A race between Greenland and Antarctica.
Atossa is a picky eater. Probably normal for a 3-year-old but it's still annoying sometimes. She'll always eat pasta and fried rice. Let's see if I can convince her that all forms of salad are basically the same...
I was thirty before I would eat salad.
I guess I was naive to be dismayed that the sub-ice topography and bathymetry haven't been studied already, but dismayed I was nonetheless .
I am trying to eat less meat, because of global warming, and less sugar, because I don't want diabetes. It's hard and it's going to get worse over the holidays because my stomach is telling me to stop drinking for a while.
I'm trying to eat less meat for all the usual good reasons - wasn't thinking about diabetes specifically, but health in general - but it's hard because it's so easy to cook. Just slap a slab of protein in a pan and put it in the oven and it'll come out edible in half an hour, depending on size, and with something healthy on the side will make the family feel full all night. The only vegetarian dish I can prepare with so little thought is pasta. Atossa would be happy to have that every single night but Cassandane and I would quickly get bored.
I don't want to restart the Paleo wars, but I wasn't thinking that cutting out meat would lower the risk of diabetes for me.
Please tell me salad in a bread bowl is not a thing.
Ah, heh, misread 5, sorry.
I've cut down on my caffeine a bit recently - haven't had a soda in over a month, or maybe just one. I've kind of given up on cutting down on sugar, though. Cassandane won't stop buying junk food and not eating it, and our previous strategy of offering Atossa dessert if she eats he vegetables has stopped working. (She just declines dessert.) I'm just going to try not to worry about it until my pants stop fitting or my dentist complains.
I've seen them in a taco shell, but that was an 80s thing.
I have a few quibbles with the cube theory of sandwiches, but it is basically sound. What it is missing is the detail that the "starch" (bread, etc.) is on the outside of the cube for a reason: to avoid getting your fingers/hands excessively cruddy while using them to hold the food object. Sandwiches are inherently held to be eaten. (It is not required that they be held, but that is the basic mode of sandwich eating.)
Some of the classifications are therefore nonsensical: lasagna is not a sandwich, for example. A bread bowl is not a sandwich, no matter what is in it. A calzone is a sandwich. Tacos are a sandwich, even if the shell falls apart while you are eating it. Etc.
Definitional clarity advances!
12 The functional theory of sandwiches. I like it.
Possibly I've been eating lasagna all wrong then.
6. Consider pulses-- chickpeas, lentils, peeled favas.
Lentil salad or favas with dill and feta are easy, and there are a bunch of ways to bake or curry chickpeas plus one or two vegetables that are 125% or less the low hassle of pasta and sauce.
A calzone is a sandwich.
Many have failed to distinguish calzone from pizza along this logic. A calzone is completely contained, but a piece of pizza is enclosed on two sides (crust at bottom, crust on arc) so it can be held in the hand. Indeed, moving to empirical data, pizza is more often held in the hand than a calzone.
Let's just make a calzone a type of Chicago-style pizza.
Antarctica apparently is toast, whereas Greenland is merely pizza.
14. If it involves your feet you are doing it wrong.
Lasagna is a sandwich that requires an unusually large number of napkins.
I really wish we weren't doing the sandwich wars here, I get enough of that on twitter.
On climate change... DUDE, that tick article on Slate. I swear the earth is fighting back.
I have a bread bowl of Permethrin for that.
23: Interesting hypothetical question: if everyone 100% stopped eating animal products, but everything else stayed the same culturally and systemically (fast food, consumer culture, pesticides, ag subsidies, etc.), would that in fact substantively help the Earth writ large?
It would cut down on some kinds of GHG, but not necessarily a huge chunk.
Naw, I think animal ag (done poorly, and done right would make meat/dairy very expensive) is about as much emissions as the transportation sector. I mean, I'd have to look it up, but I think after not-having children, giving up meat is the next largest impact.
I feel like your metric is vulnerable to abuse by the homicidal.
It would cut down on some kinds of GHG, but not necessarily a huge chunk.
Associated reforestation could maybe soak up a good chunk of carbon.
27: There's evidence that the Mongols' rampage through eurasia killed so many people that it altered the climate due to reforestation of previously cultivated land (and reduced wood burning, since there were so many fewer people around to light fires).
As solutions to global warming go, it's perhaps less than ideal.
