jadero

Canadian here, with 50 years in the workforce. I’ve never once been paid semi-weekly or bimonthly. Here, biweekly is every two weeks semi-monthly is every half month. Obviously, that latter is often spoken of as twice a month, which just adds to the confusion between “bi” and “semi”.

The reality is that these words, like most words (at least in English), mean whatever the speaker wants them to mean and consensus can be hard to reach.

I give you the phrase “table the discussion”. Sometimes it means to formally bring something up for discussion. Other times it means setting the discussion aside for future consideration.

Or, my favourite from my childhood, “fat chance” which means that something is even less likely than if it had a slim chance. Granted, that might be more in the line of idiomatic slang, but it stands as part of at least the era’s Canadian English that did have broad consensus and still does, I think.

“Semi truck” is not half a truck, but a truck designed to carry one half the weight of the cargo it is hauling. A semi trailer is one designed to have half of its load (by weight) carried by the tow vehicle. A standard trailer gets difficult and possibly dangerous to tow if the weight carried by the tow vehicle (hitch weight) strays too far outside the 8%-12% range.

And just to add to the confusion, Dodge popularized something called the “hemi engine”–an engine with a “hemi head”, not half an engine. And “hemi head” refers not to “1/2 an engine head” but to the approximately hemispherical (1/2 sphere) shape of the combustion chambers cast/machined into the engine head.

Language is a wonderful chaos. You’re just on the leading edge of change! :)

Are you sure about that? I’m from Canada and distinctly remember the travel ads urging us to head on down to participate in the bicentennial celebrations, meant to celebrate the second century of that country’s founding.

I was taught that the “bi” prefix was a multiplier and “semi” was a divider.

That meant biweekly, bimonthly, biannually were every 2 weeks, months, years and semi-weekly, semi-monthly, semi-annually were every half a week, half a month, and half a year.

Then the real world intruded and I’ve been confused ever since. About the only time I hear “semi” and “bi” used on a regular basis the way I expect is with pay periods. Biweekly is every two weeks and semi-monthly is twice a month.

Canada, by the way.

PS: I suppose bisexual and semi trailers also fit my expectations.

And plants.

There were (and are) natural radio waves from things like stars and even something known as the Cosmic Microwave Background, the product of the Big Bang that created the universe.

However, they are not like rivers that we exploit for transportation, irrigation, and energy production. Instead, we have to generate our own radio waves to serve our specific needs.

In this sense, I find it useful to think of something like a lake. There are natural waves created by the wind, but I find it difficult how to imagine we would exploit those waves for communications because there is too much randomness built in and we have no control over the wind itself. On the other hand, it’s relatively easy to imagine how we might create our own waves in patterns that can carry information.

An interesting thing about generating water waves to communicate is that it would be extremely difficult to make it work in practice. The waves degrade quite quickly over distance, so would need periodic repetition and amplification. Natural waves would mess up and possibly overwhelm our nice patterns. Other people trying to use the same body of water at the same time would be creating waves that would mess up and maybe even overwhelm our nice patterns. To get radio communications to work, people have to figure out how to deal with analogous problems with signal degradation and interference.

Yes, I agree. My perception of hobby communities, at least the online ones, is that there is an inordinate amount of time spent trying to figure out how to monetize what used to be seen as a primarily recreational activity.

I know that some of it is self defense, in the sense that some hobbies are expensive enough to stretch a budget to the breaking point.

Some of it is likely due to incomes not keeping up with the cost of living and, of course, some people are budding entrepreneurs.

But it seems to me that there are a lot of people who feel that it’s not reasonable to have a hobby that has no income potential.

I’ve tried to explain this to people before, without success. I’m starting to think that most people have no concept of what it means to be passionate about something, so they go through life with nothing more than pastimes to keep their minds off reality.

For me it’s building boats. I’ve only ever built 2, the last one 20 years ago. But the amount of time and money I spent on magazines and plans both before and after those actual builds dwarfs the time and money it would take to run a lemmy instance. And now I’ve got 3 years and several thousand dollars into building and equipping a shop so I can build another one.

I’ll throw out a few bucks here and there because it feels like the right thing to do, but I actually want hobbyists, people with a passion for it, running the show. After all, that is what made reddit work. All the passionate mods doing their thing as a hobby.