I don’t have much hope that they will get the justice they deserve.

I’d love to see the “religious right” wake up a bit to what being “conservative” has actually come to mean. The current level of cognitive dissonance has been a long time in the making.

Another vote for Kobo here. I have a Clara 2e that i really like. It can use Overdrive to get books from the library, or you can just load books yourself either over USB, or download documents using its built in web browser. The browser would also let you look at an online planner, I guess? There isn’t one built in. The slow screen updates make using the browser pretty impractical for the most part, though.

Blowing up the boat in the first place.

Nice. I’m happy to see RCV more in any context. Get it into the conversation, if nothing else.

I can’t really tell what in looking at, here. But that is an incredible shot.

My guess is that the amount of sprawl in America is a big contributor. It means there’s a higher barrier to biking, which in turn means that fewer people do it, which then means that there’s less effort put into biking infrastructure (and the sprawl also directly makes building infrastructure more expensive), and so then the people who do bike have to be more intrusive on other traffic. So then there’s tension between the drivers who end up inconvenienced by bikers, and bikers who feel threatened by drivers.

If you’re going 1/4 of the speed limit and there’s no biking infrastructure, please stay off the road. I’ll probably get hate for it, but blame the state for not providing safe infrastructure for cyclist.

This goes both ways. If there’s no biking infrastructure, maybe its you who should blame the state for needing to go around or stay behind the cyclist. The road is theirs as much as it is yours.

Were electrons supernatural before we had the laws to describe them? Would something that’s supernatural now still be supernatural if we came up with laws describing its behavior?

What does it really mean to be supernatural? What’s the difference between, say, a ghost and dark matter? We don’t really know what either one is. Is it that we can reliably find evidence of dark matter, even if we don’t know what it is, so it’s not “super” anymore? It seems to me that “supernatural” is just a name for the ones we don’t actually believe in.

I’m also a big fan of the smaller bubba mug that I have (https://www.amazon.com/Bubba-Stainless-Steel-Travel-Handle/dp/B00XMH7MRW/). It’s cheap, sturdy, and easy to clean.

I’m a liberal. I’d prefer the government be functional and running. But these days the government is pretty dysfunctional even when not shut down, so I guess as shutdowns go… In any case, I place all blame for the dysfunction and the shutdown on conservatives, and anyone who voted for them. There is no correct course for dems in the government when they’re in the minority to a party that doesn’t operate in good faith; I’m fine with them either playing ball or not as they think is best in the circumstances.

Good question. I think what it comes down to is that the idea of someone being trans is just kind of foreign to me. I never met someone in person who was trans until I was close to 40, as far as I know. So for most of my life I categorized people, at least as far as attractiveness and dating goes, without distinguishing between sex at birth and gender identity.
So while I treat (or hope that I treat) trans people as appropriate for their chosen gender, it doesn’t come completely naturally to me. It’s hard for me not to think of a trans woman as “a man who wants to be treated as a woman”, even though I know that’s not what they want. And while in day to day interactions I can just ignore that difficulty and treat a trans woman as a woman, when it comes to romantic interest it is not so easily ignored.

If I couldn’t tell, and they didn’t tell me, then i guess I’d just be happy in my ignorance. I can’t say that I can always tell, because… well I wouldn’t necessarily know about the times I couldn’t tell. But yes, if I knew then it would break the attraction for me.

I would not. I’m all for treating people as they want to be treated, but as far as my own attraction goes, I don’t think I’d be able to completely think of them as being of the opposite sex.

I would trust political advice from a doctor way more than medical advice from a politician.

Rooting for Murdoch makes me feel dirty.

Aperiodic, in this sense, doesn’t mean that there aren’t any bits that repeat. In fact, if you pick any patch of tiles of any arbitrary size, that patch will be repeated infinitely many times. What it means to be aperiodic is that if you slide the whole tiling over so that one of the patches aligns with the repeated bit, there will still be something outside the patch that doesn’t align. Compare that with, say, a repeating grid of squares, where if you slide one square onto a different square then everything lines up, all the way to infinity; it’s impossible to tell that it’s been slid over.

Aperiodic tilings! Just a couple of years ago someone discovered a single tile (down from the set of ~20000 that was first used to prove that aperiodic tiling was even possible) that can completely cover an infinite plane without ever falling into a repeating pattern.