Just smart as hell. This video makes me wonder if elephants legit have a sense of humor:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2VOvEFHDOaU

Animal behavior can be difficult to interpret (and even when descriptions come from experts, I often find myself asking “yeah, but how do we really know that?”), but this looks very close to being like someone who’s known for lighthearted pranks.

Not how it works.

“Time exists” is a positive statement. We need evidence for positive statements. There is no evidence of time until the big bang.

Maybe there were other big bangs, but we need evidence of that, and that evidence doesn’t exist.

Jyst saying “but we don’t know” isn’t a replacement for evidence.

It’s only something we can speculate about. It represents a limit to our ability to gather any evidence that might validate those speculations. We can’t say what happened before it, because time itself was one of the things that popped out of the big bang. What would “before” even mean if time didn’t exist?

Even if time and matter did exist in some sense, we can’t get any evidence for it. We can’t make any kind of useful theory about it. At best, we can make wild guesses.

We could also just say “we don’t know what it was like”. Russell’s Teapot suggests we should instead say there was nothing, because we can’t prove there was anything.

Not like that!

I feel dirty saying it, but Walmart store brand Oreos are really good.

Because you enjoy it. If you’re fixing your issues, it must be through pain and suffering. If it doesn’t involve pain and suffering, then it isn’t fixing your issues. The “Protestant work ethic” doesn’t come right out and say that, but it’s the implication.

See also: denial of LSD and psilocybin for mental health purposes.

There’s a way to program custom wake words. Takes a little fucking around to train it, but it’s not that difficult.

https://www.home-assistant.io/voice_control/create_wake_word/

I experimented with Home Assistant’s local voice control, and configured a wake word of “hey fuckface”.

Common denominators. You can divide base 12 into half, thirds, fourths, and sixths and still use integers. I find thirds to be particularly useful, so base 16 is out. Base 60 can do it, but that’s getting unweildly.

Don’t know the channel, but wouldn’t that result in a bunch of invasive species creeping in, too?

One of the things with natural lawns is you can’t just let your yard do its thing. Lots of the plants you’ll get with that are invasive. You do have to do some kind of planning and maintenance.

We have a pretty good idea. Post-quantum crypto is a real thing. There are conferences in the field about it.

Certain classes of problems are shown to be faster on quantum computers. One of them is factoring prime numbers, which is what our public key crypto is based on. Traditional block ciphers are also somewhat vulnerable, with their security is effectively cut in half. In other words, a 256 bit key is as secure as a 128 bit key. That solution is easy; we double the key size and call it a day. Public key crypto, however, is a bigger problem. Needed whole new algorithms.

The big unknown is how powerful quantum computers will get. It’s going to take a lot of qubits to break public key crypto. It may be completely unfeasible to juggle that many qubits in superposition. It’s also possible it will only barely do it, in which case we can also increase the key size and call it a day. But post-quantum crypto is being worked on, just in case.

Zoom is still bullshit. Their software has had all sorts of problems that don’t need QC to exploit.

Don’t necessarily need to have a Ph.D. A professor of history once published a paper saying “No Irish Need Apply” signs were a myth. A 14 year old found counterexamples, and did a good enough job to get the takedown published.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/rebecca-fried-the-14yearold-student-who-outwitted-a-college-historian-10437603.html

“You don’t actually read the bible, you just cherry picked some bits out of the atheist meme book” - actual response I’ve gotten when I’ve brought this up.

72% chance means Trump needed to flip two coins and have them both come up heads. It’s not that ridiculous.

No, they did not. That’s not what happened.

Polling probably has taken a dive in accuracy since then, though. Uptake in cell phone use in younger generations has been lingering over the industry for a long time, and it’s finally caught up with them.

The scientific taxonomic system was made, in part, because traditional colloquial terms are a mess. For example, “daddy longlegs” refers to a type of spider in my area, but there are two other animals and three plants that it could refer to depending on where you grew up. Taxonomists saw that there are ten different standards, decided to make a new one to replace them all, and for once, it actually worked out for the most part.

“Bug” is one of those old terms. It might have been mapped post hoc on top of the modern taxonomic system, but it didn’t start that way, and isn’t always used that way. I wouldn’t expect an entomologist to use the term at all in formal contexts.

Fish: Oooh, dragonfly larva, I’ll help myself to a nice meal

Dragonfly larva: you are mistaken about who is the meal here

When are we talking about, here? Much of Europe is a disease-ridden mosquito swamp if you go back a few thousand years.

They’re human. I don’t think it’s been fully covered how this happened, but there was one interesting piece that didn’t get published.

It combines Lucas’ various other movies like THX-1138 and Indiana Jones. Earth is overrun with an AI-driven society in THX, and a group of humans get on a ship to escape. They fall through a wormhole and end up in the Star Wars universe, becoming the first humans there. Han and Chewie travel back through this wormhole, and crash land on Earth in a forest. Chewie survives, and him walking around starts a bunch of stories about Big Foot. Indiana Jones investigates, finds the remains of the Falcon and Han, and wonders why this guy looks familiar.

I think American Gothic was in there somehow, too.

Even if it did get published, I can’t imagine it being taken seriously as Legends canon. Chewie was already killed off in the Yuuzhan Vong stuff with Han surviving. But that’s the closest to an answer we ever got.

As it stands, Courscant is often believed to be the original human homeworld in-universe, and whatever the truth is has been lost to time. Star Wars is interesting with how old the universe feels–which is more of a Tolkein-like property than traditional science fiction–and this is a pretty good example.