pliftkl

I didn't really remember the "blow up the moon", but he sure posted a lot about "Time has Inertia" on sci.physics.

This was my reaction as well - every article I've read seems to call out "changes the way we think they navigated because out of sight of land", but this may be a perverse form of survivor bias (ships tried this and sank), or as you point out, it could have been blown off course where it then sank.

The fact that this is completely unmentioned in the article really surprised me. The physicians may not have done insurance fraud, but they absolutely committed medical malpractice, and they did so for the sake of personal profit.

This is a common practice at many large companies, though it isn't explicit, and it's rarely transparent. Managers try to find roles on other teams for their worst performers in order to get them out of their organization, because that's frequently easier than using a PIP to fire someone. Unfortunately, the way you get another manager to accept your poorly-performing employee is to talk up their skills and talk about how they have career development dreams that would be perfect for this other role.

Not the author you quote, but Christopher Schwartz, who runs Lost Art Press (which printed what you quoted) can also write a heck of a wood-working book:

"The journey to the summit of Mount Vesuvius has all the romance of visiting an unlicensed reptile farms..." - opening line to _Ingenious Mechanicks_, which is a history of early workbenches.

(One thing I found fascinating about this book is that it uses religious art to infer details about workbenches, because Yeshua Bin-Maryam was thought to be a "carpenter", and medieval artists drew contemporary medieval workbenches in pictures of the child Yeshua.)

It's a weird collection of topics, all in the same dry style. Definitely AI.

I have a Mormon neighbor who did his missionary work in Thailand. My wife is Thai, so he came by to chat with us once with some missionaries who had visited us. I spoke to him for a while about his experience in trying to evangelize to a country that is 90+% Buddhist, and in which Buddhism plays a huge role in Thai culture. What I found fascinating is that in Thailand, a Mormon missionary was pretty much on a level playing field with any other Christian missionary. If a Thai person was considering a flavor of Christianity, the Mormon church isn't particularly "fringe" in the way it might be perceived by a Christian who is listening to a Mormon missionary in the US.

Well, the punishment for Facebook is twofold: (A) they probably spent 10's of thousands on fighting this in court, and (B) it sets precedent that they are liable for this sort of thing. If they start getting sued regularly in jurisdictions all over the country, then the "pay expensive lawyers a lot a few times" vs "pay some humans to look at complaints many times" may start to come out in the consumer's favor.

Thank you for posting this and giving me an injection of nostalgia. :)

I loved these books as a kid, and have probably not thought about them in 40 years. Unfortunately, my own daughter is probably too old to enjoy them the same way I did.

If you're really talking about universal rights in the modern sense, that really didn't happen in the US until the 1960's in practice (unless you were white and had the correct chromosomes). Women couldn't vote until the early 20th century, and you could not marry interracially in some states until the 1960's.

Depends a lot on the jurisdiction. In Austin, the police will declare "no-refusal" weekends (typically holidays) in which they declare in advance that they'll get a warrant for a blood draw in the case of refusals. If you look at the DUI arrest stats for those weekends, about half of them involve warrant based blood draws after breathalyzer refusals.

In case you take it up as a retirement project: what I'd love to see is an avatar builder's kit. Create the core engine, a basic level, monster, item, and class editor, and let people mod it. The basic party mechanics and att/def model could be standardized, but let people create their own game based on their own data. Create the hooks for people to add additional gameplay (ingredients, etc). Let people self-host.

Like you, I think about doing this every couple years. :)

I loved the avatar gameplay and the fact that it wasn't a "massively" multiplayer dungeon crawl, but rather something small enough that you knew most of the players. I'd trade a lot of the scale and graphics of modern gameplay for a return to the deliberate party based run of modestly updated avatar.

Becoming disciplined enough to use the CPAP every night was a real struggle for me. Ironically, what ultimately helped me was starting to take modafinil during the day. Taking that as a stimulant in the day gave me enough energy in the day that I could make good decisions about other things that influence my sleep (exercise, sleep discipline). Something of a virtuous circle for me.