I think a better quote would be

Many were increasingly of the opinion that they’d all made a big mistake coming down from the trees in the first place, and some said that even the trees had been a bad move and that no one should ever have left the oceans.

There weren’t any nuclear weapons on earth in 1930.

What? For my third once-in-a-lifetime economic crisis? There’s no way this isn’t going to suck. We’re all doomed no matter what.

I’m speaking of my experiences in the United States. Here, phone books tend to be separated into white pages and yellow pages. The white pages listed names, addresses and phone numbers of private lines, usually homes, and the yellow pages listed businesses. Taking out a listing in the yellow pages was the SEO of its day.

When the internet happened, the one thing that never really happened was a freely searchable database of the white pages. One thing the internet was never useful for as an upstanding citizen was looking up personal phone numbers.

One thing that never got digitized and put on the internet was the phone book. And for damn good reason.

Dating might temporarily relieve the first, but it won’t have any effect on the second.

What dating really does is waste time and money.

Just…don’t. Don’t date.

I picked up a thing that just now came out of early access, called The Farmer Has Been Replaced(). It’s a Python coding game, you’re given a grid-based farm and a drone that runs Python code you write for it to plant, water, harvest etc. crops. It’s a decent little coding exercise, not the worst way to learn Python.

The Klingon language is entirely artificial, it was created to bring an aggressive and war-like alien race to life. You’ll find people referring to it as “Space German.”

haiku aren’t that hard

It’s five, then seven, then five.

You’ll get used to it.

That is my understanding.

There’s a certain amount of advertising I’ll accept. If I go to see an action movie, 1 to 3 previews of other action movies that are coming out in the next few months is okay.

Of course, because they tried to force a Mission: Impossible movie down my throat, I might never go see an action movie made after 2014 ever again.

Yes it is. I’ve held the results in my hand, though the machines are not cheap.

I’ll take a stab at this.

The Scientific Method, as I was taught it from middle school to college:

1. Observe a phenomenon.
2. Raise a question about said phenomenon.
3. Research the topic in question.
4. Form a hypothesis as to the nature of the phenomenon.
5. design an experiment to test that hypothesis against a control.
6. Analyze the data yielded by experiment.
7. Repeat the experiment to verify it isn’t a fluke.
8. Publish all of the above in sufficient detail that other scientists may examine your work for flawed methodology and repeat your experiments to further verify it isn’t a fluke.
9. Conclude whether your hypothesis is or is not supported by experimental evidence.

THIS WORKS

What is being done all over the world right now:

1. Get hired by a multinational corporation traded on the Dow Jones.
2. Be assigned a fact to prove, probably about an existing product.
3. Research the topic in question.
4. Design an experiment that will support the fact you’re looking to prove.
5. Use a very small sample size.
6. Conclude something wishy-washy like “there’s a statistically significant correlation”.
7. Publish a densely written paper with a very convoluted title in some obscure sketchy journal somewhere.
8. Cite that paper in your own press releases with headlines that blow the conclusion way out of proportion.
9. No one ever follows up on any of this, the experiment is never really peer reviewed, or is reviewed by others engaged in similar nonsense, and the public only ever reads the headline.

A lot of folks recommending Mint Cinnamon. I agree, that’s a great choice, one of my favorites. If for some reason there are technical problems, you might also try something with KDE, like Kubuntu or Fedora KDE. Also windows-like, even more mainstream than Cinnamon, faster to adopt new shit like Wayland.

Cryptographic signatures are something we should have been normalizing for awhile now.

I remember during the LTT Linux challenge, at one point they were assigned the task “sign a PDF.” Linus interpreted this as PGP sign the document, which apparently Okular can do but he didn’t have any credentials set up. Luke used some online tool to photoshop an image of his handwriting into the document.

You see the same panic about 3D printed guns. It’s not that difficult to make a gun at home, but 3D printers makes it slightly more trivial.

Not quite how that worked out.

Yes, the Ottoman empire did either outright cut off the spice trade to mainland Europe or heavily tax it, which caused Portugal and Spain to seek sea routes to the Far East.

The Portuguese claimed the route around Africa as theirs. It was long, but not too long. The route was known, and you don’t have to sail far from the coast the entire way.

To say Columbus was “commissioned” was a bit much. Columbus went to great lengths to approach the Spanish crown to propose his “going to the East by sailing West” plan, which was based on some bad math. Like he read an Arab scholar’s work on the subject which gave the Earth’s circumference in Arabic miles, which he read as the shorter European miles, so he underestimated the size of the earth by about 1/3. The cartoon I was shown in elementary school depicted Columbus as the visionary who first thought the Earth was round, when it’s quite the opposite. It’s more like he was a crackpot small earther. But he did finally convince Isabella and Ferdinand to sponsor a voyage. Three ships departed Lisbon in 1492, sailed down the African coast to the Canaries and then did something monumentally stupid: They made a right turn and headed due West straight out to sea.

Columbus, if not his men, deserved to sail out to sea and starve to death eight time zones East of Japan, but in the most impactful stroke of dumb luck in human history right about where he predicted Southeast Asia and the Spice Islands to be, he found Central America and the Caribbean. Columbus ended up making 3 more trips to the Caribbean, he saw the shores of Mexico, the mouth of the Orinoco river, was shipwrecked on Jamaica. He went to his death believing he had visited Asia and did not believe he had discovered a New World. Credit for realizing “Look, we’ve sailed 400 miles down the coast, there’s no way this is Indonesia” goes to Amerigo Vespucci, and Ferdinand Magellan actually achieved reaching the Spice islands by sailing west from Europe, though most of his men including Magellan himself died in the process and what few men remained completed a circumnavigation because starving on the way back across the Pacific sounded less fun than possibly dealing with the Portuguese.

Yeah it needed to be “I’m happy that killing beavers en masse for profit…”

Yes, I have Ball’s Complete Book Of Home Preserving (which is a terrible title, as the book contains no information about dehydrating, freeze drying, jerking or brewing, only water bath and pressure canning). It has a procedure for “berry” jelly where it lists half a dozen different kinds of berries and how to extract juice from them, to include elderberry, and then you use a quantity of said “berry” juice in a standard jelly recipe. Independent of this, I’ve found a beautyberry jelly recipe that resembles this procedure, so I feel okay canning it, and have done so for years now. I’m going to stop short of recommending it to anyone else. By all means, if you’ve got access to beautyberries, make the jelly, but can it at your own risk.