Not swallowed. Final t -> glottal stop

"Just let me finish the final touches of this sweet devil biker chick with no top for my gnarly van first...

I agree in principle with everything you said, but there's a couple points, which I don't think refute your argument, but they might mitigate the 'optimism,' as it were. First, I think the Wright brothers thing - I think they would have probably not thought you were nuts. The moon turned out to be really difficult to do, it was really a marvel we made it with so few casualties and with such crude technology and small budget. Seriously. I bet that the Wright brothers would have thought it was more likely than it was, based on contemporaneous accounts at the time (the optimistic ones! the pessimistic ones can of course be ignored).

I also think your assumption of a million years of human progress is a bit optimistic. Or I guess I would if you said uninterrupted human progress. But even for a total million years of human progress, I personally think we'd need at least 10 times that amount of abject horrifying dark ages-level human misery. Like, cats and dogs, living together-style biblical stuff. But that's all just an opinion not backed up by facts or anything. I really hope your version is closer to reality than mine.

"There's a richness and texture when you're working with lenses and light that can't be replicated" Warning: smug artist alert. Ignore this advertisement in full. "Can't" is a strong word, and "richness" is just fluff that people use when they can't explain something.

I love you

Had mod points yesterday, not today. That was an accurate depiction of the problem. I'm glad you're still managing to hang in there, and I wish there were more of you, but burn-out is so common with the good ones. I want to say stick in there, but I wouldn't wish that on any rational being - so good for you, but keep hydrated and enjoy your vacation time.

Dawkins' memes are more like the information carried in waves - they're emergent properties of physical constructs, suites of nerve impulses conveyed to other organisms through purely pedestrian physical processes - nothing like the hocus pocus the op is getting at. Same with politics and the formal metaphysics of professors. I only take issue with all the ridiculous "soul" stuff, up to and including soul patches.

They're putting a lot of faith in the common sense of the average person. Much better to do one of those crazy Japanese zoo-escape things.

This would also help prevent any confusion if there's a simultaneous zombie/prisoner escapee uprising. But only down to a certain height - we wouldn't want any innocent Oompa Loompas caught in the crossfire.

But why do ghosts wear clothes?!

Also, metaphysical == not real. Your entire second paragraph makes my soul hurt.

I remember bookmarking his Python pages online, and I thought to myself, "Awesome, this is, like, the future, man. I'm not going to download it all and keep a hard copy, I can just access it anytime. The future is, like, now, dude." Wholly my own fault, but I feel strangely... weird. My cloud-faith is... shaken. Maybe I should start printing out all my emails like it's 1993...

...but I'm not going to read the other 400 comments.

It would decrease my productivity by, like, 92%, but has anyone considered NO monitors? Seriously, 0 for IDE, 0 for logs, and zero for debugging. No feedback whatsoever! let's do it! The zero monitor movement starts here!

Dominious had the right idea - the vowels change the sound; additionally, consonants have weight in many tonal languages, so they actually perceive the sound differently. You think of them as the same phoneme, because in English, they are - even if they are allophonic. Taiwanese speakers have an additional distinction, so their phonological space is tighter in that area, and thus they are able to make finer phonetic distinctions - which is confusing, because you're (parent of parent) telling them they're all the same sound. So they're thinking, "this guy doesn't even know these sounds are different in his own language! Why listen to him? Ha ha ha." Also, all this Wade-Giles/Yale gibberish, even pinyin, is useless. Try the IPA.

Those would all make for interesting stories, but technically speaking, we're talking about movies, and movies typically mean hollywood movies. I leave it as an exercise for the reader to determine the proof of whether hollywood movie == good story. They would all be very fine multi-hour documentaries, if they weren't dumbed down for public consumption. The problem isn't only directors - it's you, and the rest of us. People don't like what we're interested in. The parent you replied to meant Normal Humans.

Can you imagine a Kens Burnsy documentary on pre-moon NASA engineering? With famous actors reading lines of machine code and voltages and lots of graphs of rocket test results? Comparing graphs of all the different compounds in IGNITE! That would be like the PBS of my dreams. They could call it "Rocket Science," and if they had to reschedule the show, they could say, "this isn't Rocket Science, people."

Thank you for that, sir.