Freezing and thawing the pasta water is a huge waste of energy. Might as well just get new water from the tap.

That was a short lived trust. Go back further and you had things like the Boer War, even further all the medieval wars of conquest in Europe. It used to be that medieval peasants had just as much to worry about with their own “friendly” soldiers as with the enemy soldiers, since both sides in a war would pillage the countryside in order to gather food and resources for the army.

Trusting the government is a modern invention. In some cases it’s justified, but it should never be an unconditional trust.

The best sort of trust comes from knowing what the incentives are for all parties involved. If everyone is behaving rationally, then you can trust those whose incentives align with your own. One of the big issues we have right now is an outbreak of extremely irrational and erratic behaviour.

People keep mixing up empathy and sympathy and it’s one of my biggest pet peeves.

Empathy is the ability to take the perspective of another person and understand their emotional state. To put yourself into their shoes.

Sympathy is a feeling of compassion you have when you see someone else’s suffering.

Empathy can be part of sympathy but it can also have nothing to do with sympathy. Scammers, for example, use empathy to manipulate their victims by predicting how they will respond, based on their emotional state. Empathy is a skill with no moral content. How you use empathy determines whether it’s a good or bad act.

Dime is a pretty common word among basketball commentators and fans. It means assist!

A point guard who’s dropping dimes all over the place is playing really well and helping facilitate the team’s scoring.

Sounds like something an overzealous D&D DM would invent. Bite DC15 or turn to stone!

No, 100 is the median IQ, but that doesn’t preclude there being a lot of people with exactly 100 IQ. Thus there would be less than half of the population below 100 (and also less than half above 100).

The guy’s a Trump wannabe who’d sell out Canada for a nickel.

There’s also ECAD software for electronics. I believe a lot of product teams use both ECAD and MCAD. The former for designing the circuit board, the latter for designing the case and any moving parts.

These are everywhere where I live. Nasty creatures! The babies are cute but the parents are vicious!

CAD software for Mechanical design (mechanical engineers use it to design motors and transmissions and other machinery).

Try going to the bathroom before you’re at the point where your bladder feels like it’s going to explode!

It usually will bite you. Skeletons in the Prison will destroy you if you don’t use upgraded armour. The explosion damage is doubly-reduced by armour, so you don’t need many upgrades to neutralize it, but +0 armour is not good enough.

Also note that upgrades to armour reduce the strength requirement like this +1, +3, +6, +10 for -1 to -4 strength requirement respectively. As an aside, this sequence is known as the triangular numbers:

Right, but gas prices are one that Republican voters actually care about.

I hate calling on the phone. If you want to have a real time conversation with me, meet me in person. We’ll have a beer, or go out for lunch, or watch a movie, or go for a walk.

If you live too far away (or you don’t know me), you’re stuck with text. The only exception is my mom, who lives on the other side of the continent from me. I put up with phone calls to talk to her.

Chess is gendered because women are underrepresented at all the competitive levels of the game. If representation was nearly equal then we wouldn’t have it.

That’s really all there is to it. To have a woman become world champion we would need to have a lot more women at all levels (all the way down to beginner level). Sure, it’s possible to have one without equalizing representation but it’s extremely unlikely. The skill of the top players (one in a billion level players) is so much higher than even typical grandmaster level players, it’s pretty absurd.

After Trump is gone they may admit it.

Dunno why people don’t realize that Trump never admits he’s wrong about anything. He’s an extreme narcissist who throws tantrums like an overgrown toddler. His ego is inflated to such an extreme degree that any hint of any kind of fault on his part drives him into rage spirals from the cognitive dissonance.

He’s all too aware. As powerful as he is, he doesn’t have the ability to solve everyone’s problems everywhere all the time. This is a source of tremendous grief for him. That’s the whole reason he’s a compelling character and not just wish fulfillment.

Too bad a gigawatt isn’t a unit of energy, it’s a unit of power. The media gets this wrong almost every single time.

Edit: The atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima had a yield of 13-18 kilotons of TNT, or 54-75 terajoules of energy. Since the chain reaction of a nuclear fission weapon takes about 1 μs, and 1 watt is 1 joule/s, 54 terajoules released in 1 μs is 5.4 * 10^19 watts of power, or 54 billion gigawatts.

Wow, thanks for the recipe! I have a 12 inch cast iron skillet as well as a 10 inch carbon steel pan (3mm thick and oven safe), but no 10 inch skillet. Can I use one or the other?

Cornbread is so delicious! I’ve loved it every time I’ve had it but I’ve never made it before!