“A simile is just a metaphor with the scaffolding still up”*…

Russell Samora has been fooling around with figures of speech; with his colleagues at The Pudding, he’s fielded a fascinating analysis of of that comparative workhorse, the simile…

Similes are all around us. But, if you haven’t considered this figure of speech since grade school, here’s a refresher: similes compare a shared quality of two things, often using “like” or “as.”

I pulled every simile in the form “as ___ as ___” from tens of thousands of fiction books for the top 500 most common adjectives… I thought it would be a trivial exercise, but the more I poked around, the more questions I had…

Samora explains how similes are structured and how they are used (and with what relative frequency) in literature. He examines some of the most common– and several special cases (“The Ironic Ones”). And he explains his methodology and sources… all in the context of a lovely interactive data visualization.

It’s as cool as hell: “Comparisons as Predictable as the Sunrise,” from @pudding.cool.

* James Geary

###

As we agree with Steve Martin that “a day without sunshine is like, you know, night,” we might recall that it was on this date in 1789 that Richard Kirwan published his essay in support of the phlogiston theory (the belief, that dates to alchemical times, in the existence of a fire-like element (dubbed “phlogiston”) contained within combustible bodies and released during burning. Kirwan was among the last of its advocates.

A well-regarded scientist in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, Kirwan met and corresponded with Black, Lavoisier, Priestley, and Cavendish. Indeed, while scientific history remembers him as a defender of an incorrect theory, his work probably spurred Priestley and Lavoisier, who respectively discovered and named the actual elemental agent of combustion, oxygen.

But Kirwan is also remembered for a personal eccentricity (one of many) that led to some referring to him (all too poignantly) as “crazy as a bed bug”: he hated bugs (especially flies). Kirwan paid his servants a bounty for each one they killed.

source

Void your vowels! Now! Or the phlogiston will win!

😱

#phlogiston #vowels

I asked ChatGPT about alternative terminologies for dark matter:

Advantages of the Term "Cosmic Gravitational Anomaly"

Neutral and Descriptive:
The term "Cosmic Gravitational Anomaly" is neutral, avoiding assumptions about the nature of the phenomenon, while being descriptive of the observed effects on spacetime.

Encourages Exploration:
By not presupposing that the anomaly is due to matter, it encourages researchers to explore a wide range of possibilities, including energy-based explanations.

Improved Communication:
This term can improve communication with both the scientific community and the public, clearly indicating that the phenomenon is a gravitational effect observed on a cosmic scale.

So from now on it's called CGA. Thank you. #CGA #darkmatter #epicycles #phlogiston

Probably a question I should aim at the astrodon.social instance, but then again this isn't an #astronomy question as much as one from speculative/sci-fi...

What would the universe look like if #darkmatter & #darkenergy turned out to be as real as #phlogiston & #aether?

Is a consistent universe even possible then, or does it devolve into locally inconsistent physical laws?

What weirdness should we expect to see?