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1:05 AM
2
Q: What is a tabukuk?

BuzzNear the beginning of Keith Laumer's A Plague of Demons,* two spies are meeting in a restaurant in North Africa, and one sweeps their table for surveillance devices. We went through a ritual of hand pumping and when-did-I-see-you-last’s, ordered second drinks, then moved over to a low table. He...

 
 
1 hour later…
2:19 AM
@AncientSwordRage I dunno about that; air at -10C would be at least 10% more dense than air at 25C, and humidity tips it further in that direction. Plus the quote is about "night" not temperature or air. Night is typically deep, or dark, sometimes stygian; not concepts I'd associate with "thin."
Take a deep breath of dry air at -30C and tell me it feels thin; it feels like a brick in the lungs.
 
2:39 AM
@Marvin It may be a false cognate, but I keep wanting to read "tabak" out of that.
 
3:04 AM
@DavidW I don't mean literally literally less dense, I mean how it gets described
 
2
Q: 50s-60s short story, Astronauts being attacked on an alien planet by an invisible alien

maxI can't remember the name of a short story that was in an anthology book of vintage SciFi that I read about 30 years ago. The stories were from the 40s-60s I believe. It was about a spaceship crew being attacked by an invisible alien which would only be visible for an instant as it moved from loc...

 
4:07 AM
1
Q: Book about a girl who can speak to/ understand stones

ferret 6633I'm looking for a book about a girl who can speak to/ understand the feelings of stones. What I remember about the book is that the girl is disfigured but as the story goes on she starts to heal. She meets a group of kids (either orphans or foster kids) who join her on her journey. Each of the ki...

0
Q: Did the aliens cause the rare and incurable disease?

Bingo MehndraIn the 2016 American science fiction drama film Arrival, aside from what seems to be a type of cancer in Hannah, we also can see how she limps and at some point, she asks her mom Louise to help her with one of her boots. Given that Louise was the only character that kept direct contact with the h...

 
4:33 AM
0
Q: End Portal Glitch

BenSo according to this video, you can actually locate an End City rather easily, before even fighting the Ender Dragon. The video suggests standing underneath the Portal, then using a piston to push you (the player), which causes you to trigger the Portal, but instead of sending you to the central ...

 
4:59 AM
0
Q: Which Stanislaw Lem works are being referenced in this quote?

jwezorekThe current issue of the New Yorker includes a long article about Stanislaw Lem, about new biographies of Lem focusing on the extent to which Lem's Jewish identity and experience of the Holocaust and wartime Poland, which he seldom wrote about, informed his science fiction. Anyway, at the beginni...

 
 
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6:17 AM
0
Q: I need to find a specific manga. And I need your help

Random_personThe mc is a hero and he wakes up after 100 or maybe 200 years of sleep in cryo pod thing and he wakes up in a kids body then he meets an elf he rescued before he got into crypo pod. Please help me for this one

 
6:43 AM
0
Q: How did Moody use the Imperious Curse to tell the Spider what to do?

The Boy Who LivedSo when Harry is put under the Imperious Curse by Moody, he hears Moody telling him what to do. I wonder how Moody communicated to the spiders what he wanted them to do? Can he speak spider? Does the Imperious magically change the instructions into the language that the person being Imperiused ca...

 
7:09 AM
-1
Q: Who exactly is "her" here?

Cody SteeleThis dialogues are from Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2 (2011): Dumbledore: The prophecy did not refer to a woman. It spoke of a boy born at the end of July. Snape: Yes, but he thinks it's her son. He intends to hunt them down now, to kill them. Who exactly is "her" here?

 
7:35 AM
0
Q: Sci Fi novel narrated from the Alien antagonist's POV

Searching for aliensSince I read this more than a decade ago my recollection may not be entirely accurate but here goes: Novel is English, I read this between 2001 and 2005 but it could have been published many years earlier. From what I remember of the writing, the intended audience are most likely young adults but...

 
 
2 hours later…
SQB
9:06 AM
2
Q: MMA version of Wordle

martinJust as a diversion, I'd like to create an interactive MMA version of Wordle. As a sketch I have the following: wordlist = Import["https://gist.githubusercontent.com/cfreshman/a03ef2cba789d8cf00c08f767e0fad7b/raw/a9e55d7e0c08100ce62133a1fa0d9c4f0f542f2c/wordle-answers-alphabetical.txt", "List"];...

I interpreted MMA as Mixed Martial Arts and was quite confused.
 