I dunno, I'm toying with the conclusion that *any* solution to climate change would be better than the politicians pratting about like they are now. I mean we talk about existential challenges, this actually is one. If Trump or Rees-Mogg or Orban or Putin actually said, look, we have to do something about climate change, wouldn't we be forced to agree? (obvs. they won't, which makes it a bit hollow, but if I wanted to be a fascist dictator my strategy to get people onside would be to expropriate the energy industry and green it.)
It's a good time to remember what a shit Clint Eastwood cold be, even before the chair thing.
On generalized ecological catastrophe: the NYTimes bug apocalypse article.
Honestly way scarier than climate change.
There are things you can replace
and others you cannot
The time has come to weigh those things
this space is getting hot -
you know this space is getting hot
33: Thanks. This on bee colony collapse points out among other things that the great bulk of food crops don't depend on insect pollination. So probably not apocalypse on that front. Plentifully grim though.
The graphics in the Antarctica NASA article are almost completely unrelated to the text of the article, right? The article says it's alarming that glacier surfaces have lowered by 3m, and that it would be bad if glacier movement accelerated. The graphics show the speed the glaciers are moving, and all that red means...that the glaciers are moving. Which glaciers do. They don't yet have evidence that the movement is faster than it used to be, or that it's alarmingly fast (which it may be, but they don't seem to know that yet). They just chose a color scale that made all the glaciers red where they meet the ocean. Am I wrong? I'm not arguing that everything is not terrible, but...that's a lot of pointless red ink.
Tomato sauce. NASA incorrectly understood Antarctica to be pizza.
That's not tomato sauce, that's penguin guano.
Ask not for whom the penguin shits. It shits for the.
Aka the catchphrase to the less successful sequel to Soylent Green.
My fucking phone changes shit because it hates mocking Hemingway, I guess.
For a moment there I thought they'd gotten you, Moby.
Honestly way scarier than climate change.
And probably at least partly caused by it, although people throwing toxins around like toys doesn't help either.
Of course, you would have gone doing what you loved, so there's that.
Ask not who Moby forgets; he forgets me.
48: If it makes you feel better, I've never read Hemingway either.
At the round earth's imagin'd corners, blow
Your Trump.
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Folks may recall that I mentioned in the yellow vest thread that we had one here. The local paper talks to him and guess what?
Q-iste antisémite
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"A Clean, Well-Flooded Place"
Anybody else see this bad-ass climate speech by one Greta Thunberg? "The only sensible thing to do is pull the emergency brake."
My fucking phone changes shit because it hates mocking Hemingway, I guess.
IME parodies of Hemingway are usually more worth reading than the original.
I enjoyed reading Hemingway a lot more before I was woke. Now I can't enjoy the adventurous WWI story without it being overwhelmed by annoyance at his patriarchal bullshit.
58: Yes, it is phenomenal, and accurate, and four minutes long.
how does a jelly donut fit the taxonomy?
I totally get that we can't like Bruce singing Fire any more, but what do folks think of the Pointer Sisters' cover?
It'd be sad to never again hear them sing Romeo and Juliet, Samson and Delilah . . .
63: It's a taco, when filled with guacamole.
65. Au contraire. In a jelly donut all the jelly is on the inside, which is not the case with a taco. A jelly donut is a calzone. That fact that it is toroidal doesn't matter.
Sometimes a jelly donut is just a jelly donut.
A calzone is just a folded, sealed taco.
45
Possibly, though I'm skeptical. Hot climates traditionally produce plenty of insects. I think the disappearance of land with diverse life on it (read: wilderness) is more responsible, though of course they are interrelated.
If only Carl Sagan had been a biologist.
It's all poop in the end.
My understanding is that it depends on which end.
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The kids' dance recital mistakenly put Ace and Hawaii into different recitals: one is at 3:30 and one is at 6 today. So first, we have to hang out at a theater for 5 hours total.
Second, she had the gall to charge us tickets for both performances - including the non-performing kid who would have been free if they'd both been in the same performance.
(She did cut us a small discount: If they'd been scheduled at the same time, it'd cost us $30 to attend. If we were paying full price for both recitals, it'd cost $70. We're paying $50. I'm still grumpy about paying $50 to waste three extra hours of my day.)
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And because Jammies is NICE, he already bought the $50 of tickets before I had a chance to argue about it.
I don't understand how it was ever up for debate that we need a second set of tickets when we're already in the theater anyway.
Why not go somewhere else for three hours? Like anywhere else.
Get a six of Shiner Bock and go out to the car at least.
Last year, our studio merged w another studio for recitals, presumably to save money, and it made for an unbearably long show. So this year they're splitting it into two shows - for the love of god, why not split along studio lines?!
