Yeah, it’s just their lebensraum, nothing to be concerned about at all.

Four field approach FTW!

Anthropology made me the school bus driver I am today.

And an adam’s apple.

Lol as if Arizona in any way accomodates pedestrians.

I’ve long said that the more people you add to a software project, the longer it will take and the worse the final product will be. Your scenario describes one of the many reasons why this is the case.

Not many people know that “Baba Yaga” is the real name of the song, not “Teenage Wasteland”.

Damn, I wish I’d read your second sentence.

There are also some that do not care if their product even makes it to the destination.

I started buying 50 lb. bags of bread flour from Amazon during COVID. One of the bags was reported as delivered although it never showed up at my house. I went through the claim process and eventually got a new bag for free. Two fucking years later the original bag showed up at my house, with packing tape crudely placed over a couple of large holes. The flour was filled with mouse turds. I wonder what godforsaken corner of an Amazon warehouse that thing was sitting in for so long.

I’ve written routines to do it multiple times for my software synthesis apps and it still feels like fucking magic.

I had the rim of my rear wheel crack last week, first time I’ve ever had a wheel problem in 20 years/100K miles of riding.

I have a 20-year-old Trek 4200 with about 70K miles on it. The thing is fucking immortal and it wasn’t even close to being a top-end bike in 2006 (I think it cost around $500 new). Drivetrain, tires and brakes are the only things I’ve ever replaced, obviously many times over.

This makes physics a lot more approachable for people who know nothing, but then completely confuses people with only a little knowledge.

My favorite example of this is the use of “stress” and “strain”. In common language they’re synonyms, but in Physics they’re definitely not.

“Do Ruby Begonia ring a bell?” Even more obscurely, this Flip Wilson routine was referencing an old Amos & Andy routine where they would say something like “Do the name Ruby Begonia strike a familiar note?”

FWIW I used to hang out with behavioral psychology grad students, who were in the Skinnerian tradition of operant conditioning research. They mostly worked with pigeons, and to transport the birds they used juice pitchers with a few air holes cut into the bottom. I asked them once how they got the birds into the pitchers and they laughed and showed me: they would just open the bird’s cage and hold the pitcher up and the birds would dive head-first into the pitcher, sometimes knocking themselves out in the process.

As part of the research protocol, the birds were kept on a diet that included about 80% of their normal caloric intake; the rest of their food was provided by the reinforcements of the experiments themselves (this was done to maximize the reinforcement effect of the rewards). So those birds were way the fuck into those experiments. To add to that, these students were all behavioral pharmacologists, so in addition to getting food reinforcement the birds were also getting drugs like cocaine and heroin.

BTW a lot of people confuse the operant conditioning research with the people who put animals into cages and shock them. This is definitely not what BF Skinner was all about. In fact he wrote books on the subject of how punishment is a bad thing for all animals (including humans and pigeons).

I would have said “wasn’t Pavlov the guy who had a dog named Ruby Begonia?” and even the prof wouldn’t have known what the fuck I was talking about.

One under-appreciated aspect of leaf design is that in addition to being able to spread out and absorb sunlight, they also need to be of a shape such that in a strong wind they tend to curl up on themselves and provide a minimum of wind resistance. Otherwise their collective sail effect would tend to uproot the tree. Fortunately, there are lots of beautiful ways to solve these related problems.

My oil heater makes gurgling noises so that acoustic energy is lost. It would also just heat up the room eventually, but I usually have a window open in winter so a tiny bit is lost that way.

little plastic flags that clip on to your window or door frame

I don’t mean to be all nationalistic, but I’m not talking about little clipped-on plastic flags. I’m talking full-on, massive Old Glories.

Excuse me? We’re still the best at mounting flags in the backs of pickup trucks.