Curved swords are useful for slashing rather than stabbing, so they're effective against an unarmored opponent but not against an opponent in metal armor. (You can't slice through mail.) Thus most of these swords are from well after the invention of gunpowder, and therefore the abandonment of armor.

It's cool that humans have no problems interpreting cartoon depictions of faces which are so grotesquely exaggerated.

I oppose letting anyone define hate speech as a matter of principle, because even if I agree with the definition completely now, I may not continue to agree with the definition in the future. Look at what has been happening in the USA since the October 7 attack: a lot of people I had considered my political allies turned out to have beliefs I consider to be hateful, and meanwhile these people consider my own beliefs hateful. The solution is not to empower a single central authority to decide which sort of hate is allowed. It is (as it has always been) to maintain the principle of free speech.

No one is owed your vote

I happen to actually like Harris (more or less) but the one good thing about Trump winning would be getting to laugh at all the self-owning leftists.

Properly built, properly installed ceiling fans don't vibrate. My $70 dollar ceiling fan from a big-box hardware store has no vibration whatsoever, even at maximum speed.

He clearly hasn't been dumping STR.

Where are the other kids getting tampons to throw at him?

15 year old virgin

Aren't most 15-year-olds virgins? I went to a weird high school where the SAT-prep kids would have made fun of the PE kids, so I don't know what normal teenagers are like.

I'm a little surprised to hear people so willing to let the government of Ireland determine who they are allowed to hate and for what reasons.

I would be worried about causal mechanisms if we were discussing artificially introduced mutations. However, these are naturally present alleles and they would be considered only for the purpose of selecting among otherwise equally viable embryos. In such circumstances, I think that the risk of proceeding without knowing the casual mechanisms is minimal.

"Hizbullah" is the spelling that the Economist uses.

The short version is that Lebanon's official financial system is very weak.

the Lebanese pound has lost 98% of its value against the dollar since the financial crisis [in 2019]; last year inflation reached a high of 221% and debt hit 285% of GDP.

In this context, Hezbollah has a lot of influence though its own alternative financial system. Despite sanctions, this system has access to money that actually has value, largely through support from Iran. Apparently Israel is doing real damage to its ability to function and therefore to Hezbollah's ability to pay supporters.

We don't have sufficient information to reliably predict IQ, but we do know hundreds of genetic loci associated with intelligence. The overall contribution of these loci is significant.

The polygenic scores predicted 4–7% of intelligence variance in independent samples; another study predicted 10.6% [50]. Thus, a blood sample at birth in these samples predicts intelligence with about the same effect size as parental socioeconomic status, i.e. they do not predict well; neither is of practical use for predicting the intelligence of an individual.

Source. (A review of the subject.)

It's true that the polygenic scores cannot reliably predict that one person will have a higher IQ than another, but that doesn't mean that polygenic screening is useless as a tool for increasing the expected intelligence of one's offspring. People who effectively screen their embryos will, on average, have slightly but significantly smarter children than people who don't. In this way, screening is not qualitatively different from many other parental interventions.

I would use this sort of screening if there was an opportunity to do so. (I don't think it currently justifies resorting to IVF if that is otherwise not necessary, although it would if the effect was larger.)

C#, the better Java. A really underappreciated language...

Most financially secure people still work full time. I suppose that in theory, they're able to quit their jobs without suffering immediate, catastrophic consequences but if they actually did that sort of thing, they wouldn't be financially secure for long.

(In my experience, many financially secure people actually work much more than full time. I think they would be better off if they didn't because at some point time becomes more valuable than money, but they have the sort of personality that compels them to. This is often related to starting out without financial security.)

The very rich can do crazy stuff without consequences but they're such a small part of the population that I don't think comparing oneself to them is useful.

It's a bold move but I don't see it changing the outcome of the ongoing war. If Ukraine could build long-range ballistic missiles in the near future, I think they could regain the advantage even without any nuclear warheads. Nuclear warheads would not be useful without those ballistic missiles.

(What would happen if Ukraine did have nuclear-armed ballistic missiles but Russia refused to withdraw from Ukrainian territory? I don't foresee Ukraine actually nuking Russia, even in those circumstances.)

There's no logical contradiction between believing that some people should be killed and believing that other people shouldn't be killed. You might as well ask why a soldier would shoot at his enemies but not his allies

(I'm not picking a side in the "Are fetuses people?" debate here. They are from the point of view of the people against abortion.)

Harambe, no!

All 54 of the children? He really is a god of marriage.

There were showers in the locker rooms when I was in school, but the ordinary gym classes never used them. (Maybe the sports teams did?) I think I would rather have dropped out than showered naked in school.

They are blaming bad luck for their shitty personality.

I wish I was the kind of guy who liked being social and meeting new people, but I'm not. I can force myself to do it, but I can't force myself to do it much (and I think people can tell that I would rather be going to the dentist). I didn't choose to be like this, and I didn't choose whatever inborn characteristics and childhood experiences made me end up like this. If there's a way to choose not to be like this, I haven't found it. I do think I got unlucky.

I'm not trying to complain about my fate here. I got lucky in a lot of other ways. I'm just saying that it isn't fair to tell people that they would be happier if only they were someone else.