• Are you aphantasic (unable to form mental images of things based on descriptions)?

• Have you tried audiobooks?

• Have you tried reading books of movies you’ve already seen (so you don’t have to keep track of characters and plot, and can focus on the elements unique to prose)?

It gets worse over time but it also eventually gets better, after the deleterious recessive alleles have been eliminated. Like in herd animals where a herd has only one breeding male per generation, so every generation is half-siblings.

The general rule is that a population with a fixed degree of inbreeding will have a corresponding number of deleterious alleles so that the selection pressure balances out; but when you change the degree of inbreeding, you get a spike in expressed mutations until things balance out again.

I assume it’s an access plate to service the door mechanism.

Why not ask them to buy two tickets while they’re at it?

The ones in my neighborhood prefer unsalted peanuts.

As for the city codes—while they could probably get you for it if they wanted, I think those laws are intended more for the folks who throw out whole cups of birdseed to attract flocks of pigeons. It’s better for crows if you throw out one or two nuts at a time, discreetly so other birds don’t see.

Items would just be sold with enough lead weights stuck on to make the total weight proportional to the market value.

Are you talking about a philosophical zombie?

Her Wikipedia page says she was a Republican until 2022 (the year she left the pro-PRC news site and joined the city council), but then switched parties.

Wang and Sun operated the news website U.S. News Center, aimed at the Chinese American community, and were instructed by Chinese government officials to post pro-PRC content on it.

So was she acting as a Chinese agent in her role as mayor, or just as the operator of a website posting PRC propaganda?

If I had to coin a term, I’d call it “aesthetic ergodicity”.

As in, a culture that keeps revisiting every combination of aesthetic parameters over and over with no long-term trend.

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Seems like the obvious next step would be to combine this with variable layer height to get a continuous range of intermediate tones.

Even moving with 10 times the speed of light, you still take “forward time” to move to your end point.

There’s no such thing as speeds faster than light—the worldlines of objects with such trajectories are called “spacelike” instead of “timelike” for a reason. “Forward” and “backward” time is only defined for events within your light-cone, and trajectories “faster than light” are outside it. Whether events outside your light-cone are in your future or your past are dependent on your current reference frame, which you can change at will by accelerating.

The thing about “moving with FTL from A to B” is that if B is far away, the event at B simultaneous with your departure from A will be highly dependent on A’s reference frame—a shift in A’s velocity will correspond to a shift in B’s timeline equal to (vx/c²)/√(1-v²/c²) (where v is the change in A’s velocity and x is the distance to B). And things are changing velocities with respect to each other all the time (e.g., for objects on earth due to the planet’s revolution and rotation around the sun), so the point in B’s timeline at which you’d arrive would be constantly swinging backward and forward in time.

And the same is true for the return trip: a minor change in B’s reference frame can put your arrival back in A’s timeline at a point before your original departure.

Anytime you move at a different speed, the definition of what time matches your current time shifts throughout the universe by an interval proportional to the distance—even if you’re just driving down the street, the time that matches “now” in your reference frame in a distant galaxy could change by years relative to what it was when you were stationary. Of course, you can’t actually see that happening, so the difference is just theoretical… as long as you can’t teleport to that galaxy faster than light.

But as soon as you have any kind of FTL travel, it’s trivially easy to go back in time by warping back and forth between two moving endpoints.

USA, too—Spanish and French.

If we’d had a third language it probably would have been Chinese instead of German—the cultural influence of German was minimal in the part of California where I grew up.

Most art reflects on cultural and historical contexts that kids might not be aware of yet.
Most science museums are geared toward teaching scientific principles that kids are also less likely to be aware of.

So art museums depend on existing knowledge, while science museums supply knowledge to those who don’t yet have it.

As individuals, they can’t. But as a group making a decision through verbal discussion, they can exclude the information from the deliberative process. At least to their own satisfaction, they need to construct a justification for their verdict that doesn’t rely on the forbidden evidence.

Candide.

A mythology is a set of shared stories that define a culture—its values, its productive metaphors, its identity. They may or may not be considered literally true; even when they are, they’re generally understood to have occurred in a place and time distinct from the culture’s current reality.

But the point of a mythology is the relationship it establishes between community members, while the point of a religion is the relationship it purports to establish between its adherents and the divine.

Everyone immediately dismisses it as a promotional stunt for Crocs. The only ones who believe them are the Crocs company, who insist that the aliens either pay royalties or compensate them by appearing in advertisements.