Zeroth

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• Commented on Place your bets
  Extracting just the critical points: Well, I've just shovelled an 8x15 m driveway with 30 cm of wet snow... I'd be surprised if I was lifting more than 5-6 kg per shovelful... I was moving very slowly, like an old...
• Commented on Place your bets
  I installed Wolfram Alpha on my tablet. When I asked it the square root of pi, it told me it needed my location. I deleted it....
• Commented on An AI app walks into a writers room
  ...when I've flown in the last 10 years, SW has more legroom than, say, American. American and Delta have a 2 class coach section, with a bit more leg room for a few rows in the front. Their rear section...
• Commented on An AI app walks into a writers room
  "no such thing as climate change" Top 10 3 day snowfalls for the Baltimore, MD and Washington, DC area: https://www.weather.gov/lwx/winter_storm-pr#TopDaySnowfall 5 of the top 10 snowfalls have been since 1990. Records date back to 1800s....
• Commented on An AI app walks into a writers room
  **Can there be such a thing as a slanderous TRUTH? I think yes, in the British legal system. From the 'making the French look good' department....
• Commented on An AI app walks into a writers room
  From the little that I've read about this, the US disdain became fury when Ronnie Raygun wanted to kick-off his New World Order once the USSR collapsed. ...What France wanted was a non capitalist-dominated body, i.e., the EU which was...
• Commented on An AI app walks into a writers room
  One question I was given was on thermal expansion: given a uniform ring with a gap in it (and all relevant constants), at what temperature will the gap close? (and all the other replies to this original post) It depends...
• Commented on Make Up a Guy
  What is to be done about this? A good percent of the US population thinks the answer is 'make sure you're better armed than the other guy'. That's not to say it's a good answer....
• Commented on Decision Fatigue
  I remember being horrified to find out that my USAian friend couldn't vote because he was living in Aotearoa. Actually, US citizens overseas can vote. From https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/international-travel/while-abroad/voting.html : "Most U.S. citizens 18 years or older who reside outside the United...
• Commented on Decision Fatigue
  On age limits for various activities, and what to do with roadkill. In the U.S. state where I grew up, the minimum age for a learner's permit (so you could drive with a licensed driver in the car) was 15...
• Commented on Strong and Stable!
  "Would you say goths are punks who lost the plot, or second-generation hippies with no colour sense?" Clearly, they're the Hegelian synthesis of the hippies (thesis) and punks (antithesis)....
• Commented on Strong and Stable!
  A bit of banter from a psychedelic jazz-rock band Sunday evening: Vote Republican and you'll never have to vote again. :)...
• Commented on I can't even
  It got really serious the day that LBJ signed the Civil Rights Act (1964). Within four years or so, almost all the old Dixiecrats - pro-segregation, etc Democrats - changed parties and became Republican. The process took much longer than...
• Commented on I can't even
  Why take the side of an old imperial has-been with delusions of grandeur when you're really trying to make friends and influence people in an affluent first-world economic superpower (with nuclear weapons, natch -- see also France)? 5 eyes. Google...
• Commented on I can't even
  For me the downfall of the RepubliQan party began when Eisenhower chose raving loon (& opportunist) Number One Richard Nixon as his running mate. Nixon was despicable for other reasons, but when you look at his actual proposed and implemented...
• Commented on Necroqueen!
  I had no problem with NoScript. Just allowing ...antipope.org works to let me read. I also had to whitelist ...zazzle.co.uk to log in....
• Commented on Necroqueen!
  I always associated the forbidden term with folks who were so out there that the right/left dichotomy didn't really apply. Like they were somewhere on the imaginary axis. But it was useful as a flag to stop paying attention....
• Commented on London Bridge
  The US has a few million or so ecological disasters lurking in back yards and cellars all over the US. But mostly in the northeast quadrant. The buried ones are the worst, you can't really see when there's an incipient...
• Commented on Crimes against Transhumanity
  Does anyone with actual experience with the publishing industry (as I have none) have any comment on the Penguin Random House merger with Simon & Schuster? It's now subject to an antitrust trial in the US....
• Commented on Abolish the monarchy!
  Yeah, a lot of the sale of big SUVs and pick-up trucks in the USA is driven by utterly perverse tax laws... I think it's more about a big truck/SUV being a status symbol in some circles. Certainly in the...
• Commented on The impotence of the long-distance trillionaire
  Unfortunately, the US Supreme Court has ruled that the second amendment to the US constitution confers an individual right to gun ownership (whether this is a good idea or historically defensible is beside the point). This makes it practically impossible...
• Commented on Roe v Wade v Sanity
  There's a folksong, The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down.... It's not strictly speaking a folk song; it was written by Robbie Robertson of The Band. He is still alive. Joan Baez did have a hit with it, and many...
• Commented on Roe v Wade v Sanity
  Unless you're from the South, in which case it's known as The War Of Northern Aggression. I don't remember ever hearing that particular term in the public schools (I'm told the term 'state school' is the equivalent in England) of...
• Commented on Holding pattern 2022 ...
  Oops. Didn't make clear that those temperatures were for January....
• Commented on Holding pattern 2022 ...
  Maybe more north. But in the southern US you can get by without much in the way of heating. Especially along the Gulf Coast. Well, more like 'only along the Gulf Coast'. For Memphis, Tennessee, for example, Average high about...
• Commented on Holding pattern 2022 ...
  sed -e 's/[aeiou]//ig' But what about w (rarely) and y (fairly often)?...