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.
Getting rid of excess rupees is the real strength of the Malo Mart magic armour.
Ravens are equally close relatives, as are parrots.
The aye-aye is also doing much better, mostly because the population size was severely underestimated at the time of writing.
And yeah, the book is amazing. I usually describe it to fans of his other works as somehow being his weirdest book, despite being non-fiction.
I myself only ever visit chewbac.ca!
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).
It seems quite a few modern birds (Aves) lineages survived the K-Pg extinction (at least 5, last I checked), but when exactly they diversified is apparently still a contentious issue. The common ancestor almost definitely lived sometime during the cretaceous, so not THAT long ago in the grand scheme of things, but it definitely lived either before or during T-rex’s reign.
I was referring to Avialae, which is the clade defined as all dinosaurs more closely related to budgies than to deinonychus. Many of them would have seemed quite birdy to us, but like the other dinosaurs not many of them made it to the current day and the ones that did are all Aves.
In case anyone genuinely has this misconception: birds branched off from the other dinosaurs during the Jurassic, probably over 100 million years before the astroid hit. Dinos didn’t suddenly grow feathers and a beak because a big rock hit them.
If I’m not mistaken, he also calculated pi by hand (to several decimal places) during lockdown. So it wasn’t all sunshine and rainbows for ol’ Isaac.