I pick up street litter, and having picked up thousands of pounds, I have never felt that loose caps are a problem, let alone one that requires such a solution. The number of littered bottles, with or without a cap, is greater than the number of loose caps, and the amount of plastic in every bottle dwarfs the plastic in a cap. Fixing the cap to the bottle will do nothing to improve the recycling rate of plastic if entire bottles are already tossed anyway.

I consider the idea of cap tethers as adversarial memetic warfare thrust upon us for some unknown ulterior purpose, possibly to make us hate the very idea of environmental consciousness. Same as paper straws. I like plastic bag bans though.

As far as picking litter is concerned, I personally prefer finding bottles without a cap. At least those are empty, all liquid having evaporated after the bottle has spent several months in the bushes. The capped bottles are often half-full and are just nasty. (Who even pays for a bottle of drink and not drinks half of it anyway?)

To be fair, when I was little I too was guessing that “C” stands for centimeters or something metric. Now I know that “C” in “700C”, the most popular road/hybrid wheel size, stands for the third size in the French “ABCD” notation, where sizes “700A”, “700B”, and “700D” are obsolete and are no longer manufactured.

I’d love to use ISO sizes, but even if I know that I need a 40-622 wheel, there is no way to search for it on the storefront if every single seller made gross mistakes in labeling their product! I have to ignore the specs shown entirely and make educated guesses based on title alone. For example “WHEEL AL 700 FRONT ALEX AP18 QR Silver UCP” in the picture is almost certainly a 700C wheel and NOT an 18-inch wheel. The “18” in the title probably stands for 18mm rim width, which means that this wheel will fit my bike and tire, but is a bit more narrow than ideal 23mm. The sellers must be copying the title verbatim from the manufacturer, and then haphazardly filling out the specifications without knowing or understanding the actual numbers. The ISO size is not mentioned at all.

I wanted to go with this, but had to go even bigger. The largest mine truck according to the wiki is BelAZ 75710 (as seen in the picture) which has “59/80R63” tires that are merely 402.7cm big.

Half the fun of trolley problems is adapting them to puzzles for which they are utterly unsuitable:

Oh! They don’t mean that black holes must come in perfect pairs! The headline makes it sound like it’s about wormholes across vast distances. No! What they’ve found is a stable “orbit” solution for the two-body problem. Normally when you place two bodies anywhere in an empty universe, they will gravitate towards each other until they collide. But in a universe with dark energy, there is some perfect distance between them, where the accelerating expansion perfectly counterbalances the accelerating attraction. They’ve used general relativity math to actually calculate such an arrangement.

The “stable” orbit in this case is the same kind of stable as a pencil balanced on its sharp tip - if it tilts even slightly one way it will fall out of control. Although they tantalize the idea that they might be able to make it truly stable against small perturbations once they finish their spinning black hole solution.

I would like to have known some specific numbers examples! Like if you have as much dark energy as our universe, and two 10-solar-masses stellar black holes, how far apart would that be? Is it like 1Ly or 1MLy? How far for two 10-million-solar masses supermassive black holes? The formulas they created should give the exact answer but I am not skilled enough to substitute the correct numbers for the letters.

I think it’s precisely because there is no governing body for English and all the rules are colloquial, developed through usage, that people do get grumpy! They are the only ones who can create and enforce the rules! Each English speaker feels personally responsible and compelled to correct use they perceive is in violation of the rules the way they want them to be. If they don’t do it right then and there, no one else can.