On this day in 2008, one of our favourite movies, TEETH, was released. This horror movie centres around a young woman who has "vagina dentata" - teeth in her vagina. Vagina dentata myths is common, appearing in South America, India, Japan and Māori mythologies. Here's one myth...

Thread on best books + readers to learn Sanskrit. I will list only books I have read & their pros and cons.

1. Samskrita Bharati (4 Part Series)

This is by far the best structured english course to learn to read, speak & write Sanskrit. The material is well-structured.

... and grammar is introduced at apt phases. There is enough Sanskrit text to immerse yourself & best part is they have accompanying online/in-person courses entirely in Sanskrit. This is the best method to learn spoken Sanskrit.

2. Svayam Sanskrit Shikshak (Hindi)

This is the second best immersive-learning series. There are 2 parts and progression is gradual. The advantage is it is entirely in Hindi, so the 1:1 syntax + vocab connect for native speakers is instant, Hindi being a daughter of Sanskrit.

this however is also it's only disadvantange. It's language restricted & not suitable for say a Telugu with poor Hindi or for an American or European learner. There is enough reading material here to "learn" Sanskrit.

3. The Sanskrit Language – Walter H Maurer

This is an amazing course. The best to learn Sanskrit for Americans/Europeans & an excellent one for Indians to use to learn the western grammar terminology. Best part about it? It is extremley long & has at least 100 pages of Sanskrit.

At it's #NewYearsEve we're going to end the year by playing the Agatha Christie game!

I'll show you the book cover artwork by Tom Adams, and you guess the Fontana edition Agatha Christie novel it's from.

Here's your first one...

A little bit trickier for question 2...

A lot trickier for number 3, but the clues are there if you know your Christie...

And here's your last Agatha Christie cover for this round - quite a famous one.

I'll post the answers in a bit, so get your guesses in now please!

Here are the answers to round 1 of the Agatha Christie game. I hope you got a few right, as round 2 will exercise your little grey cells a little bit more...

A children's book explanation of what's happening:

1. If you are "smart money" you are allowed to take your $1 and leverage it up to $15+

2. You can now buy $15 of stock AND if you promise to short companies, you can short $15 of stock as well

3. In finance language, this means that you are $30 "gross" ($15 of longs + $15 of shorts) but $0 net (+$15 of longs -$15 of shorts). This makes everyone feel good because it feels like you are taking zero risk...but in reality, your $1 is exposed to $30 of risk.

4. Now you go around and tell your friends about both your longs and your shorts and when you do it at a restaurant vs on Reddit, its called an "ideas dinner".

5. You also publish your longs on a quarterly lag via an SEC rule. You don't have to tell anyone about your shorts.

6. Now the less cool people who weren't invited to the ideas dinners, start copying your longs based on your report.

7. You realize that publicizing your shorts is also a good idea so instead of only selling stocks, you also BUY options (puts) which has to be reported.

8. Now everyone can see both your longs and your shorts and if you have a hot hand, you can likely predict that the cool people from the dinner as well as the less cool people monitoring your filings will copy you.

9. But then an outsider notices that the math is way off!

love to see a youtube video that references a script that's linked in the comments and it's an obfuscated link to a one-click hoster.

THAT'S DEFINITELY STILL GONNA WORK IN FOUR YEARS

it does still work, but that's because it's only been 2 years.

also, wow, this is horrible.

the script is to generate random kanji/han characters and insert them into minecraft books.
but the video references there being two hotkeys to generate two distinct books, which seemed odd. so I thought I'd check.

it turns out by "random" they mean "pre-randomized and is hardcoded into the 45 kilobyte autohotkey scripot"

I mean, I get it. I don't want to write AutoHotKey scripts either. it's a horrible, horrible language.

BUT STILL