Cordless power tools. Yes, they are useful in concept, but today they’re just a loss-leader to sell you overpriced batteries.

Eh. 🤏

A headline created by an Israeli media outlet, aimed culturally at Britons, and run on various European sites? Much American.

The editor was certainly no true Scotsman.

This is apparently from The Jerusalem Post.

Wasteful, or extremely efficient? The bus keeps moving. Meanwhile, each of the parked cars sits idle 95% of the day, taking up tons of valuable real estate.

Several Texan articles I found about this meteorite used the metric system.

Indeed, so why add the anxiety of an achievement checklist to our lives so we can feel anxiety about possibly not achieving everything? There’s no awards ceremony, nor completion bonus, at the end.

Not only that, but for some reason, Americans have felt the need to step up their disdain for aethetics, e.g. putting up indistinguishable warehouse-style buildings everywhere, bolting eye-searing LED light fixtures to every square meter of the building façade, paving everything possible, and eradicating charm or grace in public spaces. It’s gotten really bad since the pandemic.

Exactly. “Free parking” is a fucking ridiculous concept. It’s just making others pay for it.

Think that’s weird? What about: Why do we think it’s possible to travel backwards in time, but never think about what it would mean to travel “backwards” in space? How would that even work?

I mean, you can think about putting a car in reverse, but that’s just a human design convention. Like, a ball doesn’t have an inherent direction; no matter its motion, it’s moving “forward.” So if somehow we made a machine to reverse direction on the spacetime path of an object, what does it mean for a ball to move backwards through space?

If the machine just changes the time component of its spacetime path, so it moves through space “forward,” with normal translation of x, y, and z coordinates, but over ⁻t, then at the instant of switching time direction, the machine is still essentially in the same spatial (x, y, z) location, and will immediately collide with its +t self going the other direction. And whatever momentum it had will encounter the same magnitude of momentum in the opposite direction, and since the Earth is spinning, the galaxy is spinning, etc., it’s going to happen with quite a bang.

Except how can matter collide with itself? Another possibilty is that the time machine just moves back along the spacetime path along which it arrived at (x, y, z, t), like a film run backwards. Then, it would be impossible to change the past, as by switching the direction of time, the machine would be on the same deterministic path back to before we turned it on; turning it on would instantly turn it off.

So the implicit way that time machines in fiction work is that they have to completely cease to exist (probably with a sound as if thousands of people gathered there said, “foop!”) in the universe at (x, y, z, t), and instantaneously resume existence (“whop!”) at (x’, y’, z’, t’) without passing through any intermediate coordinates. But since the Earth spins, the galaxy spins, the local galactic supercluster spins, time is all wibbley-wobbley depending on how fast you’re moving relative to other things, and there is no fixed reference point for anything, there’s no way for a time machine to lock onto (x’, y’, z’, t’), even if there was a way to get information about distant locations faster than c.

This is about the point when I wish I was high…

I propose a compromise: Parking is free, but there’s a discount if you don’t need car storage space.

Nothing, because I think the whole concept is dumb. If I were diagnosed with a terminal disease, I don’t need a huge to-do list waiting for me. Sure, I have things I’d like to do, and if I get to them, cool. If I die first, then it won’t matter, because I won’t care.

Connections Puzzle #1051
🟦🟦🟦🟦
🟨🟨🟨🟨
🟪🟩🟩🟩
🟪🟩🟩🟩
🟩🟩🟩🟩
🟪🟪🟪🟪

Luckily, blue and yellow were obvious, because I’m still not clear on WTF purple is…

Technically correct, but there are… several intermediate steps.

If you can manage to grab it, just run. Cardiovascular disease will do the rest.

I would say that they are democracies today, but the closest thing to a clear binary distinction between democracy and not is where sovereignty is vested. I’m most familiar with the history of the UK; nobody would say that it became a democracy once King John signed the Magna Carta, and agreed to share sovereignty with the aristocracy, but we would call it a democracy today. It is technically a hybrid system, in which sovereignty is split between the king and the people. The king approves all acts of Parliament, but it’s a formality, and the king approves whatever acts the popularly-elected Parliament passes. It was a bit-by-bit transformation from monarchy to democracy. (And it is continuing its transformation in 2026 with the abolition of the last hereditary seats in the House of Lords.)

I get that it’s righteous to shit on the United States — because we mostly deserve it — but in this case it really was the first modern nation-state explicitly founded on pure, popular sovereignty. (As in, no monarch or aristocracy, not that everybody could vote.)

C’mon, now, Iceland was under the Danish king until 1944. That’s clearly a monarchy. As for San Marino, the point is that they were tweaking bedrock fundamentals of their system as recently as 1974. It’s not been the same one in use for hundreds of years.

Iceland has one of the oldest parliaments. It didn’t become a democracy until 1944. San Marino vested sovereignty in the people (the definition of democracy) in 1974.

Until this moment, I kind of thought that Zendaya was a brand of yogurt.