Recent comments in /f/todayilearned

crystalGwolf t1_j9xu9u9 wrote

As a British person, couple points:

  1. There's no such thing as a British accent, it includes 3 countries each with their own substantial regional differences
  2. Received pronunciation or standard southern or just London accent is most dominant and you'll find it around London and home counties but only there
  3. Some Americans may pronounce certain words with similarities to London Shakespearean English but there's no way Elizabethans/Georgians walked around with the nasally accent Americans do today. Village towns in the black country and south west of England are going to be consistently more correlated
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Various_Succotash_79 t1_j9xs5dy wrote

That was the first one, yeah.

But the reason they came up with the rating was supposedly all the complaints they got about Gremlins and Temple of Doom.

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p-d-ball t1_j9xqvt0 wrote

Yeah, DDT was widely used to kill insects. It successfully got rid of malaria in the continental USA to Canada (malaria used to be all the way up to southern Canada), combined with draining swamps, pavement and sewer systems (to drain water away). Mosquitoes returned, but not with malaria, which requires a minimum population to spread.

DDT was also used to stop bedbugs. They are making a comeback partly because it was stopped, but probably also because of growing social inequality - extremely poor people just don't have the means to kill them where they live. And some people are immune to the itchiness and so aren't motivated enough to kill the bedbugs feeding off them.

DDT, it turns out, weakens bird's eggs. So, raptors were dying out all over the place.

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Derpy_County t1_j9xqbf5 wrote

Scariest thing about the marijuana scene is him trying to roll it directly on his bed covers, giving up because he can’t do it and then jumping about on the bed - weed everywhere!

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