Oh I didn’t know that! I will have to check out the original.

Geez don’t give him any ideas!

Last time I was on a road trip, the 10-minute-long “Stuck In The Drive-Thru” came up on my stream and about halfway through, my daughter in the back seat goes “Who is this?!? It’s epic!” I think she’s been hooked on Weird Al ever since?

Can he put actual kombu (as in Japanese kelp) into kombucha?

Yeah, I rolled a d20 and can confirm. Wow, critical miss!

I’m wondering how far I can get learning to play the cajon from YouTube tutorials?

I’d say I kind of suck at this point, but I’m having a good time and it’s early days still.

Probably, but he had to leave something for bored celibate monks to do. There are worse callings than to devote a lifetime to finding all manner of ways to fortify wines.

I’ve actually been having more trouble with Apple Maps lately.

My last trip was to perform at a country fair type thing and it couldn’t locate the venue. So I thought maybe if I put on the satellite view, I could spot it and drop a pin? But the whole area was behind a cloud. Wow.

Then later, when we were returning, it tried to send me on a shortcut through a mall parking into an overgrown field.

Thanks! I hadn’t heard about that one. Here another article on it. Wow.

Articles like this really float my boat! It reminds me a bit of the discovery of the Wollemi Pine in Australia.

Thought for a moment there the dude on the right was Emperor Palpatine?

Our mayor has been a mixed bag. He has been fairly progressive in terms of improving public infrastructure, but has had a poor track record on social issues.

Currently, he is courting a scandal involving a violent altercation at a safe injection site where someone got bludgeoned to death. His response was a rather draconian closing of the facility (he claims it’s only temporary) and essentially telling the homeless in the area to get lost. As you might imagine, this is not going well.

I have no interest in running for any political office, though if I did, the city council would likely be highest on my list. I actually enjoy watching them in session from time to time on the local cable channel, as there is less partisan bickering at the municipal level and, as you say, the decisions they make are more likely to affect your day-to-day life.

I am sort of half-heartedly angling to get on a committee involving the city’s cycling infrastructure, but that’s about the extent of any political ambitions.

One problem I have with this idea is that the cooling profile from releasing sulphates into the atmosphere looks very different from the greenhouse gas warming profile. For example, the latter has a more pronounced effect at higher latitudes, since GHG are insulators. The arctic is getting hit harder than the tropics. The former, I would expect, would affect the places in the world that get the most sun, since it is effectively a solar filter. So, the lower latitudes, in other words.

If we have a baseline scenario A of what would have happened without the GHGs and B with what is currently happening, this would make for a scenario C that is neither of the others. I would submit that C would likely be as far from A as B is. Yes, you might get global warming under control in an accountant-looking-at-only-the-bottom-line sort of way, but this would still represent a massive climate change into uncharted territory. Would scenario C still be preferable to B is the question I guess?

It varies wildly depending on where you go. I think the worst-case scenario in terms of car-built cities would be someplace like Phoenix, Arizona. Visiting that city, I gained an appreciation for what it must be like to have a physical handicap that affects your mobility, because being in Phoenix without a car is comparable to having a disability. You cannot go anywhere on your own two feet in any reasonable length of time. It’s the kind of place where you need to find a Walmart to buy a loaf of bread. The closest thing to a corner store is going to be a gas station.

When I was first looking into IPv6, people were talking about how you can self-assign an address by simply wrapping an IPv6 address around your MAC address. But that practice seems to have fallen out of favour, and I’m guessing the reason is, as you say, the whole privacy thing? There’s a lot of pushback these days against any tech that makes it easier to fingerprint your connection.

This could be why Obiwan wound up a hermit? (Programmers of my generation at least talk about “Obiwan errors” because his name sounds like “off-by-one”.)

But doesn’t it resolve the vote-splitting problem? For example, a common scenario here is you have a right-wing candidate winning in a a left-leaning district because the left’s vote is split across more than one political party. Wouldn’t a ranked system solve that dilemma once all the dust has settled?

I think the Canadian system is very much modelled after the UK?

That’s interesting about Australia though. Btw I understand Australia has a ranked voting system in elections? Curious about how well that works. Our first-past-the-post is a nightmare with vote-splitting sending the “wrong” representative to the capital.

Sometimes people will say “That person’s name!” or “Those group of people!” in anger. “That Donald Trump! How dare he claim immigrants are eating pets?” to give you a current example.

When spoken of a family member or mutual acquaintance with a chuckle, it means more like “That person has some strange quirk but what can you do? We still love him.”

For example, you might hear “That dog! Always chasing his own tail.” So I think this is likely what you were getting from that conversation? It’s certainly not a criticism of your use of the word “people”.

I am not deaf, but this is triggering a pet peeve.

It seems a pretty common occurrence that I will be walking into a restaurant, bar, airport, doctor’s office, or whatever, and there will be a TV on a news channel with the sound muted or very low. For F’s sake, put the captioning on! What’s wrong with you?!?