What? Aspartame is classified as a possible carcinogen, but mostly to encourage further research. There’s an old rat study that claimed to show an increase in variois cancers, but it had a weirdly cancer-free control group and used levels far in excess of “a few cans per day”. AFAIK, no human studies have ever shown any significant correlation. It definitely hasn’t been “proven and accepted by the WHO”.

All rhombi are parallelograms.

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.

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.

They’re like the only ones making actual money with TTRPGs and even then they need Magic to keep themselves afloat!

Haha! There’s thankfully not enough money in TTRPGs for Nintendo to care.

Affirmative!

Getting rid of excess rupees is the real strength of the Malo Mart magic armour.

Ravens are equally close relatives, as are parrots.

Doesn’t make him not ace.

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.

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 had to use one of those hex wrenches to fix my shower a few months back. It definitely felt like vindication.

Haha! That one’s for the champion, where it should hopefully be a bit less of a surprise.

It’s just those 6. Keeping the list small was a deliberate choice to keep things manageable. These are just here to give some Gym Leaders a Pokémon not normally found in the wild in the hopes of making them a bit more interesting.

Ha, weird, thanks for pointing it out!

Also, a small heads up: the most recent version fixed an issue with TM25 Thunder which slipt in at some point. Some of the Pokémon sheets incorrectly showed it as available or unavailable.

And since nobody’s going to check this comment chain anyway, here, have some extra Pokémon:

https://heavenlyspoon.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/new-pokemon.pdf

These are part of a companion book I’m working on with a suggested gym for each of the 50 TMs and a couple of pre-designed regions.

It normally is just a copy, but I edit the dex file for small changes instead of doing a full copy since that’s a bit quicker, but yeah, I apparently didn’t actually change it in the main doc. Oops.

And yeah, Articuno is deliberate. I liked it taking up most of that page, and this way seemed like a neat way of not having to shrink it as much.

Happy to hear that! And I’m always happy with more bug reports (as long as they’re fixable). Yeah, Disable should be 1 hit.

I don’t notice the edge clipping on my copy of the Pokédex, but I could’ve accidentally uploaded an older version. It should be good now, I hope.

I’ve updated the document with some other minor changes as well. They’ve been in the doc for a bit now, but this seemed as good a time as any to actually implement them.