matt_morgan

Right. My word was before "wizard," and later I guessed "yesterday," which is after wizard. It put yesterday adjacent to the entry box, before wizard. Same is true for words before the word. Basically, if I make bad guesses, it doesn't list them in alpha order.

If it's otherwise healthy, they won't kill it or even hurt it that badly. They loved the black walnut in our yard and I was worried about it, but by the next year they were mostly gone.

I live in a woodsy suburb in SE PA, and saw that first infestation. It was horrible. Disgusting. The next year was way better, and by this year (I can't remember if this is year 3 or 4) there were hardly any. There are definitely predators catching on--I've seen praying mantises and various spiders eating them. I think I've heard that some birds have caught on, too.

What I don't know is at first we heard that it's a little colder than they like around here, and that we should expect them to move south. I haven't heard that it's bad south of here, but I don't know.

I've worked in and around museums for a long time and this topic comes up now and again. It occurred to me that if we think a museum should never close, then we'll never open up museums experimentally. There's no museum startup.

I agree it's a shame for the community and the staff.

Requiring that they provide more information earlier encourages them to behave more safely (by exposing them to scrutiny backed by sound evidence). And if they still go down, at least it happened sooner and there are fewer depositors to be harmed.

My heart wants to agree with you but all those regulations must have something to do with how few people die in airplane crashes. It's like the textbook case of when regulations work, and I don't think the FAA has a department of special exceptions. We can wishfor it, but it's not easy to handle someone who wants to do something different.

That looks super cool. Thanks!

Cool! I bought Cosmic Encounter in the 80s. I left it with my parents when I moved out, and then we would play it there when we visited so I never moved it to my own house. Then of course they threw it out. I had no idea it had been republished. Very fun game--a little random but for me that makes it more fun.

KineticLensman's writing is a little unclear there, but I think that was the intent--birds are tricky, and Caracaras are just as tricky as raccoons, i.e. not safe.

This sounds like what I did in high school and college, where I did pretty well for grades etc. By grad school I was doing funner things, and then the first 15 or so years of working, I worked pretty hard and was productive. Since then I don't think I can measure what I do in terms of productivity; I'm a manager (every day) and strategist (on good days) and if I have a good idea, it's rare and unpredictable.

So I would ask, are you providing value in some other way? In school I got a lot of informal extra credit, or at least good will, by participating in class a lot even when I hadn't done reading or homework. I'm sure that alone caused teachers to bump me up a half-grade or better. And then after 30 years of working I still do kind of the same thing by being useful at meetings and in figuring out what work can and should be done, defending and supporting my colleagues and staff, and otherwise being a good influence around the office. What I'm saying is you might have other skills you're not recognizing.