Anyway, mid-westerners suck at bargain. Apparently, my grandfather was an exception, but I never met him so I can't say for certain.
IT HAS BEEN DETERMINED THAT SPLITTING ALONG STUDIO LINES IS NO LONGER DESIRABLE.
OT: Apparently, you can now say "raw dogging it" on network TV.
People always say, "Dance like nobody's watching," and then they go and hold recitals and make you watch.
It means "don't be so self-conscious or worried about the opinion of others."
To be fair, when I was a kid, I had to do dance recitals and they said something along the lines of "Dance like we practiced because your moms are watching."
OT: you academics out there: are you being supportive enough towards your postgrads?
Yes?
Now read this link.
https://www.thelocal.se/20181213/lund-professor-freed-student-from-islamic-state-warzone
Remember: if you aren't ready to send armed mercenaries in Toyota pickup trucks into the middle of a war zone to ensure your students can complete their theses, you aren't being the best supervisor you could be.
And if you send unarmed mercenaries you aren't being clever.
"What was happening was completely unacceptable," she told LUM. "I got so angry that IS was pushing itself into our world, exposing my doctoral student and his family to this, and disrupting the research."I like this person.
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Churchill instructed postwar planners to take no actions that would get in the way of closer British-U.S. integration, but his program for much more intensive integration after the war--he envisioned merged military and foreign office staffs, even joint citizenshipAnyone ever heard of this?
No, but it tracks with Churchill having had an American mother - he doesn't seem to have been a dual citizen, but maybe he wished he had been. (He would have been if born in the same circumstances after the laws changed in 1934.)
He suggested something similar with France in June 1940, to keep them in the war even if the Germans conquered metropolitan France; a political union with a joint parliament, a single currency, and even a single postal system (selling what would be called either timps or stimbres). The French government refused, reckoning that they would be better off with the Germans; joining with Britain, they said, would be "fusion with a corpse".
"It is always a joy to meet an American, Mr. Moulton, for I am one of those who believes that the folly of a monarch and the blundering of a minister in far-gone years will not prevent our children from being some day citizens of the same world-wide country under a flag which shall be a quartering of the Union Jack with the Stars and Stripes." - Sherlock Holmes
I was aware of the French thing and took it to be an improvised unserious offer to keep France in the war*. The American angle makes for an interesting continuity. (Not to say that the idea was any more serious.)
*The account I read said that the French thought that, inasmuch as it wasn't a joke, it would amount simply to the cession of French colonies to Britain. (Not inconsistent with the corpse analogy.)
The French government refused, reckoning that they would be better off with the Germans; joining with Britain, they said, would be "fusion with a corpse".
France giving China a run for their money in taking the long view.
France giving China a run for their money in taking the long view.
"In the long run, we are all Germans." -- Jean Keynes
Says the King of the ROMANS.
Neither holy nor Roman nor an empire; nor, thank God, French.
91: The best part was that the university had someone on staff who got the call from the professor, and clearly said "I have been waiting for this moment my entire life."
"A student is in danger of having his thesis research delayed? This cannot be allowed! Brutus, hand me my claymore and prepare the faculty ekranoplan."
'the fraternal association of the English-speaking peoples. This means a special relationship between the British Commonwealth and Empire and the United States'.26 As these quotations suggest, Churchill's use of the term was prescriptive as much as descriptive. He was trying to will such a relationship into existence, or at least to build it on the foundations already laid in the wartime alliance. Repeatedly he indicated that the special relationship would have two aspects. It was based on the underlying cultural unity between the two peoples, cemented by language, literature and law, which might one day be expressed in common citizenship. From this should grow a close military relationship, centred on a combined body of Chiefs of Staff, shared use of bases and collaboration on the atomic bomb.
107: of course, like many others, he underestimated the stupidity and small-mindedness of Harry Truman and the sheer concentrated malice of the Republican Party.
Also, the fundamental difficulty of "world's largest colonial power trying to hold some of those colonies" and "former colony still deep in denial about its own empire."
I think Canada is still a colony, technically. And ok with it? So you know, maybe.
DOES DOMINION DAY MEAN NOTHING TO YOU SONNY
And NZ and Australia. I'm not sure they're English-speaking peoples though.
I've come to think that merging with Mexico along with Canada would be a good project for us, and for mankind.
Amexada? Canexica? Mexerida? Or if you're boring, North America.
Then, I wouldn't be the only person to use "Central America" to refer to Kansas.
Estados Unidos Mexicanos is a pretty easy merge. USNA. Mexico comes in as 32 states. Canada another 10. Presto, 84 new Senators.
