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> There is an evolutionary advantage to not killing your host before spreading

Once you've been able to pass on the virus to others there's not much evolutionary pressure one way or the other.

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You're surprisingly ready to jump down that poster's throat without stopping for a moment to consider it might be a regional thing - never mind that there's a named linguistic phenomenon at play as well.

Where I'm from (Ontario, Canada) there's really no difference in sound between those words.

Blasting the device to pieces destroys the evidence to prove whether it is a weather balloon or a spy balloon.

Perhaps it's time to develop a way to capture a balloon mid air for future incidents.

On the other hand, blasting the balloon makes for a good show and keeps the argument whether it is a weather balloon or a spy balloon alive.

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It's also good to remember that coronaviruses aren't just some singular static thing. SARS-CoV-2, for instance, is highly mutable. So a better question would be variant competition because as far as viral species go, you can definitely be co-infected.

The only thing I can imagine is karst terrain (limestone erosion) causing a sinkhole to form. Typical lake forming processes shouldn't result in this.

Grain of salt; I only have an undergrad in geology, and hydro was not my jam.

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I read the word 'diodes' wrong the first time I read it. I was utterly confused

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Makes sense because the universal mitigation measures used on SARS-CoV-2 impair all respiratory viruses. Everything from masks to absolute bans on going to work / school / day care with respiratory illness.

The others aren't as contagious so while the pandemic is extremely hard to drive transmission down below 1, the others are temporarily removed.

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Yes, that makes sense, thank you!

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Because there are different levels of whispering, and at an actual total whisper versus just speaking quietly, there’s a complete absence of tone as the vocal chords do not vibrate.

I'm pretty sure that, in Europe at least, the local church or cathedral would be responsible for keeping the official time, and this would primarily be accomplished through the aid of a sundial. So if the sundial were properly calibrated, the daylight hours would have pretty regular.

I would have to assume that nighttime hours, or daytime hours on cloudy days, were often estimations at best. For the most part, the only folks who really cared what time it was were church officials who needed to determine when it was time to hold daily services. Everyone else would have just listed for the church bells.

Or 3) you’re imagining the difference, based on your knowledge of what’s being said, just as listeners do.

>Even if the two beams were mirrored into the same trajectory, it's possible they'd refract while traveling due to their different wavelengths and end up as two dots at the end anyway.

Do you mean that they would refract differently passing through an interface, or that the two beams would interfere with each other? It seems like the former should be able to be controlled on the device side as long as you are careful with the optics (though shining the laser through an interface would split the beams, but nothing we can do about that). You could probably cheat your way around inter-beam interference by using a pair of pulse-width modulated lasers set out of phase so that the beams don't overlap and relying on persistence of vision for the laser to be perceived as yellow.

Edited to clarify that it’s accent dependent. Much of the US and Canada would pronounce them the same, it’s known as cot-caught merger.