I remember damage. Then escape. Fan of #crows, #StarTrek and the #Japanese language, among many other things. Currently posting one frog species per day. If I keep this up, I should be done in about 20 years. My toots are searchable.
I'm following the devastating news from Slovenia, where one month's worth of rain fell in 24 hours. It's the biggest natural disaster in the young country's 32-year history. Large parts of the country are flooded. I can't even begin to imagine the time and money needed to recover from this.
You may have seen the quote, "The real danger is not that computers will become like men, but that men will become like computers." I'll now argue against this claim. First let me --hold on, I have to log in. Nope, that's not the password. Nope, that's not it either. OK, let's click "Forgot password." Ah. Let me go get my phone real quick to check the MFA verification code. "Please select all squares that show traffic lights." Hm, this is taking forEVER. Let's check the wifi. "Enter password"?!
The New York Times op ed by José Andrés, the chef and founder of World Central Kitchen, whose employees were killed by the IDF today, is well worth the read. It's a desperate, heartbreaking appeal to civilization, made to a regime that's unlikely to listen.
The World: Oh my god the internet is a wide-open firehose of incoherent misinformation! The only silver lining is that the amount of bullshit is limited by how much content the human population can produce.
Swatra just showed me a case where someone claimed an insurance payout after a burglary where a bunch of stuff got stolen, including a radio-controlled toy car.
The insurance company sent them a letter saying that the toy car wasn't covered by the insurance because it met the definition of a "motorized vehicle."
The customer's lawyer had to write a response explaining that if this was a "motorized vehicle," it would need mandatory car insurance, license plates, and be used for transportation.
Idea: a market research company that offers people a free pasta dish of their choice if they join a focus group. The company calls itself "Penne for your thoughts."
A good lesson in humility: scientists have found evidence that 800,000 years ago, our hominid ancestors were reduced to a mere 1280 breeding pairs worldwide —and stayed like that for 117,000 years. If that’s true, we have come incredibly close to extinction. All of humanity today owes its existence to the survival of those 1300 or so hominids. https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abq7487
Many a 14-year-old girl has been known to exclaim, "I'm so random!" But how random ARE people really?
Well, as it turns out, you can test your randomness. Go to https://roadtolarissa.com/oracle/ and hit your left arrow and right arrow keys as randomly as you can. The webpage shows you how good it is in predicting your next move. Can you get the percentage below 50%?
Reading a review of the new movie "Civil War" confirms what I already expected when I watched the trailer: the movie, about an imagined civil war in the United States, completely avoids explaining who the two sides are or what they're fighting for, or against.
This may be an independent movie, made by a British filmmaker, but to make a movie about civil war, set in the near future, without taking a political stance, reeks of ridiculous bothsidesism with a dash of "War is bad, mmkay?"
Here's the building that Bram Stoker may have been thinking of when he mentioned the property called "Carfax" that Count Dracula wanted to buy in Purfleet, outside London. Look at it. Doesn't it just ooze mystery, gothic romance and vampirism? #dailydracula
Source: https://ianfarrington.wordpress.com/2021/11/08/draculas-purfleet/
Maybe I would like billionaires more if they spent their money wisely, like hiring tens of thousands of people to travel to every motel across the United States to replace every Gideon's Bible with what looks like an exact copy, except that throughout the text, the word "God" has been replaced with "Godzilla."
