Hedwig sings a song about this myth, Origin of Love.

In the US it must be Springfield because there’s so fucking many of them that they named made a TV show after it.

Stupid sexy autocorrect.

There will ALWAYS be mistakes, bias, and corruption. There is no such thing as incontrovertible evidence. And even if there was some fantastical magical way to know absolute truth, that is still a pretty poor justification for more murder.

Execution of innocent people is (and always has been) the entirely predictable, inevitable, and probably unavoidable result of capital punishment. There is no getting around the fact that, as long as the state executes prisoners, innocent people will be executed and “the state”, i.e. taxpayers, will pay more for it than they ever would have imprisoning the convicted for life.

I’m not the one being combative here. You’re attitude is pretty condescending and alienating. Are you okay?

You totally missed the part where OP said she was looking into Python because she ALREADY WORKS IN GIS.

She already works in GIS and is looking to supplement that work with python. Python is used for more than geojson and web development in ArcGIS Pro. I’ve use it for constructing labels, simple field calculations, symbology, data processing etc. and in general ESRI makes it pretty simple to implement compared to the other terms you’ve listed. All she really needs to get started using Python with ESRI products is an simple python course and googling for some ArcGIS examples, which are pretty abundant. I remember taking one ages ago that ran the code in the browser, but I can’t remember it now.

It’s a damn shame that we haven’t built a microwave that actually listens to the pops and stops when the pops slow, just like every bag of popcorn instructs you to do. We’ve got gun shot detectors; you’d think we could build a chip to analyze popping popcorn.

TV static in recent movies and shows that are set in the past almost always instantly pull me out of the narrative because no one seems to be able to get it right and some are just stunningly bad. It’s usually very subtle, so much so that I’m not sure I could even describe what’s wrong. Makes me feel old to notice it.

Let this be a lesson to you then. Checking the logs should be your first troubleshooting step, not installing a variety of distros until one “just works”. Good luck.

I’ll phrase it like a shower thought:

“Avoiding politics is about as useless as avoiding economics, math, science, or the arts; they permeate everything we do. We even use them to define what it means to be human. We might as well avoid breathing.”

I think avoiding partisanship and incivility might be more productive, but it has the problem of being more vague and requiring judgement, thus requiring more effort to enforce fairly and consistently. I don’t think there is an answer that will satisfy everyone. Avoiding politics may be a good rule for this community, even if it’s pointless.

Some people get a lot out of sitting very still and clearing their minds completely. Some people get more clarity in motion, while running, rowing, cycling, or walking. There is another way on meditation that involves almost the opposite of a clear mind, where you focus on experiencing and really noticing absolutely everything around you; every breath, birdsong, machine noise, footstep, squirrel chittering, and insect buzzing. Sometimes while focusing on a puzzle or game like Tetris, Sodoku, or a Rubik’s cube, it feels meditative to me. I don’t know if that’s real meditation. But my point is that everyone’s built differently, find what works for you and stop worrying about failing. If you’re trying, you’re not failing.

One thing that the movies miss from the books, which seems like it would be hard to pull off, is that NOBODY in Dune just has a normal conversation with each other. Literally everytime there is dialogue in the book, at least one of the characters is psycho-analyzing every word for some sort of ulterior motive, or some hidden meaning within a meaning or something, it’s actually kind of annoying and I’m glad they didn’t attempt to work that into the movie.

Did we read the same book, because my impression was that it was almost entirely written from the perspective of main characters that were looking for conspiracies everywhere. Paul and his mother in particular were literally constantly attempting to detect the machinations and plots of others in order to either manipulate their allegiances or literally predict the future. The were the center of an ulterior motive tornado for the Fremen. The mythos they exploited to grab power was built on the foundations of other Bene Gesserit missionaries before them, an army of ulterior motives. The entire theme of the book was secret manipulation of the masses in order to maintain and grow political power. You don’t survive in the Dune Universe without psychoanalysis of every interact for ulterior motives.

Mostmaps people use to make some point, especially some political point, turn out to just be population density maps.

Pretty much all of the Sci-Fi written by Ursula K. LeGuin features people more than machines. There are technologies in the stories that play a role, but the are described as vaguely as possible to support the plot. As a result, often her sci-fi stories feel more like fantasy.

Octavia Butler wrote the Xenogenesis series which features an alien “species” whose system of technology is entirely biological.

Judge appointments work in a similar way, I assume other offices do as well. Judges often decide precisely when they are going to retire in order to manipulate how their replacement is chosen, by vote or by appointment. These positions SHOULD be mostly non-political and merit based in general. In reality, just like economics, politics is inevitably everywhere. The real solution here is to get out the vote for every election at every level, not just the big federal one every 4 years.

That’s the way voting in a Republic, where you’re not voting directly for every position, law, and amendment, should work. The Republic falls apart and corruption and manipulation of the public will becomes easier when people don’t turn out to vote at the smaller election cycles. The death of local news plays into this too as it becomes much more difficult to stay informed about the people and politics of those smaller local elections. If you think our representative system is broken and needs to change, the solution is the same, get out and vote for every election and support local investigative journalism.

The “E” (and similarly the “IE”) at the end is a very different pronunciation indicator than an “E” in the middle of the word.

There’s no need for the weird hate in your spoiler tag just because you don’t understand something.

Yeah, dividing a circle into 360 parts, then subdividing those by 60, and further subdividing those by 60 makes so much more sense than just using ratio of a number fundamental to circles themselves.

Because it’s a unit circle.

Sine of theta is the ratio of the lengths of the Opposite side over the Hypotenuse (SOH). Cosine of theta is Adjacent over Hypotenuse (CAH). Tangent of theta is Opposite over Adjacent (TOA).