That’s pretty much it for me, too. The process of writing a paper and then making the slides gets the content I want in my head enough that I don’t need to memorize anything. The stuff that gets cut from the actual slides (since I always start with too much and make cuts) will stay in my notes as a reference, in case…

This is too perfect. I was just in a used book store trying to find one of the Dresden Files novels as a present for my father and I discovered them in the horror section. It was a weird trip, because I would never have put those novels in the same genre as Stephen King, they are so different in style and tone. At the…

Lactose is a cow milk thing. Human milk has a different composition.

Tell you a secret. That book is written by a very very strong atheist. I don’t know whether that was a change that happened between Calculating God and his later books like Hominids and the WWW series, but Sawyer does not believe in intelligent design now. Honestly, if we had the proof the aliens did in that book, I…

The provincial healthcare plans vary, but many don’t cover a lot of drugs (including birth control). My asthma inhalers are only covered by private insurance that my university provides, for example. People shouldn’t forget either that PEI residents must go to New Brunswick if they need an abortion. We’re not 100%…

See, that’s not what I got from that scene at all. I understand your interpretation and I can certainly see how you get that from that scene, but I must respectfully disagree. For me, it was more along the lines of straightforward self-loathing. Romanov still sees herself as a weapon, a monster, something that…

GoG is run by the same people who own CDProjekt RED, who took the DRM off the second Witcher game and gave everyone with a Steam version the GoG version. In case you weren’t aware, GoG.com started as a site for selling old games (like the X-Wing series and Planescape: Torment) DRM-free with modifications made so that…

There are a number of things about Minas Tirith that make it harder to besiege. First, I believe there are passes through the mountains behind so the city would be very difficult to completely isolate. Obviously transporting large amounts of food through these would be difficult, but in an emergency it could be done.

That makes a surprising amount of sense. If you’ve ever read ‘The Prefect’ by Alastair Reynolds, the whiphound is a similar sort of weapon. It’s very dangerous, but also extremely precise and works primarily in melee range. In there, it’s the only everyday weapon allowed the Panoply peacekeepers. They have others…

I’m 23 and I had to have that one explained to me when I came back to North America; not West Side Story specifically, but the idea of racism in general. I still don’t get how people can kind of just generalize to skin colour while ignoring so much else about a person. I guess I’ve just had too many contradictory…

Get them used. Garage sales, Kijiji and the like are very helpful. Power tools are easier to get that way but you can find hand tools as well and the price is often very good because they just want rid of them. It’s not like electronics where things go obsolete. The hand tools you need have existed for well over a…

The obvious best option for carry-on if you don’t know what you’ll encounter and don’t need a ton of actual volume is a backpack. You can carry a lot of weight that way, so long as the bag is well-designed. I actually use a big old hiking backpack with a frame as my main piece of luggage if I’m going anywhere wheeled…

You make wood into charcoal, use bricks/stone/clay to make an oven, light a fire in it, and melt the metal down that way. If you build it correctly (not every type of material will take the heat, so you’ll have to do some trial and error on spare bricks if you don’t know for sure) and pipe oxygen in with a bellows…

They can be perfectly boring and not a big deal if that’s how your teacher spins it and if you’re a fairly confident student. My experience of NY standardized testing was like that back in 1999-2005. Perhaps things have changed since then. However, a lot of teachers were not that way even then and not every student is…

Fresh bread made by hand is phenomenally tasty and actually really easy and very nearly free in terms of money. The only thing that you can screw up if you're inexperienced is how much you knead it and the exact amount of flour you add. Too much makes it doughy in the middle and that's the mistake I made when I first…

Not everyone who's anti-GMO is necessarily anti-science. I'm a bit of a fence-sitter (and I certainly don't think that there's anything inherently "wrong" about genetic manipulation), but I know plenty of people with fairly well-reasoned criticisms of GMO crops. Some of it is elaborated on below.

There's a major problem with that. New Horizons doesn't have near enough delta-v (aka fuel but labeled in a useful way for doing orbital changes) to slow down for a Pluto orbit. The spacecraft itself had a bit over 290 m/s of delta-v left once it got on its way to Pluto. I'll do some explaining and then some math to…

I've always been partial to the minimal black covers.

The problem is that many things that you plug in have conflicting ways of indicating top/bottom. The only reliable way is to look at the end of the plug and then hope that the port was installed the right way up (which is almost always true, except for the couple of times where it isn't). It means that plugging in a…

Yeah, I too was wondering if this man tried to make humans into krogan.