You do realise water can fall from the sky, right? 100°C might not be too useful for outside temperatures, but knowing if there might be ice on the road or not seems like a useful thing to know.

Also, as a maths teacher, having frequent negative temperatures makes working with negative numbers a lot more intuitive for students. The fact that Americans apparently use 1 for the ground floor means I’d lose out on both of my simple real-world examples of negative numbers.

Sure, but I was responding to someone who was defining wasp (the common word) based on clade (using scientific words).

I’m fine with common parlance words for things. What I had issue with was arbitrarily restricting the definition of wasp to a specific clade, which would exclude ants and bees, and also a whole host of at the very least wasp-adjacent animals which would now be stuck with no real way to describe them.

(Also, yes, fish is a rubbish scientific word. We’re far closer cousins of salmon than sharks are. By any reasonable definition of fish, at least biologically, we are fish. You could redefine “fish” in the same way we define “tree”, i.e. based on structure and not on ancestry, but by that definition whales should still be fish. The word “fish” shouldn’t be allowed within 50 metres of cladistics.)

Just to confirm, you don’t think of jewel wasps, spider wasps, sand wasps, and flower wasps as wasps, since they’re not part of the Vespidae, correct?

I’ve mostly seen wasps defined as basically “Apocrita but not the ones we don’t think count as wasps because there’s too many of them, specifically bees and ants.” Which leads to the same weird reasoning that would somehow make legless lizards lizards, but not snakes. I’ve seen velvet ants referred to as wasps, but not ants, even though true ants are far closer cousins to Vespidae. That just isn’t a viable scientific definition. I’m glad we’ve mostly moved on to grouping avian dinosaurs among the dinosaurs, but it feels like a lot of similar groupings are still lagging.

I’m willing to accept Vespidae as a synonym of wasps, but that excludes a ton of wasps. It also erases the very wasp-like nature of ant ancestors, which is what makes cladistics so fascinating. So why not just open it up to include all Apocrita and be done with it?

I’m also fine with a morphological definition of wasps, like how “tree” isn’t based on ancestry but on structure, but you were the one pulling in the scientific names.

Except many non-Vespidae, both living and extinct, would readily be considered wasps. Look at this thing and tell me it’s not a wasp: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Eusapvertic.jpg If that’s a wasp and a yellow-jacket is a wasp, then so are ants and bees, in the same way that we are apes and birds are dinosaurs. You wouldn’t call a zoo to deal with a loose human and you wouldn’t call dr. Grant to deal with a pigeon, but biologically it makes a lot more sense to deal with ancestry then with how a species interacts with humans.

Weird comic, why put the punchline in the penultimate panel?

To be fair, based on the (lack of) spelling and grammar in his e-mails, that might actually be how he writes letters.

I don’t know of any television series, but Maple from Zelda Oracle of Seasons/Ages eventually swaps out her broom for a vacuum cleaner:

It wouldn’t. A tetrahedron has four sides, hence the name, while an Egyptian-style pyramid has five (if you include the base, otherwise it isn’t even a polyhedron).