that, if you were to hit the singularity, you(re atoms) would emerge in a universe with time instead of space and space instead of time.

It’s bizarre is what I’m saying.

A thin, bedraggled stranger came to the Temple one night and asked for master Kaimu. The master was roused and brought to the gate, whereupon the stranger said:

“For years I have wandered this pitiless land, seeking the perfect programming language. Name any one and I’ve given it a go, be it fast or slow, high-level or low, from Ada to Zeno. But whatever the pluses there are minuses too, so I pack my things and hit the road again—which in this case led me to your door.”

Kaimu asked the stranger to describe the language of his heart’s desire.

“It must be suitable enterprise-wide,” the stranger replied, “client-side and server-side, in scripting, in shells and in spreadsheet cells. I need it real-time, multi-threaded and optionally object-oriented; with garbage collection, deadlock detection, custom exceptions, auto-resizing arrays of things and regular expressions for matching strings. I want the simplicity of BASIC, the purity of Smalltalk, the brevity of Haskell, the speed of C, the consistency of Lisp, the readability of Python, the flexibility of Perl, and the portability of… Java, I guess, but with native code bindings that aren’t a mess.”

“Then tomorrow morning we shall assist you as best we can,” said Kaimu. “But tonight you must spend in the carpenter’s shed below the south wall.”

The stranger bowed and departed to make his bed amid sawdust and wood shavings. As Kaimu left for his own chambers a monk asked, “What is your design for him?”

“When dawn breaks,” replied the master, “our guest will see that on the walls of that shed are arrayed ten thousand tools, each crafted to serve a unique purpose. No one would mistake the hammer for the chisel, and no true carpenter would renounce one for the other.”

---

At the sun’s first light the stranger returned to the Temple gate, there to be greeted again by Kaimu and the monk.

“Do you still seek your heart’s desire?” asked Kaimu.

“No!” replied the stranger. “For in the shed I found a most marvelous dagger, no larger than my hand, whose hilt opened to reveal the most wonderous things: tweezers and toothpicks, pliers and drill-bits, wrenches and reamers and rulers and tiny blades too numerous to count! Holding it I understood that my destiny is to fashion the thing I have sought for—a language made of other languages, a tool to end the need for other tools!”

And with that the stranger bowed and departed.

The monk turned to Kaimu, whose jaw had gone somewhat slack. “What do the annals say on the subject of the Misunderstood Lesson?”

“That it too brings wisdom,” said the master, “If only to the hapless teacher. No doubt I would have been twice as effective had I been half as clever.”

“And what of the stranger?” asked the monk. “Surely he will fail in his endeavor, for that knife he prizes holds neither hammer nor chisel. And should he partly succeed then all the worse, for he will have added yet another language to a world that already drowns in confusion.”

“Let him try, and good fortune to him!” said Kaimu. “If not for fools of his fashion, we would not have Perl or Python, Bourne shell or Tcl, and the world would be a poorer place. I only grieve that you and I are not such fools, for since we will never attempt the impossible, we can never hope to achieve it.”

Thus master and monk left the gate, and went in to the Temple together to greet the morning.

–ibid

A novice asked Java master Banzen, “What is the most perfect programming language?”

The master answered, “The one which accomplishes the desired task with the least effort expended by the user.”

The novice asked, “Is there a language which exceeds all others in this regard?”

The master answered, “Build me a garden of ten thousand stones!”

–From The Codeless Code

Jackie Chan is an unnamed martial arts student in Fist of Fury and a random mook who gets killed by Bruce Lee in Enter the Dragon. He mostly worked as a stunt double at the time, and was so good at stunt work he transitioned into credited performance.

Jackie Chan was an extra and a stuntman in Fist of Fury and Enter the Dragon, where he does an impressive job of getting beaten up by Bruce Lee.

“An atom-blaster is a good weapon, but it can point both ways.” — Salvor Hardin, The Merchant Princes (Isaac Asimov, 1944)

I was sceptical about psychological pricing until I worked at a call centre and had this conversation multiple times a week.

