I would distinguish between authorities who engage in ”bad“ behavior that’s inherent to the institutional role they’ve assumed (in which case my negative feelings are directed more toward the institution than the individual), and authorities who exploit their institutional roles to serve themselves.
Abuse of authority.
Any other form of misbehavior might make me feel sad, or sickened, or determined to make things better; but the only time I actually feel angry at the people involved is if they sought out a position of public trust and then betrayed that trust.
Zipping a file repeatedly typically doesn’t reduce the size further after the first time.
The Song That Doesn’t End—we’ll finally rescue all those people who started singing it not knowing what it was.
AKA “Why zip doesn’t compress things much any more”.
Unreliable narrative imagery, where the description reveals more about the narrator’s interpretation of reality than it reveals about the actual setting. (Classic examples would be Poe’s The Telltale Heart or Joyce’s Ulysses.)
Not quite—it’s every four years, excluding years divisible by 100, but not excluding years divisible by 400. So 2000 was a leap year, but it was the first century in 400 years for which that was the case (using the Gregorian calendar).
The “prime meridian” is the line through the black holes at the centers of the Milky Way and Andromeda, and the “equator” is the galactic plane.
Hay is for fodder; straw is for bedding and thatching.
Reality, for one.
Also Doctorow’s novella “Unauthorized Bread”.
The original binary format is split into six-bit chunks (e.g., 100101), which in decimal format correspond to the integers from 0 to 63. These are just mapped to letters in order:
etc.—it goes through the capital letters first, then lower-case letters, then digits, then “+” and “/”. It’s so simple you could do it by hand from the above description, if you were looking at the data in binary format.
Most binary-to-text encodings don’t attempt to make the text human-readable—they’re just intended to transmit the data over a text-only medium to a recipient who will decode it back to the original binary format.
Yes, see Binary-to-text encoding (e.g., Base64).
Front left: phone, small bills, crow-calling whistle
Front right: keys, multitool, tin of peanuts
Back right: wallet
Back left: spare change, spare mask, small magnet
A closer US parallel might be getting appointed to the Supreme Court.
In part it might be trying to head off trouble during and after the election with Republican state officials interfering with the election process—they might be more hesitant if they see other Republican leaders supporting Harris.
For the Greek gods, the greatest sin was attempting to be like them.
If there’s ever a Giraffe Interchange Format, I’ll pronounce it the same as giraffe. And unlike some people, I’ll be able to tell the two apart.
The rate at which your hairs emerge from their follicles is constant, but the rate of increase of the total length of the hairs slows down and eventually stops because the hairs naturally wear down over time.
Imagine that your hair is like pasta being extruded into water, and that it slowly dissolves over time. The more time the pasta is in the water, the faster it dissolves—and it eventually reaches an equilibrium where the length stops increasing at all. But if you cut off the pasta at the extruder and time the new pasta coming out, you’ll measure the full extrusion speed instead of the extrusion speed minus the length-dependent dissolution rate.