The people in your TV set

All are welcome.

I for one don't want to give Physics research a blank check to investigate some unobservable math fantasy.

Why not? And who exactly is asking for a "blank check"?

So, the people who said otherwise were lying through their teeth?

In which case, they should be fired for stupidity before getting criminally charged.

Exactly this! I like watching Jack Bauer "question" the bad guy as much as anyone, but what it comes down to is, it's not real! Nobody is really getting hurt, not even a criminal/terrorist. A real cop shouldn't do a fraction of the stuff we in the movies, and if they do, there should be heavy RL consequences.

Yeah, I remember. At one point, it got so bad I counted the BSODs. The record was 15, in an 8 hour day.

Because there wouldn't be anyone left to talk to.

The difference is that in the movies, the audience generally has perfect knowledge of the situation. Of the intentions and criminality of the bad guy and the honesty and righteousness of the good guy.

And this is why IRL we must have due process of law, in which the good guys must prove beyond reasonable doubt that the bad guy deserves what's coming to him, and that the good guys acted like good guys.

Doesn't make for good TV, though. 99.9% of real court cases are boring as shit.

I've also been to the pyramids. Stunning works.

The thing that's struck me about the mystery of ancient construction methods is...just that they chose to make things with such large stones. If you can cut stones precisely as they could, why not cut them again? It must be simpler to cut a two-ton stone into four 500lb blocks and move those. The fact that they chose to use such large stones implies they had a simple method of moving them.

Particularly when you look at some place like Pumapunku where they've got stones in the 80 metric ton range lifted on top of cliffs, after moving them from quarries miles away (and in some cases across lakes). What the hell? Why did all of the ancient world decide to use massive stones, and only later civilizations realized "oh wait this is way easier with smaller bricks." Odd.

Not saying it was aliens...but it is weird.

Since most of the artists I listen to on streaming services are dead, should they be paying me?

A bunch of workers hanging their body weight on the lever end would raise the stone a foot or two. You prop the stone with some timbers, shorten the lifting rope, and repeat. When the stone gets to the next level of the pyramid, you rotate the lever arm horizontally and pivot the stone to the next step.

Sounds plausible, except how does that lever get the stones to the top of a 455' structure? The widest "step" doesn't seem like it would allow room for enough guys to exert 800 lbs on a lever, much less for the lever itself. And we're talking a pretty long lever by the time you get halfway up. Then, you've got all the limestone sheathing to put up and you have to make sure the inside chambers are there, and accessible..

However they did it, it's pretty remarkable. I got to see it once up close and it's amazing.

I left off the most important part of the Baldwin quote, the second half:

This perpetual justification empties the heart of all human feeling. The emptier our hearts become, the greater will be our crimes.

In the words of the great James Baldwin:

The world has never lacked for horrifying examples; but I do not believe that these examples are meant to be used as justification for our own crimes.

The "Runaway Galaxies" was the name of my garage band in the 70s.

Hell, I won't even use digital thermometers out of concern that they'll upload my body temperature to the internet. I'm not going to be uploading my vitals to some app developer in Mencino.

Honestly, I think we're seeing late-stage Apple at this point. Each new product announcement makes a smaller and smaller blip on the radar, and Apple is entirely a company whose fortunes are tied to the faddish vitality of a brand name. Every year Apple does less and less to differentiate itself, and their older products are starting to whither a bit. The people who were excited about OSX 16 years ago have less and less to be excited about with each passing year and those aren't the same people who are going to get excited over a watch or something that will tell them they need to exercise more.

I'm not saying Apple is going to crash and burn or disappear, but when a company's capitalization is their biggest news don't make the mistake of thinking the future is a foregone conclusion. (see: IBM).