Carl Sagan wrote a book, The Demon Haunted World, which is all about why people get sucked into nonsense like ancient aliens, and how to deal with it.

Y chromosomes have very little information on them, and the DNA there is pretty highly conserved. You’re not really keeping any secrets by hiding your Y chromosome away.

Yes, but that led to my absolute favorite joke in Moby-Dick: the fart joke in chapter 1. (It’s important to remember that the “Pythagorean Theorem” is A²+B²=C², but the “Pythagorean maxim” is ‘Don’t eat beans.’)

“For as in this world, head winds are far more prevalent than winds from astern (that is, if you never violate the Pythagorean maxim), so for the most part the Commodore on the quarter-deck gets his atmosphere at second hand from the sailors on the forecastle.”

Gesundheit.

Or, if you prefer: “Yahweh bless you.”

Disagree. The movie is a mediocre adaptation of a fun and mediocre book into an un-fun and mediocre movie. The film was never going to be gold, but they spent an awful lot of CGI money to make a movie that wasn’t as fun as just reading the original and imagining all of the nerdy stuff being described.

Yes, and?

Mid 30s, USA. I’m smart (Ivy League science doctorate) but I can’t drive a standard transmission because my dad “couldn’t teach me” because I “wouldn’t learn right”. It was just me asking him questions like "What does the inside of the clutch actually look like? " and him yelling “That doesn’t matter, just ease out on the clutch while giving it some gas!” Apparently I can be taught a lot, but not how to drive a standard.

Weirdly, my engineer friend let me drive his standard transmission car once after giving me some basic instructions and I did okay going up and down the road alone, but that was just one day and I fear I’ve forgotten everything. But I must be mistakenly remembering that, because according to my father I “can’t be taught!”

That was the whole point of the “Q”! In fact, we could ditch the LGBT and just stick with a fully inclusive “Queer”.

Barbarians. The world must treat them like it and shame them and their children until this stops.

If you get good at it and if you run enough hives each year, it does, eventually, start making money though! Which is almost more frustrating, because every dollar you spend on it could come back some day in honey sales… but will it?

Ursula Le Guin’s “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” https://shsdavisapes.pbworks.com/f/Omelas.pdf

This is the shortest comment here, and perhaps the most elegant answer I’ve seen. Instead of shooting all of the rioters to prevent them from causing harm, you trick them into turning on each other, devouring just one of their number, and then after their internal melee you round up the survivors and throw them in a paddy wagon.

Thank you for linking that. The anthem absolutely slaps. Now I wish I was Tuvan. Or, at the very least, I wish the Russian Federation would collapse so Tuva can participate in the Olympics under their own flag, and then I will cheer for them so I can hear this anthem.

You have linked directly to an image of a Ukrainian stomping on a swastika flag. You are not making the point you think you’re making.

Brawndo. It’s got what I crave.

I once overheard a pair of utility workers talking, and as I walked past I only overheard a snippet of conversation. The older one yelled up the cherrypicker to the younger one and said, in a heavy Boston accent:

“If only you could use your powers for good, instead of for useless…”

That sentence is seared into my brain.

See “outlawry” or “homo sacer” for this concept from centuries and millenia ago.

Cries in Medieval Engineers

Ignore that jerk. You’re great, and your detergent videos explained, in exhaustive detail, (as all of your videos do, because that’s literally the whole shtick,) the nuance and context that you were aiming for. Anyone who missed that just wasn’t paying attention.

Also your snarkiness in your videos is amazing and never stop being you.

Honey bee population counts are sometimes hard to interpret, since many colonies are split in half in the spring, with a new queen inserted into the queenless half to create new colonies. Thus, the number of colonies can be high, then low after lots of winter deaths, then high again after new colonies are created, then low again after the following winter, etc. Peering through those fluxtuations, it’s clear that (1) honey bees aren’t anywhere close to going extinct, but (2) it’s still a lot harder to keep a bee colony alive than it was decades ago. New parasites, new pesticides, lower food availability due to habitat loss and/or climate change, etc. Commercial beekeepers who manage thousands of hives also have very different pressures and their bees have different stressors than people who keep a few (or a few dozen) bee colonies. This report that more colonies died than in previous years means that beekeepers’ practices have a lot of room for improvement, but the bees won’t all be gone by this time next year.

If anyone is interested in further discussion about bees and beekeeping, you’re welcome over at [email protected]