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[Graknorke]

E: How come a UK dweller is bothered by gopniks, by the way? I really thought you don't find much of these to the west of Poland.

One of my favourite internet memers mentioned them, and I'd heard of them before while never actually getting it.

[GiglameshDespair]

When you see helicopter footage from police chases and the like, how high do the helicopters tend to be? If they're flying quite low.

[Mechatronic]

When you see helicopter footage from police chases and the like, how high do the helicopters tend to be? If they're flying quite low.

Anything below 1000 feet over a built up area would be flying low. That's below the usual minimum for civil aviation and requires authorisation from the local civil aviation authority that's only granted to operators like police, fire and rescue.

[GiglameshDespair]

Why do humans have stomach acid that's not strong enough to kill off most bacteria in raw food?

I tried googling it but it came up with a load of sites saying 'We have weaker stomach acid, therefore we MUST be herbivores', which is rather horseshit and not what I'm looking for.

It is.
Stomach acid is useful for both digestive and decontamination purposes. Diseases to do with low stomach acid production can result in infections.

Even animals can get sick from eating food, but they don't tend to talk about it so much.

[scrdest]

Why do humans have stomach acid that's not strong enough to kill off most bacteria in raw food?

I tried googling it but it came up with a load of sites saying 'We have weaker stomach acid, therefore we MUST be herbivores', which is rather horseshit and not what I'm looking for.

It is.
Stomach acid is useful for both digestive and decontamination purposes. Diseases to do with low stomach acid production can result in infections.

Even animals can get sick from eating food, but they don't tend to talk about it so much.

Furthermore: a good chunk of things like food poisoning is not directly caused by bacteria, but by bacterial toxins produced as a side-effect of their metabolism, which isn't destroyed easily without nuking the meat into vapor as well - which is why you can't just cook spoiled raw meat and eat it later safely.

And modern humans don't have to bother with potentially-unsafe food most of the time for various reasons. Which, sadly, means that our immune systems aren't too heavily drilled to respond to the common foodborne bacterial pathogens which lowers our tolerance threshold compared to animals or even humans who are exposed to them more often whose immune systems can SCP the hell out of smaller amounts of bacteria/bacterial toxins.

[TheBiggerFish]

I like your choice of verb there, scrdest.

[DragonDePlatino]

Is there a formal name for a medieval winged snake? Like, just a normal-sized snake with membrane bat wings. I know the Egyptians called them Wadjet and Aztec called them Coatl, but I can't find a medieval name other than "winged snake" or "winged serpent".

[My Name is Immaterial]

Wyrm?

[GiglameshDespair]

Wyrm is Old English for "serpent."

I can't really think of any particular myths or legendary beasts that were normal-sized snakes with wings, but I imagine you could probably call them dragons. The border between dragon and snake was always pretty indistinct, to be honest. Hence a lot of large dragons/ giant snakes in british mythology are called worms. So wyrm, dragon, serpent would all work, but I can't think of a formal name for a winged serpent. Perhaps they'd just be called winged serpents.

Something like the spanish dragon Cuélebre was a legless, winged serpent, though it's too large for you question.

[DragonDePlatino]

Eh...In retrospect, I guess it was a stupid question to ask. Wadjet and Coatl amount to "Green One" and "Serpent" in their respective languages so it only makes sense that "Winged Snake" in English is "Winged Snake". I'll stick to Wyrm as it's the closest thing that sounds remotely exotic.

[i2amroy]

Even animals can get sick from eating food, but they don't tend to talk about it so much.

A lot of animals also have shorter gut times (though not all, obviously) that makes them less vulnerable to eating, say, dead carcasses without cooking them. For example housecat gut times are only like 6 hours or so in length, compared to a human 36-48 hours, meaning that a lot of the things that would have us vomiting and horribly sick pass right through them before they really have time to inflict serious damage. (Though this comes with the drawback that they get less nutrients from a fair bit of their food, and that they can't process more complex molecules (like carbs) with any sort of real efficiency).

[Frumple]

... so, okay. Someone out there told a story about mel tillis singing out when he thought someone was breaking in to the place they were sleeping. One I'm thinking of wasn't tillis himself, it was... someone else. Who I've forgotten. And at some point in the past (we're talking, like. Over a decade ago.) there was a .mp3 made, that had the person I'm forgetting telling the little tale. Distinctive, 'cause the guy was just kinda' talking (maybe to guitar strumming, maybe not), and then at the end of the bit, he burst into (quite loud, comparatively) song, just as tillis was purported to. Something about a man breaking in, iirc, and searching has shown it was probably a reduced context telling of the event where a drunk johnny paycheck was trying to get into the place several singers were sleeping.

Is... is there anyone out there that just happens to remember who did that fairly specific bit of country music related comedy? I really want to hear it again, but trying to google-fu for it has been failing miserably.

[Andres]

Is Loki a good name for a girl?

[TheBiggerFish]

Well, Loki kind of associates with the (male) Norse god so I'm not sure it's a good name for anybody.

[Frumple]

Conditionally male norse god. Loki works well enough for a female, if you're okay with the association. Maybe check and see if loki used a different name when he was genderbending, use that instead?