Caller: Why is my bill £10 higher this month?

Me: I see you made a £2 call to a premium rate number.

Caller: That’s only £2.

Me: Yes, your bill is normally £19.99 a month. Add on the £2 and you get £21.99, which is what you paid this month.

Caller: (notices the other digits) Oh, so it is.

Nice. They taste like orange carrots, but with a peppery kick.

I already did. The place I buy vegetables had purple carrots for a while, which cost more than orange carrots. I still bought them.

Mu.

Lemmy and mbin are different software. You are on lemmy.ca, which is a Lemmy instance. There are other websites that run Lemmy, notably lemmy.world, beehaw.org, and sopuli.xyz. They are different, independent websites, but they all run Lemmy, and thus are all Lemmy instances.

All these sites communicate with each other because Lemmy is based on ActivityPub, a protocol for letting social media accounts on different websites talk to each other. (A common analogy is that email lets people on different websites communicate because it’s all based on SMTP).

My account is on thebrainbin.org, a website that runs mbin. mbin is less popular than Lemmy, but there are still a few other websites that run it, including kbin.earth and fedia.io. Each of these sites is an mbin instance, and because mbin, like Lemmy, is built on ActivityPub, all those websites are able to talk to each other.

Now you might be thinking that, because Lemmy and mbin are both built on AcitivityPub, then logically accounts on Lemmy instances should be able to interact with accounts on mbin instances and vice versa. And if you think that, you are correct. The reason you see posts from Lemmy when using an mbin account and vice versa is that the various instances all use AcitivityPub to talk to each other, even though they’re on different websites.

But it doesn’t stop there! Mastodon is also built on ActivityPub, but aims to be like the website formerly known as Twitter, whereas Lemmy and mbin both try to be similar to Reddit. But because it’s all ActivityPub, accounts on Mastodon instances and interact with accounts on Lemmy and mbin instances and vice versa.

The same applies to other ActivityPub software, such as Sharkey (imitates Tumblr), Akkoma (also Tumblr), PeerTube (YouTube), and WriteFreely (blog).

“Not my cup of tea”

Yes. They kind of still are, because the Roman, Cyrillic, Arabic, Greek, Armenian, Georgian, and Hebrew scripts ultimately derive from Egyptian hieroglyphics, and hieroglyphics are even more pictorial than Chinese characters.

(Brahmic, Tibetan, and traditional Mongolian scripts also go back to Egyptian, but they aren’t western).

Yes, languages get mistaken for each other all the time when one is not familiar with the writing system, and sometimes even when one is. I have struggled to understand posts in Spanish before realising they’re actually in Portuguese, which I don’t speak. (Also I’m pretty sure Norwegian and Danish are actually the same language).

Can you tell the difference between Telugu and Kannada just by looking at them? How about Arabic and Persian? How about Arabic and Ottoman Turkish? Persian and Kurdish? Yoruba and Xhosa? Ukrainian and Kazakh? Sumerian and Akkadian? Actually, could you tell the difference between Akkadian and Old Persian? They are both written with cuneiform characters, but the characters themselves are apparently as different as hiragana and hangul.

If your sentence is written entirely in Chinese characters, there is no way for somebody unfamiliar with them to determine whether it’s Japanese, Mandarin, or Hokkien. And if somebody hasn’t seen enough Japanese text to figure out the difference between kana and Chinese characters, they still won’t be able to tell the difference.

As to why Google can’t tell, Google doesn’t actually understand anything. It’s based on a massive database of which characters and combinations of characters come next to each other (and there’s also some Markov stuff to account for common spelling mistakes). If your search string is made entirely of Chinese characters, it’s going to get hits on websites written with Chinese characters, many of which will be in Mandarin. Google.com probably isn’t able to detect your UI or browser language settings. To ensure you get results from Japan, try using google.jp instead, as it will prioritise Japanese results.