when will Japan learn to make buildings with proper insulation

@ssb Ahh... Japan... a technologically-obsessed culture strongly emphasizing community and conformity... that has rejected both central heat and central lighting.

as we head into the colder months again I can only wish there were an area in my apartment bigger than a few square feet that wasn't freezing

I come from a very cold part of the US (compared to which... Chicago could be considered basically tropical), one of the most surprising things to me about Japan is the lack of double-pane glass on anything

hey now, don't go completely dissing chicago's cold credibility

i think i earned my wings when school was cancelled because it was dangerous to be outside

こんにちは！

みんな、何をしている？

@Flaw, はろー！

so I just had someone tell me that Japanese people have longer intestines than white people because their diets were more agricultural while we ate more meat

this sounds very.. suspicious to me

@ssb Given the relative difficulty of digesting the two categories, I would suspect it would be the opposite way if there was a (non-height correlated) difference

I cannot find any kind of source in English mentioning this

sources in Japanese say that the Japanese intestines are 2~3 meters longer

huh...

just found this, looking through it

d.hatena.ne.jp/ROYGB/20090419

my hunch is that it's one of those eastern medicine type things

So... Indians and Africans have the Japanese "beat"... I assume

there is one study linked in the comments there

link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2FBF00346222

doctor's always getting on me about my sigmoid colon adhesions...

If I understood your first link correctly, it looks like a scientific fact about controlled diets from animal studies is being applied to people with no scientific justification whatsoever

i think he was more saying that he couldn't find any actual studies to support it

except that one

but he notes that it's not necessarily applicable:

このデータを見る限り、食物が腸の成長に影響を与えることがあるのは確かなようです。とはいってもオタマジャクシの例がそのまま人間に適用できるとも限らないわけですが。

i guess the question also becomes would white people who are lifelong vegetarians also have longer intestines, or is it a genetic thing?

the person I was talking to said it was a matter of adaptation, like people in colder climates having longer hair

(is that even true?)

@ssb What does that even mean? Do they mean "hair grows faster"?

presumably that people in colder climates adapted to the weather by becoming generally more hairy

@ssb considering the old racial group "malay"... I'd argue we have at least one rather strong counterexample

yeah, I also think of the middle eastern stereotype of being really hairy

no idea how true that is but i can fight folk wisdom with stereotypes

(the existence or not of 'malay' as a distinct racial group is irrelevent to this... part of the definition was being rather hairy, and generally the group categorized as such lived in warmer climates)

i posted it as a question over on skeptics.se

私の老臣。。。

！！！

老臣?

はい。。。

迷惑な？

for emphasis, you do not omit it. however, you want to omit it when talking about little unimportant things like "I had a hamburger for lunch yesterday. I had fries,too." That would be just ポテトも, not　ポテトをも. The last item named must be of significance to use the emphatic も

@TokyoNagoya btw... for doing bold text on the site, use <b>text here</b>... the usual asterisk syntax apparently requires spaces

meh

use <blink>を</blink>も to indicate that the を is sometimes there :)

hey thanks!

@snailboat I have never watched an episode of Doctor Who

只今！

oh no

i just realized that 今 looks like a smug talking face

and now i can't unsee it

yay... living the manifesto :/

i dont see it very often

but not never

does it work?

<blink>を</blink>

って、どうなるんだろう

気になる

<strong>を</strong>もあるんですか

老臣?

「今」が顔に見える？

を

を

益←顔に見えます？

ざんね～ん

おもしろそうなのに～

annoyingだって書いてある

most hatedだって

なんとｗｗｗ

<marquee><blink><b><i><u><s><font face="comic sans">Hello Welcome To My Homepage</font></s></u></i></b></blink></marquee>

While looking for the blink tag in gecko, I found a comment saying "C++ is stupid".. Anyway yeah no, no blink :P And no blink in blink either for that matter.

no!

おお

blinkしてます

@snailboat きっと、カラオケボックスとかすきなんじゃない？

そおなんだ～日本は何でこんなにカラオケボックスが多いんだろうね～

私は、英語の歌(R&Bとか)を歌うのがすき

(一人で)

wii u has a karaoke application

任天堂のwii?

@ssb あは

すごいupvote

回答はまだついてないのね

難しい質問なのかな

@snailboat ちょっと東北弁ぽい？

山形とか・・・「そうか～。」を「んだか～。」とかね。

@snailboat まあそうだったの

おとついかな

気づかなくて

ご冥福をお祈りします

(日本語でも、こういうときってなんていうものなのか・・・)

冥福.. that's a new word

i thought of 冥土 which i learned as "hades"

so I kind of assumed it had a negative connotation..

freezing in this office..

i have no idea why schools/workplaces think it's somehow a good idea to let people freeze when they need to be doing work