You people would complain about Colima, of course. And how come DF gets to be a state and not DC.
Sounds great, though it's not Colima to get pissed about, but PEI. With a population of 500 million spread out over 92 states, you'd think we could at least get a minimum population of 550,000.
We'd move the capitol of the USNA to St. Louis, though, right? And go to 800 Representatives?
I did not know that the Mexican Senate has a partial PR system (first place party gets 2 senators, second place gets 1).
Also no party is allowed more than a 3/5 majority in their lower house.
QI Twitter account ripping off unfogged atm.
122 How weird. Or maybe ajay runs the account?
That's quite a coincidence. No, I don't run the account...
Incidentally I hope we'll have a 2019 predictions thread. Last year I went with:
I am actually optimistic that Scotland will pull back from secession now that we have seen how complicated brexit is turning out to be. Also I suspect we are headed for a soft brexit which keeps single market membership. Trump will still be president but the democrats will retake the House. Robert Mugabe will die.
And I was right on US politics (which was an easy call), almost right on Scottish secession (the polls haven't really moved much in either direction) and wrong about Mugabe (though there's still time!) I have no idea yet whether I was right or not about Brexit... stumbling into hard Brexit would be the easiest option if not the most likely.
NW seems to have been spot on.
All his predictions now look likely (though still have to wait 100 days to see if any of them actually come true)
Speaking of, have any of the Brits read this?
As always, Sir Ivan Rogers on Brexit is excoriating and obviously right.
J.M. Barrie made a cowboy film starring G.K. Chesterton, George Bernard Shaw and himself. Sadly, the original film has been lost; we can only imagine.
This isn't that entry but it's very like.
"the film was part of an experiment in stage presentation by J.M. Barrie, who was intrigued by the inter-relationship between film and theatre. He set up an event in July 1914 entitled 'The Cinema Supper', to which many of London's great and good were invited, and in the middle of it staged a argument between Shaw, [author and philanthropist Lord Howard] de Walden, Chesterton and [drama critic William] Archer, the later three ending up chasing Shaw off-stage while bearing swords..."
https://blogs.bl.uk/sound-and-vision/2012/05/how-men-love.html
130: I'm only halfway through, but yeah, it's very good. It's weird to me how much of it could have been written three years ago. There's no real news in it.
This bit is ominous:
So the narrative has be of "Betrayal" by a remainer elite who sabotaged the "no deal" plans. It is the emerging British equivalent of the Dolchstosslegende - the stab in the back myth - which, post Versailles, the German military - Hindenburg and others - propagated to blame the Weimar civilian elite for having betrayed a supposedly undefeated army.
The key here -- and the genius of the US Republican Party -- is the ability to screw things up and then successfully blame others. This creates a feedbak loop: The worse things get, the worse they are going to get. In the US, we haven't figured out the answer. Maybe Robert Mueller has one, but I wouldn't count on it.
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I'm in an elementary school library for a little while, killing time, and it really sounds like someone gave each third grader their own vuvuzela. Why.
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If you give one to half the class, they fight over them.
126: I came within one play of being 1/3 right. Unusually accurate for me.
133: I think the left needs to be better at coming up with counter-narratives. If Brexit doesn't happen, I suggest "Rees-Mogg tried to trick the UK into Brexit to benefit his hedge fund. Fortunately we figured it out in time."
130:
For all the imperfections of the Single Market, services trade between Member States is, in many sectors, freer than it is between the federal states of the US, or the states in Canada. The US Government is unable, even if it were willing, to deliver on commitments in many areas in international negotiations, just as it cannot bind its states on government procurement, on which many federal states are as protectionist as it gets.Interesting.
Looking back at last year's predictions, the one thing I didn't take into account is the unbelievable fucking delusional uselessness of Jeremy Corbyn. But the May deal is pretty much a soft Brexit in a HEAVY METAL typeface: it's just that reality doesn't have that font to display.
It's clear now (this afternoon) that Theresa May is going to try to force her ghastly deal through by fixing the vote on it so close to the no deal deadline that anyone who wants to avoid catastrophe will feel compelled to vote for it. I don't think, though, that this will work. I don't know why; perhaps because the way to bet up till now has always been to find the stupidest and most vain course of action for any party leader and put your shirt on their doing just that.
Corbyn couldn't even practice as a speech pathologist in Texas.
139.2 is likely. The vote's been set for 14 January, 10 weeks before Brexit day; probably too late to organise another referendum.
