I will defend it, halfheartedly, as a mildly entertaining diversion with a nice setting.

Or lack thereof. That is, subplots about the lack of pubic hair. In any case, the revealing shot of Rosario is the only thing I remember from that film.

Yeah, this isn't math; it's practical knowledge. There is, however, a whole branch of game theory that deals with fair ways to split a non homogenous cake amongst several people. For the simplest case, Alice cuts the cake and Bob gets to pick which part he wants, and it gets progressively more complicated with more…

Man, if I do like this musical, I'm a gaylord, and if I don't, I'm a commie. Can't win.

No, the pagers didn't have e-ink. But the LCDs were really power-efficient because there was no backlighting. LCDs are somewhat similar to e-ink in that they consume very little current when the display isn't changing. Of course, the contrast isn't very good.

That sounds about right. Don't forget to call us sheeple for using iPhones.

That Corrs CD thing reminds me of an email I got from a recruiter the other day. I couldn't figure out how the job possibly applied to me and then realized a word on my resume had been taken in an entirely different context.

I worked on those in the 90s. They were called 2-way pagers. They were killed off because consumers wanted voice calls, which seems funny now.

Maybe I'll check it out. I like the Mark Knopfler song "Sailing to Philadelphia" which was supposedly inspired by the book. It's one of the few cartographic ballads I know of.

I don't doubt it happened. A lot of the actresses in the musical era were only lip-syncing to more-talented singers.

It's just a bunch of numbers chaotically thrown together with no concept of a whole. Even the very first scene is a big mess. And it's super-cheesy.

Agreed. He's got skills, and is yet completely unenjoyable to watch.

Will Have Ben Hur

I'll be the contrarian grump. I think this is the most annoying scene in a thoroughly annoying movie.

RIP

When your business will be defunct in ten years, and you have to pay pensions for fifty years, then yes, you have to pre-fund the pension.

It has worked very well for a government-run entity, but in recent years, prices have gone up faster than inflation and they've nonetheless gone from self-supporting to huge deficit mode. And they lacked the foresight of, say, anybody, in believing mail volume would not decline.

I am sure that's still the case.

Who's the genius who drew this chart? If I interpret black as night and yellow as the sunny day, as I naturally would, I can see that night stretches from midnight to noon.

There are some physical limitations. You have to have a screen and a lens some distance from the screen to change the image's focal point. Sure, you could make them as thin as a pair of glasses if you are able to focus on things closer than your nose. I can't.