I'll just use my imagination.

For those for whom English is not a first language, this is incorrect, as "criteria" is plural, and the "a" requires a singular noun.

It should read, "a certain criterion".

Yours in pedantry,

dtmos.

Not to mention that the quality of the track, the design of the shoes, the timing methods, etc. have changed so much over time that it's difficult to compare, say, Jesse Owens' performance in 1936 to that of, say, Usain Bolt's performance in 2009.

The claimed difference between the world depth record, 35,873 feet (10,934 m), and the Chinese mark, 35,791 feet (10,909 meters), is 82 feet (25 meters), or 82 / 35873 = 0.0023 (0.23%) of the measurement. Measuring depth in the open ocean to such precision is easy; measuring depth in the open ocean to such accuracy is a lot more difficult. Making relative comparisons between two measurements, done independently at different times by different people with different equipment, and at slightly different places in the ocean, turns the exercise into a game of probability, i.e., the only answerable technical question one may ask is, "What is the likelihood that the Chinese mark [differs from / is greater than / is less than] the world depth record?"

This is, of course, separate from the questions, "Where is the deepest spot in the ocean?" and "How deep is it?", questions that have answers that vary over time, as explorers survey with improved equipment. When I was young, Mount Everest was stated to be 29,000 feet high (subtracting the 2 feet added by Andrew Waugh); this number has varied since from 29,028 to 29,035 to the number currently accepted by many today, 29,029 feet (8848 m). The absolute number, of course, is dependent on the definition of "sea level" which, also of course, depends on the geoid one uses in one's definition.

I had a similar experience when I took biochemistry, embryology, and other such biology courses, back in the 1970s. I even remember asking a graduate student teaching assistant the same question about how the blastocyst selects the geometric axis that will eventually become the alimentary canal.

However, the answer to that question -- and many others -- back then was entirely unknown; while it was relatively difficult to find a question to which no one knew the answer in physics (one had to get to subatomic particles and such things, or maybe cosmology and black holes), it was relatively easy to ask a biologist a question the answer to which was completely unknown. In fact, it was harder to find a question to which the biologist did know the answer. And it wasn't just that no one knew the answers to most of the questions; there were also no immediate ideas on how one might *get* the answers.

So I majored in something else. I suspect that if I were to take those same courses today, I would find them much more rewarding and satisfying, as much of the unknowns have been filled in in the intervening 45 years.

If only that were true. From Wikipedia, emphasis added:

So as you can see, there are still plenty of opportunities for shenanigans. Not only is there the "conventional" approach of objecting to a state's electoral vote at the session of Congress; there is also the possibility of tying the vote up in the courts so that neither the president nor the vice-president are chosen by 6 January 2021, which puts the whole matter before Congress. (The relevant passage in the Twentieth Amendment is, "If a President shall not have been chosen before the time fixed for the beginning of his term, or if the President elect shall have failed to qualify, then the Vice President elect shall act as President until a President shall have qualified; and the Congress may by law provide for the case wherein neither a President elect nor a Vice President elect shall have qualified, declaring who shall then act as President, or the manner in which one who is to act shall be selected, and such person shall act accordingly until a President or Vice President shall have qualified.") Of course, Trump would need to find a federal judge willing to go down in history as the one who, by not resolving the parties' disagreement by 6 January, put the nation into a crisis, but there's someone for every job assignment -- after all, Nixon found Bork during the Saturday Night Massacre.

(Another level of detail in the presidential election process is available here.)

Maine also split its electoral votes this time, with Biden getting 3 votes and Trump, 1. (Nebraska gave 4 votes to Trump, and 1 to Biden.)

There's a reason the typewriter UI (i.e., the keyboard) stayed substantially unchanged for more than a hundred years: To change it would have required the re-training of every customer and, in a competitive, non-monopolistic environment, no company wanted to be the company with products every user had to be retrained in order to use.

That, of course, is not the situation in which Microsoft finds itself.

Rather, it finds itself in a situation in which its products are standardized utilities; there are few functions they can perform that they do not already perform (although there are several that they perform that they should not, and others that they perform poorly), and so coming out with new features on which to base new products is becoming increasingly difficult. The alternative is to use Microsoft's market power to collect sets of random UI changes that no one wanted or asked for (remember the -- *shudder* -- ribbon?) into "new" products that consumers and enterprises are forced to accept, usually because previous versions no longer will be supported. Without support for security upgrades, enterprises cannot risk staying with older versions, so they move to the new product, forcing the consumer market to do the same.

Leave it to Microsoft to work out a business model that turns security holes in its software into an asset.

Is Ultimate Frisbee just for solipsists?

Or did you mean "self-refereeing"?

. . . the patent issued last month. The patent application was filed on August 15, 2017.

Axon was thinking about this three years ago.

While I guess it makes sense that
National Hug Your Hound Day is the same day as National Pet Memorial Day, and
National Grandparents Day is the same day as National Bald Is Beautiful Day, but
it is a little odd that National Kids Take Over The Kitchen Day and National Peanut Day also fall on National Celiac Disease Awareness Day.

A similar idea was tried to protect people from tigers. It worked for a while, I am told -- tigers are not endemic in my area, so I must rely on second-hand information -- but after a few years the tigers adapted to the ruse.

It would be interesting to see if the lions adapt, too.

They want their Smart Dust back.

That's not really the question. Domestic cats do extensive ecological damage. There is a distinction between what cats kill, and what cats eat. The fact that domestic cats kill large amounts of wildlife, far more than wind turbines, is the relevant fact at hand; whether they eat what they kill is, to the prey and to this discussion, irrelevant.

We can, of course, discuss the fact that wind turbines and cats kill different ranges of species.

A complement to what?

I've always thought of it as more of a compliment, but YMMV.