McEnroe’s famously pedantic and cantankerous. If someone tells him that Serena Williams is the best tennis player, he’s going to point out that there are hundreds of tennis players better than her. The guy’s not famous for his suave and intuitive understanding of social niceties - he calls a spade a spade. And at some…

I saw some estimates a few years back that at their peak they might have been competitive with men around the ~200 mark? So he might be exaggerating a bit (or he thinks they’ve declined).

Since nobody’s mentioned it (because it was a weirdly overlooked series - despite my having some problems with it, it should have been better known), he was also in Condor.

He was a guy with an ego small enough that he’d sign up for a part in anything going, particularly as he got older, but with enough pride to want to deliver a great performance no matter how small the role or how inconsequential the film or TV show. I’m too young to really know him from his heartthrob leading man days…

One thing to bear in mind is that the life expectancy has to take into account all of the people who die young, and all those who die in middle age. If you make it to 65, you’re really pretty unlucky not to also make it to 72...

People with any ideology tend to overestimate how popular their ideology is among ‘real’, ‘normal’ people, due to echo chamber effects. A lot of people believe they are part of the “silent majority”, at least among people they care about (like people who are cool enough to play their game), or at least that it’s, say,…

The sidepod structure never had the rigidity to have any effect on impacts anyway, so in theory the new structure is just as safe. In tems of risk to others, again no - it’s not meant to be dangerous, and if it is dangerous than the aesthetic concealment of it in a sidepod structure wouldn’t help. Essentially, the…

No, the same impact structures are still there; the sidepod that previously concealed them wasn’t significant for safety anyway.

As an outsider, fascinating to me to see Americans still insist that a multimillionaire is “cowboy-adjacent” just because he’s bought himself a house in the countryside.

You’ve clearly been in some really weird strip clubs...

You don’t have to have made a profit to have commited a crime. Smashing your bicycle is just as illegal as stealing it. [I don’t know if he’s commited a crime or not, but whether he was profiteering or not is not relevant to the question]

“Hey, you know that there’s a flaw here that could allow someone to be a complete and total arsehole, right?”

I very rarely think this, but this does sound like one case where someone is such an arsehole in a computer game that they really should be sued. I don’t know if they can be, but I’d hope so - they’re hacking the game in order to vandalise other people’s property, in effect.

Very unlikely, unfortunately. Officially their reserves are Vandoorne and de Vries (from Mercedes), or di Resta... but “coincidentally” today they also agreed a deal whereby they “could” (i.e. will) borrow Piastri as a reserve.

Well yeah, it’s pretty fatuous. Many, many, many people have caught COVID, while very, very, very few people ever win F1 GPs. The remarkable thing is that there was ever anything close to parity between those twoo numbers! That shows both how great F1 was at avoiding COVID (and most of those positives come from the…

True; and frankly I wouldn’t blame Vettel if he DID want to recognise Northern Cyprus, since the point where we have to go from “this land was conquered by an invasion/theft of land from inhabitants, therefore we shouldn’t recognise it” to “these people have been living there for decades/centuries/millennia now and…

Yes, I agree with that. I don’t think the man should be tarred and feathered, and I don’t think readers’ legitimate frustrations are an excuse for any sort of abuse. But to a large extents these complaints by George and his supporters are just demands that writers should never face any consequences at all for their…

I’d say she’s probably reasonably smart. If you gave her teenage resume to someone without a name attached - learnt Mandarin, attended Stanford’s summer programme, started an international business selling software to China, got into Stanford - they’d assume she was one of the smarter kids in her high school…

(whoops, wrong thread)

Honestly, Martin should have abandoned the series years ago. Gone off and actually done something else. If he had done, he might have finished it by now - projects always become more exciting when they’re not compulsory.