The first thing that comes to mind is that bacteria are prokaryotes, while plants are eukaryotes. They have internal membranes, called thylakoids, in which they do photosynthesis, but chloroplasts in plants are fully-developed organelles with their own DNA. If I recall correctly, the current thinking is that chloroplasts developed from endosymbiotic cyanobacteria.
Nah, like 50% of it is just telling people to restart their computers.
Seriously. Saying “we’re fucking morons” for being surprised by the 2001 attack on the World Trade Center might be hyperbole, except the same group tried the same thing in 1993! They were just bad at it. Instead of being a KIND OF A REALLY BIG HINT, that incident just kind of disappeared down the memory hole.
Salt is a preservative, so salted butter will last quite a lot longer when unrefrigerated.
Scenario: I want to call a friend in Bulgaria. It’s 11:23AM GMT. What’s he likely to be doing right now? With timezones, I can quickly calculate that it’s 2:23PM local time, and intuitively know. Without, I’d have to look up a timetable of daily activities in Sofia.
I guess if I called regularly, I could memorize the timetable, or maybe roughly calculate an offset in hours to add or subtract from GMT to intuitively relate his schedule to mine. For example, my dinner time is about 11PM GMT, so his dinner time is about 7AM GMT.
But, I wonder, if I went there to visit, would it be easier to memorize the local timetable, or just do the math when I check the time?
I would make the written English language 100% phonetic.
Nobody speaks written English, so how do we know it’s not already phonetic?
Almost literally true, which is why it makes a great response to OP’s question.
Oh, hell, classes just resumed at the university here, so the new batch of freshmen is here, and some days I feel like it. But I don’t count the Cold War as a war, just like the Holy Roman Empire wasn’t holy, nor Roman, nor an empire.
When I was born, the United States wasn’t involved in a war.
Reminds me of an old Yakov Smirnoff routine. Espresso powder makes espresso, and milk powder makes milk. So what does baby powder make?
Indeed. Notice, too, that the concerns about Biden’s cognitive abilities have instantly stopped? He’s still the President, and still in charge of the nukes. But no more news stories.
Meanwhile, the other guy has recently developed a habit of swearing at rallies, and there are a few articles about his wife asking him to knock it off, but nothing pointing out that a sudden increase in swearing is a symptom of dementia. At a town hall in La Crosse, WI the other day, he didn’t know why he was there at first. Still radio silence from the news media.
Funny, isn’t it?
Our society really needs to lower the barrier to entry for this stuff, but I have no idea how you’d go about that.
I know. At least in the US. It sounds wonky, but think it through: Cars and zoning law. Between the two of those things, there are fewer and fewer third places. There’s nowhere to go to just be around other people. First (home) and second (edit: work) are incredibly isolated, too. You get in the car and pull out of the garage, and interact with nobody until you pull in to the lot at work. At best, you interact briefly with fast food workers for a few seconds at the drive-thru window. There’s no “local,” no stores, no restaurants, no cafés in the neighborhood; you drive to those. They draw from a large area, so you never see the same people twice there.
Proximity has always been the best builder of community in human history, and we’ve done away with it.
This is probably 10 years ago that I read it, but I don’t expect that the numbers have changed much: The median number of lifetime partners for men is 4, while the median for women is 7. The median means that half of the group had that many or more, and half had that many or fewer. If every heterosexual encounter by definition has to include a male and a female, the way that that works out is that there’s a subgroup of men who have a partner count way over four.
In short, yeah, that observation checks out in the research. Among men, there are a few Wilt Chamberlains balanced by thousands with only a partner or two. (NB: extreme example for rhetorical purposes)
Shout-out to Raritan Engineering. I accidentally cracked the porcelain bowl of the head that was original equipment in my 1974 sailboat, and needed a new one. Not only is the company still in business, the parts from a model they still sell are compatible, 50 years later! Their support techs were able to tell me exactly what parts I needed to buy.
Actually, quite a few marine brands are always reliable. The harsh environment at sea tends to out cheap crap in a hurry.
I think you have some stiff competition on the shortest war from the Conch Republic. You’d have to sign the peace treaty in 59 seconds to beat the record. (Be sure that the enemy sets their killbots for a very low preset kill limit.)
Never heard of it, but I’ll check it out. Thanks!
I had a 13" black and white television in my bedroom when I was a teen. The big, color Trinitron TV that we got later was amazing. Beyond that, I don’t recall the improvement in quality making sitcoms funnier, or the stories better.
In fact, to me, the old, fuzzy NTSC video is better in some ways. It helps with the suspension of disbelief, the feeling of watching a story on the screen. Even 1080p is sometimes too good, to the point that the actors fall into the Uncanny Valley, like I’m watching a live play, but not quite. Instead of a story, I see the makeup on skin, the wardrobe choices, the blocking, and the bad CGI backgrounds.
I can certainly hear the quality differences in audio, but I feel like past a certain minimum, I’m listening to the music, not the equipment. Like, my Shokz had a noticeable lack of bass when I got them, but I’ve adapted, and don’t hear them that way any longer. The convenience of open-ear headphones far exceeds any gain in quality.
How about a government-sponsored, non-profit authentication service? That is, it should be impossible to get a loan, open a line of credit, or anything else in somebody’s name, without the lending institution verifying that it’s actually on behalf of the named individual. Eliminate the security-through-obscurity technique of using bits of easily-leaked personal information as a poor substitute for actual authentication.
I mean, (as a comparative example) I have to go through an OAuth2 consent dialog to connect a third-party app to my email account, yet somebody can saddle me with huge debts based on knowing a 9-digit number that just about everybody knows? It’s the system that’s broken, tightening up the laws on PII is just a band-aid.
Why that fellow has such a sterling reputation for honesty and integrity, I can’t imagine why nobody believes him when he says he doesn’t plan to implement it. /s
Love it!
Gotta point out that, though, that most primates don’t eat a lot of bananas. The species that really seems to love bananas is homo sapiens. I worked at a grocery store for several years, and saw the sales numbers. Bananas are the biggest seller, and it’s not even close. They outsell whole categories of other products.