9:18 AM
0
Q: Why didn't Harry's scar hurt in his first year DADA class?

The Boy Who LivedHarry has DADA classes in The Philosophers Stone with Quirrell, but his scar never hurts despite being in such close proximity to Voldemort...why?

 
 
1 hour later…
10:28 AM
@SQB same
 
-1
Q: Why is the Darth Vader rule (tail sum formula) in mathematics/statistics so-called?

BCLCThere's a rule in maths/stats called the tail sum formula eg this. Apparently it's also called the darth vader rule. The explanation here goes This is not a reference to a discoverer. But the designation may capture the somewhat counterintuitive—if not slightly unsettling and surreal—impression ...

3
Q: Children's/ Teen novel: Boy protagonist sent through a maze on futuristic space station that keeps getting harder. Read in 1980s

alan_downunderI posted this on Goodreads, but thought it might be good to get ideas from a more specialised group. Age group: children / teens Date: 1970s / 80s (read it mid to late 80s). Origin: British or American - no clear feeling on this. Plot details (so far as I can remember): Boy is in a futuristic spa...

 
A well-written story-id. Doesn't remember too many extra details, but the plot point seems specific enough that it should be possible to find.
 
 
1 hour later…
11:56 AM
@AncientSwordRage Tomato, tomahto
 
@Spencer Tomato, Mixed Martial Arto
 
12:46 PM
0
Q: Are last episodes of Wandavision and Loki really connected?

alseetherAfter watching the last episodes of Wandavision and Loki, many people have notice that around minute 27, both episodes seem interconnected. In Wandavision, the epidsode 9 runs more or less as expected, we can see how Wanda At the same time, the episode 6 of Loki show us Some theories stands tha...

 
1:38 PM
0
Q: Why did Harry (and all the other first years) have to buy ‘Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them in their first year?

The Boy Who LivedWhy did Harry (and all the other first years) have to buy ‘Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them’ in their first year if Care of Magical Creatures was a lesson they couldn’t take until their third year?

 
2:04 PM
-1
Q: How do wizarding schools acceptance letter work?

The Boy Who LivedLike do they know you’re close to the school so they’re like hippity hoppity another soul a tragedy or check where you’re from, and if they do, and let's say your mix French and American, do they have a battle between each other to see who keeps the student? Okay, I'm getting off-topic. Or do you...

 
2:43 PM
@Marvin Hippity Hoppity I'm after your Wizarding Progeny
If people want "What's the meaning of X" questions to be automatically deleted, then we need to stop answering them. — AncientSwordRage ♦ 21 mins ago
 
3:21 PM
0
Q: Why doesn't Darkseid always use kryptonite on Superman?

honeste_vivereDarkseid and Superman have fought on several occasions and Superman, I think, always turns out to be a major pain for Darkseid. Darkseid is not stupid and surely must have known about the kryptonite weakness from very early on. Darkseid is also not weakened by kryptonite. So why doesn't he jus...

 
4:13 PM
posted on January 17, 2022 by Jack B Nimble

Orson Scott Card’s The Last Shadow is the long-awaited conclusion to both the original Ender series and the Ender’s Shadow series, as the children of Ender and Bean solve the great problem of the Ender Universe—the deadly virus they call the descolada, which is incurable and will kill all of humanity if it is allowed to escape ... Read more

 
4:36 PM
@AncientSwordRage That'd be difficult to orchestrate, I think; there seem to be lots of people willing to jump on those questions to answer them.
 
@pipe In the future try not to flag thanks comments on story id answers where the OP is confirming the work is correct. It's better to keep them around in this one specific instance (:
 
5:09 PM
@DavidW yeah I'm aware of that
Randon thought: a tag to add so people can opt-out of these?
 
5:29 PM
The biggest problem is that the tag that would seem most obvious to a novice user, , has an existing purpose that's not that.
Maybe we should have a ?
 
5:57 PM
0
Q: A powerful mage gets reincarnated as the youngest prince who's overpowered from birth

djmI'm looking for a (mostly black and white) manga that I read a few years ago. I could have sworn the cover was of a young blond boy sitting on a throne, but I could be mistaken. At the beginning of the story, the young boy remembers his previous life and is ridiculously overpowered since birth. ...

 
6:23 PM
-1
Q: Newt got 3 points to Hufflepuff. What Hogwarts points awards or deductions were not in multiples of 5?