139: The fundamental issue with Corbyn is that he's really a Brexiter, no?
I remember you being absolutely disgusted and depressed over Brexit during our April meetup. I hope you all still find a way to pull off a second referendum--after all, the EU as an institution doesn't want you to leave, so maybe on net it's worth it to play a bit of Calvinball with the rules even if it sets a bad precedent--and stay in, but it doesn't seem likely.
Anyway, I made a tiny bet that May wouldn't be prime minister at the end of the month and I'm disappointed that I'm probably going to lose that. But who knows.
141: Under those conditions might Parliament have the wherewithal at least to suspend Article 50, even if not anything else?
The lesson of the last three years is that May is tactically very clever in a way that screws the long-term future of the UK. So yes, 139.2 is guaranteed to happen.
It's clear now (this afternoon) that Theresa May is going to try to force her ghastly deal through by fixing the vote on it so close to the no deal deadline that anyone who wants to avoid catastrophe will feel compelled to vote for it.
I would say (and did at the time) that it's been clear ever since she was forced to have a vote at all.
I agree. 130.link is the only piece I've read on Brexit that actually makes sense. Too bad it doesn't have a happy ending.
I know you're not supposed to try to time the market, but part of me wants to take my retirement money out of the stock market before Brexit...
I rode a chairlift with a financial guy yesterday, and he's expecting, still, a 2008 style correction. I think I might change the balance of our IRAS.
You don't need to do that. When there's a recession, the balances change all on their own.
The whole damned shebang is bizarre
And for the love Christ why is it always "the island of Ireland". It's only funny the first time. The inter-German border was good enough for Germany.
Maybe he's just reminding people that he can call that vote when he wants?
He seems to be literally the only person in parliament who doesn't want to call it.
Except possibly May. But I think she's actually a chatbot.
How else are they supposed to refer to both parts of Ireland without pissing somebody off?
"You can reach the Inter-Irish Border by plane or ferry."
"The Inter-Irish Border was formed by rising sea levels at the end of the last glacial period."
Anyway, I think the cases are different. The inter-German border was imposed by an imperial power with basically no domestic constituency. The wall divided Germany, but it didn't really divide Germans.
"The Táin bó Cúailnge records the first of many diplomatic crises concerning the Inter-Irish border."
The "Ireland" in inter-Irish can be interpreted as an island not a country, or vice versa, however one prefers.
Also IIRC there were another three imperial powers who were at least not too fussed about the inter-German border.
They had hardly any tanks nearby compared to the one that was.
I have this new, low-cost, defense concept called "Massive Retaliation". You'll love it.
There's a Dora the Explorer movie with Benicio del Toro voicing Swiper?
In keeping with the inter-German parallels, it is no doubt possible to blame the inter-Irish border on competing Stuart and Habsburg imperialism. The proof is left as an exercise for the reader.
Mr del Toro is very versatile. I'm sure it'll be fine. Whatever it is you're talking about.
The official name of the Republic of Ireland is, in fact, "Ireland". This obviously gives rise to all sorts of confusion, which was probably De Valera's intention. At the time the Republic made a territorial claim to the North, rather as the PRC does to Taiwan, which it no longer does, although the GFA retains the option of unification following plebiscites. Every Irish person I've ever met simply talks about "the border", and I don't see the problem with that in the context of Brexit; we're not likely to be referring to the Polish-Lithuanian border. However, the Continuity League of Empire Loyalists who write straight faced articles about how the whole issue could be resolved if Ireland rejoined the UK would affect to be offended, and at the moment they're keeping the government in power.
Ireland and Romania, as I think dsquared pointed out, two of the few countries where the short form of the name is identical to the long form. (Unlike "Britain/The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland" or "Germany/The Federal Republic of Germany", for example.)
Does Canada still have a long name?
Does Canada still have a long name?
Yes but it's kept secret to avoid hostile powers gaining a sorcerous advantage.
My schoolbooks in the 1950/60s told me that the Sunday Name for Canada was "The Dominion of Canada". However Wikipedia (which I consulted to find out what was the French for "Dominion" in this context) tells me that it has now joined the Ireland-Romania club as Canada.
The French for "Dominion" in this context turned out to be "Dominion".
The North Reach. (To become increasingly true over time.)
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This Flynn sentencing hearing sure is something.
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Mueller seems seriously to be getting to his endgame. Dogs in corners, etc.
I guess there's a law against plotting with another government to kidnap someone legally in the United States. That's good to know.
191: WTF! What's next? I go to jail for wiping my butt wrong?