I believe that’s not the law though. The law outlines the conditions under which a person has an “expectation of privacy.” If you’re inside your house, you have an expectation of privacy and so should not be filmed. If you’re on the sidewalk in public, you have no expectation of privacy. If you’re in a private establishment (restaurant or store for instance), the owner or their representatives can ask you not to record and you have to comply.

All of street photography depends on this kind of legal framework.

This is something that the CIA actively engages in. It’s not quite at the covfefe level of “we meant to get caught,” but they do occasionally put out the word that they like it when they’re perceived as ham-fisted bunglers as it makes it easier to get away with stuff.

The Kids Who Lived.

Probabilistic curves are pretty much the opposite of what we normally mean when we say “free will.” If the assumptions were correct, we’d tend to use the term “non-deterministic.”

I tend to lean in the direction of Stanford neurobiologist Robert Sapolsky who believes that it is deterministic but not predictable due to the complexity of the parts and their interactions.

This is known as the Whorfian Hypothesis, aka Sapir-Whorf theory. In generalized-to-the-point-of-inaccuracy terms, the idea is that language constrains thought. It’s one of those ideas that we can perceive as intuitively correct but that does not stand up to experiment.

There are, for example, languages that don’t have words differentiating green and blue, and others whose counting numbers don’t include specific words for numbers larger than two. Some languages have no words for cardinal directions but use terms like “mountain-way” and “ocean-way.”

Experiments do seem to support a weak version of Whorf - people from cultures with “missing” words can differentiate between green and blue for instance, but it seems to take a bit longer. There’s also a paper indicating that people who don’t use cardinal coordinates have a better innate sense of orientation when, eg, walking corridors in an enclosed building.

I’d personally fall between the weak and strong position because I do not believe in free will and do believe that semantics are a significant driver of behavior, but that’s a step beyond where most of the current research is. There’s research into free will, but none that I’m aware of that pulls in cognitive semantics as a driver.

In the books, Isildur turned invisible by putting on the ring, and dove into a river to escape a band of orcs. The ring, under its own will, slipped from his finger and he was spotted by orcish archers, who killed him.

I’ve always thought that the “invisibility” aspect of the ring was that it shifted the wearer into the shadow realm. The Nine were invisible without their cloaks, but were visible when the ring was worn. It also made the wearer more visible to Sauron, iirc.

If that’s the case, then the power granted by the ring might mean that magic users (such as Gandalf or Galadriel) would more easily draw on power from the other realm into this one.

That makes perfect sense.

At one point, many years ago, I read that earth’s water cycle is such that, at some point, you’ve drunk Napoleon’s urine. The author didn’t show their math, but let’s assume it’s true. We can take the same approach to holy water.

We might make the assumption that all water on earth has holy water mixed in with it, like cosmic background radiation. Now, obviously it doesn’t have sufficient holiness to be considered fully holy water - it doesn’t damage such creatures as vampires, possessed children, or Jews - but it’s necessarily present in at least trace amounts. And it would increase as a function of time.

So if the water is holy, does that mean in addition that the evaporated water is also holy, or does the holy get left behind, making future batches even holier?

If the former, does that make the air containing the water vapor holy? Is holiness a percentage thing - the more holy water humid it is, the more holy? Could you take out a nest of vampires simply by boiling a pot of holy water and letting the place steam up?

Negative tip value.

A 1971 Chrysler Newport.

The thing was a boat. You’d hit a bump in the road, and the car would act like you crested a wave and bob front to back a few times. It was wider than most pickup trucks and probably heavier. Not only could it not fit in most parking spots, it could hardly fit in some lanes. Required leaded gas, which was getting hard to find at that point. If you needed to go uphill you had to build up speed because you would slow down, even with the gas pedal floored.

The best part is that when I finally brought it in for service, the mechanic came out and said “You’ve been driving that thing??” Three out of four motor mounts had broken and the last one was about rusted through.

It did have an 8-track though, and came with a bunch of Elvis tapes.

I hated Elvis, but did manage to find an 8-track of Peter Paul and Mary.

Making someone eat saltines plus peanut butter plus sardines sounds like a war crime.

Shark, as long as we are on land. I’d just outrun him then call coup by hitting him with a stick while he’s gasping for air. I guess at that point I could take on a blue whale, but that would just make me feel like a dick. I’ll stick with the shark. Any shark, any time, 1.5 miles inland.

Smalltalk would probably make more sense than C++.

In 2012 I voted against Obama because I thought he was too conservative. I didn’t think his healthcare program went far enough, I didn’t like his foreign policy of continuing the Bush wars, and I thought he turned out to be far more establishment than he had indicated as a candidate in 2008.

I voted for Jill Stein. I said it wasn’t a protest vote and that I was voting my conscience, but it was totally a protest vote. Stein would have been the worst president in US history, and I even knew that at the time. I did it because Obama had a predicted 99% chance of winning my state, so I figured it was safe and would communicate to the democrats that there was a preference for more left leaning candidates.

What I did not do was try to campaign for Stein to try to get swing state voters to vote for her. I didn’t try to get swing state voters to not vote.

Thanks!

I have always loved the OED. As a kid I used to sit in the library and just read it. It was always a dream of mine to buy my own copy and just have it the way people used to have encyclopedias.

That’s exactly my perspective.

I came of age with the birth of the web. I was using systems like Usenet, gopher, wais, and that sort of thing. I was very much into the whole cypherpunk, “information wants to be free” philosophy that thought that the more information people had, the more they could talk to each other, the better the world would be.

Boy, was I wrong.

But you can’t put the genie back into the bottle. So now, in addition to having NPR online, we have kids eating tide pods and getting recruited into fascist ideologies. And of course it’s not just kids. It’s tough to see how the anti-vax movement or QAnon could have grown without the internet (which obviously has search engines as a major driver of traffic).

I think you’re better off teaching critical thinking, and even demonstrating the failings of ChatGPT by showing them how bad it is at answering questions. There’s plenty of resources you can find that should give you a starting point. Ironically, you can find them using a search engine.

That was amazing! I can’t believe this is the first time I’ve seen this.

“Every customer should be greeted when they walk into the store.”

The singular “they” is traditional in English - it is very much proper English and has been around (iirc) since the 17th century. It’s only a big deal now because conservatives want to make gender a factor in elections.

The difference is that Elon would have said “And we can do this today!” back in 2017.

First “democrats” is doing a lot of work here. I’m assuming the voters that you’re talking about turning out were democrats. I’m assuming the politicians they voted for were democrats. So what you mean is some subset (eg Third Way types, which have already been mentioned).

Use numbers. What was the turnout for the previous years? What was the turnout for Obama? For Bill Clinton? Was it bigger when Dennis Kucinich was in the race? Other than Bernie, he was the leftmost candidate that I can recall - at least in the top 5 in recent years. State the point you are trying to prove clearly, then demonstrate it.

I’m a Bernie supporter - he actually helped secure a research grant I worked on, I’ve met him in person, and I donated to each of his campaigns since I started to be able to do that kind of thing. I’m a member of the DSA. I’m also a scientist, and I deal with this kind of thing all the time.

What you’re basically coming off as, to be honest, is that family member in the maga hat who keeps yelling that 2020 was rigged.