Quality of engineering design doesn’t indicate quality of manufacturing. I mean, they often correlate because a company that doesn’t invest in one seldom invests in the other, and engineering can certainly produce a design that is difficult to manufacture reliably. But it’s still a separate thing, and you can pour all…

Oh yeah. Plus, horses are breeding stock (I mean, unless this one was gelded) and there’s animal cruelty to consider.

I think if they were hung, they were . . . ah, “impressive”.  :-P

Sure they are. They aren’t actually a totally closed community like folks think; they interact with the outside world. They mostly just dress differently and don’t generally use electricity or gas engines (although they may be allowed to hire others to use them for them, like buying bus tickets). A lot of things you…

I do wish we had more trains.  Tons of small towns around my part of the country with abandoned railway stations.  Used to be, you could get from any town to any town on passenger rail.  Can’t anymore.

It’s how they drive, I’m sure of it. I’ve seen some Tesla drivers who clearly LOVE the way you can jackrabbit away from traffic lights. I mean, yeah, that’s one of the cool things about electric motors. Awesome low end torque means awesome acceleration. But you’re gonna pay for it somewhere; the energy’s gotta get to…

Those heads look nice and stripped too.

We had the weirdest Christmas — high was around 60! Then we came out by your neck of the woods: I brought my family out to Washington, DC for winter break so my kids could finally see the Smithsonian and my husband could see the monuments. (Kids didn’t care about the monuments.) It was bizarre that the weather was…

Oh, that is nightmare fuel.  Yikes.  Only a matter of time before someone’s showing up at an ER -- and let’s just hope it isn’t a kid.

To look cool*.

Although, this winter in Minnesota has been pretty atypical. I’m in Minnesota and it’s above freezing right now. We had a nice run of below-zero weather last week, but that cold snap is definitely over now, and you can hear the weeping of the ice fishermen. :-)

One advantage to the automatic car washes is they usually include a dryer, which helps a lot with the problem of doors freezing shut.

Drug testing isn’t out of the ordinary, but it is very much out of the ordinary for it to be frequent.  It’s only frequent if they have reason to be suspicious.

This is the perfect time to bring up my favorite Eastertime science website:

I’m still in shock that Bash and Tapper just let DeSantis and Haley dunk on each other rather than ask anything specific

I think you misunderstand where the money for the tanker overruns came from. They did not get more money. They lost money. Huge amounts of it, and this will cost them more.

And not just any science teacher, but a physics teacher! :-)

I think you miss the point. I strongly recommend the book; it’s absolutely fascinating. Dissecting comedy doesn’t make it uninteresting — it just makes it not funny, and as you dissect it, you can see precisely why. The process changes the very conditions that trigger the humor. Which, of course, goes right along with…

Best example of this I’ve seen is in the excellent (but *heavy*) book “Le Ton Bot De Marot” by Douglas Hofstadter. It’s (broadly) about the inherent difficulty in translation, but there’s a whole chapter about the special challenges in translating comedy in particular, and you’re absolutely right — once you dissect…

EMTALA does not mandate medical treatments, let alone abortion care, nor does it preempt Texas law