I agree. Mercury is very poisonous.
Typically, there is always a fresh set of things of which they become persuaded, as the older ones go stale (AIG is in fact a good demonstration of this - debunking the things it used to promote, and promoting something else instead - the ‘arguments we no longer use’ feature is, for them, like the job of painting the Forth Bridge.
I’ve often heard the claim that if things were different, they wouldn’t be the same as they are now. It really makes you think.
Yeah, and nostalgia ain’t what it used to be, neither.
It’s also true that things that happened, happened exactly when they happened and not before. Imagine having to wait for that.
A rectangle is a geometric concept, a Platonic ideal. A shape is either a rectangle or it’s not. There are no “imperfect rectangles.”
I agree. There is perhaps some small utility for the concept ‘very nearly rectangular’, but a perfect rectangle is just a rectangle. And in engineering terms, nothing is perfect - instead, there is a specified tolerance of imperfection.
“Imperfect” rectangles do exist as a mathematical concept, but this doesn’t have anything to do with their size or width-length (a perfect rectangle can be made of squares of different sizes). Of course, you could also call a square a perfect rectangle, one which has sides of equal length.
Also, as for the Earth’s orbit being off by a millimeter causing havoc, I wonder how much human activity has affected the orbit already, with no dire effects. Here is an old (1996) NY Times article on dams speeding up the rotation of the Earth by 200 nanoseconds per day (which is to say, 1 second in 13,700 years). I’m pretty sure though that even if the Earth’s orbit changed by thousands of kilometers (or the length of day changed by seconds or even minutes) it wouldn’t have any noticeable effect.
I’ve never heard of that usage - is it common? - a square is a regular rectangle.
A perfect rectangle is made of pie.