Depends if I can get my phone unlocked and call an ambulance or not. Unassisted I’m probably bleeding out, but if I can get to a hospital then I can probably make it. I do wonder how much skin I’ll even have left at this point, considering the sheer number of cuts, scrapes and burns I’ve had, but blood loss should be the only potentially fatal problem needing to be dealt with immediately.

Big if, though, my hands would be a busted up mess. Operating a touchscreen would be a pretty big ask, and I probably don’t have a lot of time fully conscious. I’d also have several broken bones preventing me from going anywhere to find help.

It’s a pros and cons thing. The pros in this case are our upright posture with narrower hips that let us cover long distances more efficiently than most of the rest of the animal kingdom. We can even do things like carry food to eat while walking, which something like an antelope would struggle with. Then a second pro is the whole big brain thing. These two factors did let us take over most of the planet over the course thousands of years, pretty quick work, really.

Then the cons are high mortality in birth, and taking something like 10 years after that risky birth to become even semi-functional at a practical level.

The answer was — and is — not to let that panic us or force a change in policy: to keep calm and carry on.

When you’re dealing with a bully, there are times when you have no good alternative than to just punch them back. We have intelligence services and cyberwarfare departments too, if I’m not mistaken.

They’re headed in that direction, but not yet. Their pop is 143 mil roughly, and the Ukrainian estimates are a little over 1 mil Russian casualties last I heard.

They could roll in with tanks, if enough pro-Russian parties came into power in the EU. The Baltic countries are not very big. Creating a situation where an Article 5 is called by a small country, but not answered, would be the ideal result.

Let’s also not forget that Putin has only done a very limited amount of mobilization so far.

Conspiracy being a real phenomenon and the manufacture and spread of conspiracy theories to help one particular narrative are two separate concepts.

MKUltra and Illuminati running the world/flat earth/young earth/great replacement/etc are two different types of things. You have to ask who benefits from spreading the idea around. Flat/young earth is a particularly easy example, certain religious movements benefit from convincing people those are valid ideas.

Five maps so far. Is someone doing this by hand, the hard way? I figured it was an AI someone programmed, but if it’s an individual or small team, big respect. Very neat project.

When the Generative Agents system was evaluated for how “believably human” the agents acted, researchers found the AI versions scored higher than actual human actors.

That’s a neat finding. I feel like there’s a lot to unpack there around how our expectations are formed.

Should be a simple enough thing to determine, in multiple different ways. How many people only shocked themselves once, vs how many did it more than once, would be one. Would need to look at the details of the experiment and what data was gathered, which sadly seems to be behind a paywall.

I wonder how age factors in. Being alone with your thoughts is something that probably becomes more comfortable the more you practice it. In the modern age, though, nobody actually has to practice it when they can just pull out their phone. Anyone who grew up in pre-smartphone times has encountered countless times where they had no choice, though, usually you’re waiting for something or another, so you just sit there and wait. And think. Gets you rather used to it.

… does he think that will make more Brazilians have good feelings about Bolsonaro?

Minor quibble, but Rafale does not make a cutting-edge fighter. The US, Russia and China all make 5th gen fighters. France does not yet, they mostly make 4.5. Before long here, the 5’s won’t be cutting edge anymore and we’ll all be on to 6th gen.

That being a Mark Twain quote was apparently just a made-up thing that circulated on social media. According to Twain experts, he never said anything of the sort.

https://www.reuters.com/article/fact-check/quote-comparing-politicians-and-diapers-falsely-attributed-to-mark-twain-idUSL1N2P21VE/

Apparently they have a saying in Moldova, goes something like “you should change your underwear and your politicians frequently, and for the same reason.”

You know … at a certain level, I respect the dedication. Go big or go home I suppose.

debating the best way to chop an onion

I get their point, but this is one of the few things I’ve actually never seen debated. Your options are very limited by the shape you want the finished product in.

Thinking about hammering in a screw puts a very serious frown on my face…

Upvote for creativity though.

No clue, I don’t know what its mechanism of action is. Probably one of the less-likely possibilities though.

The numbing agent they apply has a very short duration. So usually in my experience when you’re feeling the bite, it’s not the moment of bite you’re feeling, but the moment that anesthetic wears off. They’ve hung on too long, basically.

So, it could be a difference in the mosquito population, but it could also be a difference in you, either in how quickly your blood can be sucked up by the mosquito, or how quickly the numbing agent gets processed.

You can explore this yourself pretty easily if you ever visually spot one before it bites. You can just let it bite, and then count how long it takes before you feel it. It’s not long at all.

tbf, Grant was pretty ruthless in his post-war pursuit of Confederate holdouts. He didn’t have them shot, though, they were mostly hung.

The problem is that it is very hard to eradicate an idea violently. It just goes into hiding and bides its time, unless you just want to do a full genocide or something. I mean, it’s not like people stand up and volunteer for their own execution when they know certain folks are being executed.