Blondə

This is recreating the Civ weapon progression. Start with swords, then rifles, then cannons, then ICBMs.

We’re gonna need a bigger board.

It is true. It came out a while ago. It was just entered into testimony. I didn’t actually read her statements and answers, so I don’t know what level of detail she went into, but it was in her book and she talked about it at the time.

I do this for a living. Seasonality as a generic term refers to temporally periodic signals but can even be extended to talk about non-temporal aspects of a signal. The same math used in areas like econometrics to remove periodicity in annual data can be applied to multiple domains. The main motivation to removing or isolating periodicity is to allow for investigation into the underlying phenomena, or to allow the investigation of the sources of periodicity independently of other drivers. In every case, though, seasonality is an acceptable term in everything I’ve written, read, and worked on.

This is seasonality.

Seasonality is a characteristic of a time series and refers to periodic and generally regular and predictable changes that occur over a year.

To make it more generic, drop the “over a year” and just refer to the periodic signal over time idea. You can find additional signals by how you bin the data, eg monthly or day of week.

I like how the Apache goes “wizz.”

Or is that the SAM missing the Apache?

A 1971 Chrysler Newport.

The thing was a boat. You’d hit a bump in the road, and the car would act like you crested a wave and bob front to back a few times. It was wider than most pickup trucks and probably heavier. Not only could it not fit in most parking spots, it could hardly fit in some lanes. Required leaded gas, which was getting hard to find at that point. If you needed to go uphill you had to build up speed because you would slow down, even with the gas pedal floored.

The best part is that when I finally brought it in for service, the mechanic came out and said “You’ve been driving that thing??” Three out of four motor mounts had broken and the last one was about rusted through.

It did have an 8-track though, and came with a bunch of Elvis tapes.

I hated Elvis, but did manage to find an 8-track of Peter Paul and Mary.

Uno Reverse

This was possibly the most offensive episode from TNG.

I have pushed back hard on the idea that the Ferengi are space Jews (the Bajorans are space Jews, the Cardassians are space Nazis). The Ferengi are space capitalist Americans - Riker even called them “yankee traders.”

I’ve defended, somewhat, the sexist aspects of TOS by saying it was the 60s and they were trying. They probably did more good than bad.

I know that LGBT-phobia (or concerns about it) made them back off on how Garak was played. I know the Troi stuff ranged from cringe to rape culture, and I know that having Riker being neo-Kirk with the ladies was… a choice.

But the Irish episode was the closest thing to blackface I’ve seen on Trek. I can’t even watch that episode.

Thanks!

I have always loved the OED. As a kid I used to sit in the library and just read it. It was always a dream of mine to buy my own copy and just have it the way people used to have encyclopedias.

That’s exactly my perspective.

I came of age with the birth of the web. I was using systems like Usenet, gopher, wais, and that sort of thing. I was very much into the whole cypherpunk, “information wants to be free” philosophy that thought that the more information people had, the more they could talk to each other, the better the world would be.

Boy, was I wrong.

But you can’t put the genie back into the bottle. So now, in addition to having NPR online, we have kids eating tide pods and getting recruited into fascist ideologies. And of course it’s not just kids. It’s tough to see how the anti-vax movement or QAnon could have grown without the internet (which obviously has search engines as a major driver of traffic).

I think you’re better off teaching critical thinking, and even demonstrating the failings of ChatGPT by showing them how bad it is at answering questions. There’s plenty of resources you can find that should give you a starting point. Ironically, you can find them using a search engine.

That was amazing! I can’t believe this is the first time I’ve seen this.

“Every customer should be greeted when they walk into the store.”

The singular “they” is traditional in English - it is very much proper English and has been around (iirc) since the 17th century. It’s only a big deal now because conservatives want to make gender a factor in elections.

Return it as it was shipped with a hardware bug.

“No stupid questions” is intended to be a topic, not a challenge.

Calamari is indeed squid, but that just raises questions about what we would find in Finnish underwear.

I have an Army background (from a long fucking time ago). I was always amused by “Front Towards Enemy,” and we were trained to click three times.

I still think the joke works though.

No, man. My comments are like jazz.

I think you mean Prisoner 24601.