Who picked the name “Vultr” for a hosting provider?

In the sense that the original organic material has been replaced by minerals? I guess that’s a version of the old Ship of Theseus question.

We could use one, and assume we’re operating in the field of complex numbers:

1 N = North
i N = West
i² N = South
i³ N = East.

And we could use the complex modulus to indicate distance or speed… or we could map the Riemann sphere onto the surface of the earth and use a single complex number to indicate location.

It’s almost as if Democratic voters are selecting their candidates based on some other criterion entirely.

Many of the people electing the pope have hopes of becoming pope one day themselves, so they elect someone they expect to outlive.

Once we get good, universal real-time translation, we might start to see a new proliferation of local languages. And of small groups inventing their own cryptolects for privacy, trying to evolve them faster than AI can keep up.

Agnosia or asemia?

Montreal is just a subspace of Montcomplex.

Saag paneer.

Probably the same way Putin feels about Dobby.

I ate the last one yesterday.

Did you really expect me to resist?

Sign language isn’t just another way of expressing English that can be picked up like learning a different alphabet or a secret code. It’s a full, independent language with its own complete vocabulary, syntax, inflectional system, etc. that takes as long to learn as any other natural language.

It would be great if more people knew it for the sake of communicating with the deaf, but as a means of foiling surveillance, there are many other approaches that would be more effective for less time investment. (Hell, you might as well learn a really obscure spoken language that would be less likely to be recognized or deciphered than ASL.)

Global Thermonuclear War.

Before trains, sea travel was the standard way to travel long distances even if a land route was available. Sea voyages came to represent any destination that was far enough away that communities wouldn’t be in regular contact.

Assuming that

• human phenotypic traits that correlate more closely with mouse traits have more-predictable outcomes with mouse-tested medicine, and

• more-predictable medical outcomes correlate with higher survival and reproductive rates,

can’t you plug that straight into the Price equation?

In the long run, using mice to test human medicines will result in selection pressure for humans whose physiology more and more closely resembles mice.

I don’t have any direct experience with that, and I can’t say if it’s a good or bad idea—but I’d say if you’re going to do it, it can’t hurt to do it with some friends and try to create some positive new experiences to overwrite the traumatic ones.

I’d say devices like metaphor and synecdoche are compression tools for meaning, and devices like rhyme and meter are checksums for error correction.

Yeah—Milton’s Paradise Lost seems closer to the modern conception.

It’s like a double negative: a cool dog is the opposite of a hot dog, but a cool cat is the opposite of a cool dog, so you end up back where you started.