The catarrhine who invented a perpetual motion machine, by dreaming at night and devouring its own dreams through the day.

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Cake day: January 12th, 2024

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  • Those are used with urine, not blood. Urine is yellow-ish, but since it’s just a drop, it doesn’t stain the strip; instead, the blue tip changes colour as it reacts with the glucose in the urine. Then you compare that coloured tip with a chart, and you get an idea of the concentration of glucose in your body. Picture related:

    I remember seeing those bottles in my bathroom all the time as a kid (my sister is diabetic).

    These almost look more like ph or ketone test strips…

    It is roughly the same idea as the one behind the litmus test for pH, indeed. The difference is which substance you’re putting there (Benedict’s reagent vs. pH indicators) and which substance you’re testing for (glucose vs. H₃O⁺ / OH⁻).






  • All languages are the result of the collective brainfarts of lazy people. English is not special in this regard.

    What you’re noticing is two different sources of new words: making at home and borrowing it from elsewhere.

    For a Germanic language like English, “making at home” often involves two things:

    • compounding - pick old word, add a new root, the meaning is combined. Like “firetruck” - a “truck” to deal with “fire”. You can do it recursively, and talk for example about the “firetruck tire” (the space is simply an orthographic convention). Or even the “firetruck tire rubber quality”.
    • affixation - you get some old word and add another non-root morpheme. Like “home” → “homeless” (no home) → “homelessness” (the state of not having a home).

    The other source of vocabulary would be borrowings. Those words aren’t analysable as the above because they’re typically borrowed as a single chunk (there are some exceptions though).

    Now, answering your question on “why”: Norman conquest gave English a tendency to borrow words for “posh” concepts from Norman, then French. And in Europe in general there’s also a tendency to borrow posh words from Latin and Greek.