Im pretty sure I saw this as a visual gag in a Muppet Babies comic book in the 80s! I think it was issue #13… I might still have it packed away somewhere

It looks to me as if 0.10 to 0.80 takes up as much vertical space as 0.01 to 0.02. They “yadda yadda‘d” the middle values because mouse was the only one that went that high.

It’s definitely been translated into the most used languages, but there are a bunch more that are being worked on still.

Here’s an infographic on it from another org: https://www.wycliffe.net/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/2023_Infographic-Large_EN.pdf

Looks like the way they calculate it, 80% of people in the world have access to a full translation of the Bible in their language.

An internship is a role where a person learns how to do this. (And someone who knows how to do this knows it’s orders of magnitude more involved than the two days you were given — two months is a more realistic timeframe.)

Here’s a personal experience of mine, so you have more to compare this with:

When interviewing for a developer position (not an internship), I was once given a take-home programming task to complete over 2-3 days: basically a small, self-contained web app that they had made intentionally buggy and poorly-composed in various ways. I was tasked with identifying & fixing the problems, then providing a write-up of why I changed what I changed. (The package was different enough from their specialty that it was pretty obvious I wasn’t doing their work for them. I confirmed after being hired that this same task was given to all applicants.)

Again, that was for hiring a developer. The whole point of an internship is that you’re being taught and trained on the job.

If you’re already able to build what those people asked of you, then you’re overqualified for the role.

Original sin: AI edition

A visiting captain and Sisko never got along. This captain knows that Sisko is crazy about baseball, and spent some time studying the rules specifically to mess with him. They challenge each other to a game of baseball in the holosuite with their respective crews as the teams.

Now, Sisko needs to quickly teach baseball to a bunch of non-humans who don’t get what the big deal is. Hilarity ensues, and life lessons are learned along the way.

I think the controversy of Janeway's choice is largely due to the show's failure to address the orchid of it all.

As I see it, Tuvix is not "Tuvok + Neelix," but also isn't "something new." I maintain that Tuvix is primarily the orchid, which has subsumed the essence and personalities of two Voyager crew members and is asserting itself on board the ship.

All it would have taken is for Janeway to have maintained (or be convinced by another) that this was the case, and it would be the obvious choice to split them back up.

Of course that would negate the tension of the episode, but it could be left as "not everyone on board agrees that this is who/what Tuvix is, but Janeway believes it so that's why her decision isn't immoral." We could have the same kinds of "was Janeway wrong?" debates, but some of the rough edges would be smoothed out, I think.

My understanding of the concept was that it was something like multiple channels of data being sent along the same wire. So long as the frequencies are the right kind of different they’ll essentially exist completely independent of each other.

Maybe this requires a minimum of two time dimensions so that the variance can result in the different beings following time along different “tracks”?

I took Troi’s awareness of the beings to be a result of the intermittent overlapping bits of time where they did overlap. Like, it happened too quickly to perceive visually, but enough for the empath to have something to pick up on.

Timothée Chalamet will have the slightest a hint of a British accent

I was really sad when I saw the initial release was PC-only. Looking at all the optimization problems it has, I kinda get it now.

Hopefully the plan with the delayed console release schedule is primarily to address those issues, and extra-hopefully that means it can be made available on the Mac before next summer.

MechWarrior 2? Man, that takes me back…

Martin and Waldron did some good work here! Especially when compared to the other D+ writing we’ve been getting lately…

Ah, sorry. It stands for “Manufacturer’s Suggested Retail Price.”

In the U.S. the law doesn’t allow a manufacturer to require that retailers sell their product at a particular price, but they’re free to “suggest” one so that’s how we ended up with the MSRP.

It doesn’t carry any real weight, but it generally serves to anchor consumer expectations for a product’s value. (It also gives retailers an easy metric to compare sale prices against.)

The MSRP for Nintendo Entertainment System cartridges in the mid-80s, adjusted to today’s U.S. Dollar, would average around $150-200.

I don’t think games should cost that much, but we stuck with the $60 price point for literal decades so it’s not completely unreasonable for someone to talk about raising prices.

(I also write this while having only bought one game? two? In the past year.)

“Fair” in the context of this phrase is meant to convey “beautiful” but literally meant “light or pale skinned.”

“Maiden” is meant to convey “young woman,” but literally meant “virgin” (as in “maiden voyage”).

This is why they want us to return to the office.

I’m guessing that if you have the right kind of Pal, you could figure out a way to Pay them to help you figure it out…

Maybe acknowledge what he’s said before it gets to that point. 4 year olds aren’t quite at the stage yet where they think to jump gears to “hey, a-hole, quit ignoring me—I’m trying to have a conversation with you here.”

I’ve found that, generally speaking, the way we talk to our 4 year olds is the best preview to how our 14 year olds will talk to us.

• microwave ovens
• speakers (especially battery-powered Bluetooth, since they aren’t connected to anything)
• LEDs (light without noticeable heat)

The Prime Directive seems at least a little bit hypocritical if it fails to discriminate between species on a planet.

I’m thinking about how there are dolphins serving on some Starfleet ships. Was the PD undeveloped when they were introduced? Was there a pre-warp history of Earth’s humans and cetaceans working together in similar capacities (such that they could be seen as sharing a collective technological culture)?