Yes, the spelling would have given that away.

I though he was a defense attorney?

Carl Sagan wrote a book, The Demon Haunted World, which is all about why people get sucked into nonsense like ancient aliens, and how to deal with it.

Y chromosomes have very little information on them, and the DNA there is pretty highly conserved. You’re not really keeping any secrets by hiding your Y chromosome away.

Gesundheit.

Or, if you prefer: “Yahweh bless you.”

How will this plan affect my real estate taxes?

Disagree. The movie is a mediocre adaptation of a fun and mediocre book into an un-fun and mediocre movie. The film was never going to be gold, but they spent an awful lot of CGI money to make a movie that wasn’t as fun as just reading the original and imagining all of the nerdy stuff being described.

Yes, and?

Mid 30s, USA. I’m smart (Ivy League science doctorate) but I can’t drive a standard transmission because my dad “couldn’t teach me” because I “wouldn’t learn right”. It was just me asking him questions like "What does the inside of the clutch actually look like? " and him yelling “That doesn’t matter, just ease out on the clutch while giving it some gas!” Apparently I can be taught a lot, but not how to drive a standard.

Weirdly, my engineer friend let me drive his standard transmission car once after giving me some basic instructions and I did okay going up and down the road alone, but that was just one day and I fear I’ve forgotten everything. But I must be mistakenly remembering that, because according to my father I “can’t be taught!”

If you get good at it and if you run enough hives each year, it does, eventually, start making money though! Which is almost more frustrating, because every dollar you spend on it could come back some day in honey sales… but will it?

I’ve been playing little bits of Aven Colony, a straightforward and fun space-colony-themed city manager. However, mostly I’ve been watching my wife play Baldur’s Gate 3 and thinking "We should really buy another beefy gaming PC before Starfield launches so we can both play games simultaneously… "

Brawndo. It’s got what I crave.

Black & White 3. Just more Black & White, slightly updated and improved since technology is better, but it doesn’t have to be much better. Just a little bit. But basically more of the same.

Sure, but in the case of a show dealing with the question of what would happen if the general public could download celebrities despite the non-consent of the celebrities involved, literally Futurama did it.

You’ll take what you can get, and you’ll like it!

I once overheard a pair of utility workers talking, and as I walked past I only overheard a snippet of conversation. The older one yelled up the cherrypicker to the younger one and said, in a heavy Boston accent:

“If only you could use your powers for good, instead of for useless…”

That sentence is seared into my brain.

Pete, I do not need you to innovate. I just need you to make Black and White 3.

Cries in Medieval Engineers

Ignore that jerk. You’re great, and your detergent videos explained, in exhaustive detail, (as all of your videos do, because that’s literally the whole shtick,) the nuance and context that you were aiming for. Anyone who missed that just wasn’t paying attention.

Also your snarkiness in your videos is amazing and never stop being you.

Honey bee population counts are sometimes hard to interpret, since many colonies are split in half in the spring, with a new queen inserted into the queenless half to create new colonies. Thus, the number of colonies can be high, then low after lots of winter deaths, then high again after new colonies are created, then low again after the following winter, etc. Peering through those fluxtuations, it’s clear that (1) honey bees aren’t anywhere close to going extinct, but (2) it’s still a lot harder to keep a bee colony alive than it was decades ago. New parasites, new pesticides, lower food availability due to habitat loss and/or climate change, etc. Commercial beekeepers who manage thousands of hives also have very different pressures and their bees have different stressors than people who keep a few (or a few dozen) bee colonies. This report that more colonies died than in previous years means that beekeepers’ practices have a lot of room for improvement, but the bees won’t all be gone by this time next year.

If anyone is interested in further discussion about bees and beekeeping, you’re welcome over at [email protected]