If it’s the USA, then “iced tea” may actually mean “sweet tea” (an American South tradition), which is often prepared something like this:

• bring 1/2 gallon (1.9L) water to a boil
• place 8 large black tea bags in a 1 gallon (3.8L) pitcher
• pour boiling water over the tea bags in the pitcher
• steep 10-15 minutes, then remove tea bags from the pitcher
• add 1 dry cup (220g) granulated sugar
• stir the slurry until sugar is dissolved
• fill the pitcher to the top with ice cubes
• wait 20 minutes for ice to chill and dilute the tea, gently stir again
• serve

It may be a stronger tea, but so much sugar gets added (probably 3x what would be used to sweeten tea served hot) that you typically don’t notice any bitterness.

It’s like in Unpretty, that 90s song by TLC:

you can buy your hair if it won’t grow

you can fix your nose if you say so

you can buy all the iPhones that MAC can make

This involves some HTML in your Markdown, but isn’t very difficult. You’re just going to add an anchor tag (with an ID but no href) immediately above the heading, like so:

<a id=“some_examples”></a>
## Some Examples

When you’ve got that, you can just use the anchor in a Markdown link:

I’ve provided a few [examples](#some_examples) to illustrate this concept.

I’m pretty sure that “oh, shoot, things got wonky… toss a 13th month in here real quick” is due to people trying to force months to fit weeks.

It’s the opposite of what I was saying about the role that months play in timekeeping & how they work.

ALSO, the same can be said for weeks & leap days… so if it’s a point against months, it’s just as much a point against weeks.

Months are one of the best ways for a low-tech/pre-tech culture to keep track of dates (using the Zodiac for something it can actually do—act as a calendar you can see no matter where you are in the world).

Keeping them around is a sensible fail-safe in case some nuclear power sets us back into the dark ages.

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.

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

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.)

Both films my family had no desire to pay theater prices to see, but if it’s available at home & there’s nothing else going on? Sure, why not?

BTW, in both cases we were disappointed. Those scripts could have used a lot more work before going into production. #thanksChapek

Cool article. It looks like they only tested this with wasp faces, though — still inconclusive as to whether the wasps around my yard hate me personally.

“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”).