"Normal people who already pay way too much to play games online."

It's Mother's Day, soon, so we will be treated to all those stupid articles tallying up the value of a mom as manager, psychologist, chef, etc. Well, guess what. You're CEO of your life all the time, but you don't get a CEO salary for it. I make a lot of my own meals, but opening a can of Dinty Moore doesn't make me a…

Americans have perverted the notion of "democracy" into meaning "my opinion is equal to your facts." Since early times Americans have had a sense of entitlement, feeling that any land or natural resources they could grab were theirs by Divine right. The Religious Right's vision of government is the Israel of the…

Let's tie this in to the "blood moon" nonsense. We just had the first of four successive total lunar eclipses, during which the moon looks red. But if it had to be a literal 24 hour day in Genesis, if the whole earth had to be flooded by the Deluge, and if they really will be taken up into the clouds as in 1…

So those sneaky poutine-eaters have annexed a piece of the U.S., eh? The border from Minnesota west is the 49th parallel. The 42nd parallel runs from south of Boston to below Detroit and Chicago, then along the northern boundary of Nevada and California.

These maps are a monument to crappy cartography. Use only one color and use nearly indistinuguishable shades to show different levels. By all means don't use the whole spectrum.

Perfect in every way. The costume is perfect and the face is perfect. The very best entry.

BRT is not just buses. BRT is a system of dedicated bus-only lanes. And to see what the problem is, visit a few links and see bumper to bumper traffic next to a completely empty bus lane with no buses in sight. If the buses ran every 60 seconds it would be a workable system, but as it is, BRT merely cuts the capacity…

I think I see a tiny pinhole to the right of the eye and a less distinct one to the left. Bravo!

In the rosiest scenarios, AI takes care of our every need. Look at the spaceship in Wall-E to see how that works out. More likely, they'll decide we're not worth the resources and go Galt on us. Or they'll just ignore us. If they need something we have, they'll take it.

Actually, they need some kind of randomizing algorithm so Italian vs. Chinese, instead of being tied at 0.5000000000, ends up 0.49999999999 and 0.50000000001. However, lots of chaos generators simply make use of the truncation errors in calculations to achieve that purpose.

The picture is weirdly distorted. The skyscrapers are way too thin. The crosstown streets are almost perfectly straight and appear to converge far off the right edge of the picture. The north-south streets show very slight curvature. I suspect the picture may have been an early attempt at orthophotography, where the…

My age shows a nice linear upward trend when plotted against time. Either my getting older causes people to lose their religion, or their losing their religion causes me to age. Or maybe it's linked to the price of gas, which also shows an upward trend.

Well, on the plus side, it makes good use of color, as opposed to all the maps that plot some variable in shades of a single drab color.

Saying something is a fact based on years of professional training and experience = Arrogance

One reason people are so paranoid, I believe, is they are beneficiaries of things they did nothing to create and are charged only a token of what they're actually worth. I have a phone in my back pocket that has more computing power than Mission Control when NASA filmed those moon landing movies [/snark]. The Wright…

BMJ was formerly the British Medical Journal but shortened it to BMJ in 1988. (Pre-Internet)

Baffling. I believe in free will, and I have absolutely no problem seeing that conditioning can play a role in behavior. It's the decision to follow or reject your conditioning that determines good and evil, as you yourself acknowledge by talking about conditioning leading to immoral thinking, and overcoming bigotry.…

Two persistent theories are that FDR knew about Pearl Harbor and allowed it to happen, and the OSS, and maybe the Soviets, killed Patton. All I can say is if they're true, thank God. Without Pearl Harbor the isolationists would have kept us out of the war until it was unwinnable. And Patton would either have launched…

11. Patton maneuvers us into war with the USSR. The "Greatest Generation" dies on the battlefield or in the gulag.