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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • Uh I had to quickly look at Wikipedia but apparently the reason it’s transcribed with Ph is:

    At the time these letters were borrowed, there was no Greek letter that represented /f/: the Greek letter phi ‘Φ’ then represented an aspirated voiceless bilabial plosive /ph/, although in Modern Greek it has come to represent /f/.)

    And so out of the various vav variants in the Mediterranean world, the letter F entered the Roman alphabet attached to a sound which the Greeks did not have.

    So Greeks pronounced Phi differently from F and somehow someone decided that it should be transcribed as Ph because it sounded different from the transcriber’s sound of F. Maybe the Phi symbol just looked like a P.










  • Placebos work even when you knows it’s a placebo though. Pointing out something is a placebo is important because many are at best overpriced scams (homeopathy) and at worst actively harmful (chiropracty). The culture behind many placebos is also rife with pseudoscience and advocates against seeking out genuine care, so you should ensure nobody gets invested into placebos past a certain point.

    One can make an informed decision regarding taking placebos if and only if one knows it’s a placebo, else one will be scammed and/or harmed.