BCLCFrom trailer: 3 points to Hufflepuff. Where there any else in movies or books (including cursed child and fantastic beasts)? As for games, I can't remember any in the games I played, but I guess anything's possible in some games. According to fandom, it's just t...

 
@DavidW are you sure?I just checked and it's on a bunch of those
 
6:42 PM
We may be talking to cross purposes? If is on one of those "what does 'is' mean?" questions, then I'm suggesting changing it for a new tag.
@Marvin We don't have tags for individual HP movies; do we really need them for all the Fantastic Beasts movies?
Oh, and there's nothing in that question about mathematics. Sometimes I think people feel that they need to find 5 tags to put on their questions.
(It's not really a question about Dumbledore either...)
 
 
1 hour later…
8:02 PM
@DavidW there’s a meta somewhere about it. Fantastic Beasts though started with individual film tags so might as well keep them in my opinion
 
8:21 PM
0
Q: Did Hemingway write about intentional contagion during World War I?

Alessandro JacopsonI have this vague recollection about Hemingway writing, in one of his novel, about intentional contagion of infection; it seems to me there is a character, near a trench, offering a cigarette pack containing some infected substance to another character. Did Hemingway write about intentional conta...

 
Hmm... for scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/243173/…, I have a note that the answer was confirmed by the querent in a comment, and my comments suggest that I was replying to one of their comments, but I don't see that comment. Is there a way to see the deleted comment if there was one?
 
Mods can see deleted comments
 
@FuzzyBoots “Its not the seventh prince one but the one above it is right I wish you knew name. – flatman”
feel free to ping me here about this stuff by the way
Oh and also “when I read this manga I found it under a different title lmao. –
flatman”
 
8:48 PM
Well that's weird... I have no idea which one is the "one above it".
 
They’re the only deleted comments. The first one is posted under this comment and the second is posted under this one
They were self deleted
 
9:24 PM
0
Q: How did the magicians obtain the buttons that they possessed at the climax of "The Magician's Land"

user23087The Magicians trilogy features magical buttons that was used to travel between Earth/Fillory and the Neitherlands (presumably inspired by the similar magic rings featured in the Magician's Nephew). Towards the end of the novel the text indicates that the magicians possess at least three such but...

 
9:45 PM
posted on January 17, 2022 by tech

Click here to go see the bonus panel!Hovertext: This is God's preferred second person plural. Today's News:

 
4
Q: Story collection with new house turning into hypercube

comodoroI remember reading a short-story collection that could be about twenty years old, but the book was older, maybe 70s or 80s. After each story there was a sort of scientific explanation. The book was in Czech, but almost certainly translated from English. One story was about a house designed as the...

0
Q: In The Matrix Resurrections, who created the modals?

MartySkipWere the modals created my the analyst or were they part of Neo's game or both?

0
Q: In The Matrix Resurrections, can Neo see the real image of Trinity or only her Digital Self Image (DSI)?

MartySkipCan Neo see Trinity like she actually looks like or just her DSI? And what about how Trinity sees Neo?

0
Q: In The Matrix Resurrections, how did the analyst reset situations?

MartySkipWhat happened after the first time Morpheus meets Neo in the bathroom? After they meet, there is a big shootout in the office. How did the analyst reset everything? He also did this with Neo's suicide attempts I assume. Also, why did Smith become Smith out of the blue once he grabbed the gun?

0
Q: In The Matrix Resurrections, why did Smith initially fight Neo if all he wanted was the Analyst?

MartySkipHe had a big fight with Neo but all he wanted in the end was the Analyst.

 
10:00 PM
I see a floof tag, so I assume we are still doing those...
 
That we are… daily used very loosely of course
What a lovely little fella :)
 
@TheLethalCarrot 3 months. wife and kids are over the moon. I like the little fluff ball but am trying to remain pragmatic on his training and such.
 
Are you the “dad didn’t want a dog” meme? :P
You might want to cut the hair out his eyes btw. My mum dads labradoodle had terrible eyesight when we got him cos his hair was like that. A few weeks with it cut and he was fine
 
10:23 PM
@Skooba Awwww... Poodle mix? Maybe spaniel?
Very cute!
 
11:08 PM
3
Q: Multi-trunked elephants invade Earth

AlfredI read this novel at least 25 years ago, maybe more. I don't remember the cover. There is a joke: How does an elephant come down from a tree ? It sits on a leaf and waits for autumn. Well, this is how this book begins, by an army of elephant-looking aliens reaching Earth on gliders. And soon they...

 

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