The actual D2 reveal? The fold back control panel for the pilot was sexy as hell. I wished they'd shown a bit more of it. Earth landings with retro rockets! Now THAT'S a spaceship!

I'm a software engineer, but I don't care for Java. I like python, perl is meh, I despise PHP, and JS isn't as bad as people seem to think (working with the DOM is a mess, but that's not JS's fault). Frankly, I've not found a web development technology I really like yet. Fortunately, I don't have to do much of that being a systems software guy. When I do, I hold my nose and get it done.

I've been using Go lately, which has a couple warts but also some cool things (defer is simply brilliant). Also plinking with Scala a little, which I'm liking.

Java, PHP, mod_perl, Django, node.js, Flask. I'm sure there's more. I'm not much of a web developer, thankfully. None of the above constitutes endorsement. 3 of them I actively hate working with. Which three are an exercise left to the reader. :-)

Generally if you just say "I'm not interested. Have a nice day." then close the door, that will be the end of it. If you get an especially pesky one, sometimes calling the local JW branch and politely asking to be removed from their list will fix it.

Arguing with them, or telling them you're a devil worshipper is about the worst thing you can do if you want them to leave you alone, as from their perspective you are now a challenge God has put before them.

And if you look carefully at your bill, you will probably find your actual cents per kWh is lower as most electric companies charge just to be attached to the grid. Mine charges $15 a month for that.

The whole prison system in Ohio is massively corrupt, and based on profit. The worst thing you can do for a prisoner in Ohio is buy things for them and take phone calls from them (at $1/minute), because they will get their appeal denied, even if the victims of the crime come to the parole board and say "let him out, he's served enough time."

Doubled negatives are not really a thing in German, with either educated or uneducated people. "Ich habe keine Augentropfen" would be the way I would expect to hear it from any native German speaker, but my German is rather rusty.

It's progress, but with very different metrics.

Well, in the US anyways, we have this concept called "innocent until proven guilty*" and that cuts both ways. Believe me, I'm no fan of the direction of modern "law enforcement" with its increasingly paramilitary outlook, and I don't trust the police** much at all. But on a jury? If there's no evidence they're lying, you shouldn't convict because they might be lying.

* - I know. I've been on enough juries to know this is laughable in the real world. If I'm ever accused of a crime, I will waive my right to jury trial unless I'm going for the hail mary of jury nullification.

** - but I don't trust organizations of any kind. YMMV. I trust in individuals, and there are a couple cops out there who have earned it from me.

Neurons aren't even within several orders of magnitude as fast as transistors: linky1 and linky2.

However, a single typical neuron does a lot more work than a single transistor, computationally speaking.

Also, some languages have subtly different operator precedences, and in a house where many languages are used, it avoids confusion because not everyone is at the same level in every language.

English and code don't compare on other grounds. One can communicate with metaphor and simile in English. Your options are less in code. You are not just communicating to the computer with your code, you are communicating with your fellow programmers. You have to draw a line somewhere, but being explicit is usually the safer course.

OTOH, complex boolean logic should probably be accompanied by a comment explaining your intent.

There are many reasons to hate on Python, but the "whitespace thing" is probably the least offensive oddity, since it just enforces something you should be doing anyway for writing good code. It's not like this is old RPG or COBOL where things in certain columns carry meaning. Really, it should be transparent to a programmer in an hour, unless they're lazy about indentation in general. In which case, Python isn't the thing that's broken.

Truth. One of my favorites is motion detection. It is carried out in the retina, and curiously, the neurons that compute motion are only wired to rods, not to cones. You can do some pretty freaky things to your vision armed with this knowledge. Example: write a simple program to bounce a green dot on a red field smoothly. It looks like motion. Get two polarized lenses, one green, one red, and put them together. You can then turn the lenses to a point where the contrast of the green and red are similar and you quit perceiving the motion of the dot and you only perceive discrete jumps of it. It's a very jarring experience.

I can't find the relevant papers, but I recall a study that says a first past the post voting system will fall into a steady state of two dominant parties. The only time that will change is during times of large upheaval and a third party will either briefly emerge then subside as one of the two parties co-opts the ideas of the rising third party, or a third party takes over from one of the two entrenched parties, relegating the old mainstream party to political backwater status or oblivion.

I had a job as late as 1994 writing programs for company with an old IBM System/38. The AS/400 that IBM would sell to replace it was one they considered useful for up to about 15 concurrent users. We had 200-300 on our System/38. I would send a 4000 line RPG program to be compiled to the queue at 9 am and it would finish at about 4 pm. The three other programmers and my boss were all in the same boat. We tried to make the case to even get a tiny 15k dev AS/400 box, which would have an ROI in less than 5 months, but the senior management just saw the dollar figures and balked. That's how I learned to program in C on Unix, since I was friends with some people in product engineering who had some Sun boxes and pretty much had nothing else to do for 6 hours a day.

Never underestimate the power of stupidity. :-)