peeters

Tolkien's Earendil was definitely a reference to the morning star, but outside his legendarium I don't know of anyone spelling it "dil" instead of "del". If it was supposed to be a non-Tolkien reference I would've expected them to spell it accordingly.

The fact that they're spelling this Earendil, not Earendel, makes me think this is a direct reference to Tolkien's work. It's pretty weird for dystopian industrial initiatives to be named after characters in a work whose most unambiguous message was that rampant industrialization was ruining the world.

This comment made a lot more sense to me once I realized we weren't talking about an aggressively marketed weight loss drug.

I don't think you're understanding what OP actually said. They didn't cite the Libya example as an example of bad behaviour; there wasn't any value statement on it at all. They were saying the fact that they intervened in Libya but not elsewhere was an example of the US intervening when it suits them.

I'm not an expert in US foreign policy so I'll refrain from entering the debate itself, I just think you're not arguing against what the OP is actually saying.

Yeah Taskmaster (which I adore) came to my mind too. I think it's more common when the food in question is an animal product, but still it just seems a bit contrived when behind the scenes the catering company is probably chucking tons of food the talent didn't feel like eating on a given day anyway.

It's entertainment, it has an environmental cost, sometimes a big cost. I don't think you need to signal that it's unacceptable for that cost to be paid solely for entertainment's sake. What's the difference between some food waste and burning fuel to drive a boulder out of town for a laugh.

Yeah I was going to say, the ACC is basically connected to Union already, you don't need some complex system of tunnels to get from one to the other.

The article itself has the title:

The FBI Seized Her $40,000 Without Explaining Why. She Fought Back Against That Practice—and Lost

I think it's decent, but still a bit ambiguous. Less ambiguous than if it just said "She Fought Back and Lost". My initial assumption formed by the title was still that she didn't get her money back.

Yeah and I think that's the core of the issue here. In a lot of hiring markets, the cost of letting in a bad hire is higher than the cost of filtering out a good hire.

Hmm I'll take your word for it that that's true, but I would say the examples are very different. Independence Day is a title/holiday retroactively created to commemorate the event (which apparently might not have even happened on July 4).

Whereas D-Day was something soldiers used to describe that specific day even before it happened. And you would hear things like "D-Day plus 23" to describe points in time, you wouldn't have to specify the year

So to me the Independence Day analogy is a little weak.

Passports please! British paratroopers met by French customs after D-Day airdrop

Err, D-Day anniversary airdrop. That headline has only one correct literal interpretation, and it's wrong (not ambiguous, wrong).

The moment that people ascribe properties such as "consciousness" or "ethics" or "values" or "morals" to these learnt mappings is where I tend to get lost. We are speaking about a big recurrence equation that produces a new word, and that stops producing words if we don't crank the shaft.

If that's the argument, then in my mind the more pertinent question is should you be anthropomorphizing humans, Larry Ellison or not.

Yeah that's a very bad idea.

Oops disregard this, by "has to be identical" I thought you were objecting to the non uniformity of the surface, not the incongruity of the sides' shapes, so that's where my comment was coming from.

The incongruity of the sides certainly makes it not a Platonic Solid, though the article doesn't actually assert that it is. It just uses some terrible phrasing that's bound to mislead. Their words with my clarification for how it could be parsed in a factually accurate way: "A tetrahedron is the simplest Platonic solid (when it's a regular tetrahedron). Mathematicians have now made one (a tetrahedron, not a Platonic solid)...".

It's a dumb phrasing, it's like saying "Tesla makes the world's fastest accelerating sports car. I bought one" and then revealing that the "one" refers to a Tesla Model 3, not the fastest accelerating sports car.

It's a meaningless distinction. A solid is defined by a 3D shape enclosed by a surface. It doesn't require uniform density. Just imagine that the sides of this surface are infinitesimally thin so as to be invisible and porous to air, and you've filled the definition. Don't like this answer, then just imagine the same thing but with an actual thin shell like mylar. It makes no difference.

In some ways it's a shame because I love the finesse game as a counterbalance to the focus on power that seemed to peak around the time Brad Jacob's crew was dominating the scene. I don't follow curling quite enough to know what the impact will be on the meta game though. More guards? Fewer? More takeout attempts? It's interesting because finesse and power both have critical roles in both scoring and defending so it's not obvious to me where the negative/positive impacts to the game will be.

Pulling an object "down" (ie towards the gravitational focus) doesn't lower the energy of its orbit, it just changes the eccentricity. To lower its orbit you have to slow it down.

I think we could solve that problem by removing Jupiter. If we drop it into the Sun, we can gain all of its orbital energy in the process.

How did you come up with dropping Jupiter into the sun being a net energy producing operation? You have to cancel out around 10^35 J of kinetic energy to drop it from its orbit, and that is real work. How do you get that 10^35 J back? (Ignoring that from your own math, that E35J is around 100,000 years of the sun's total energy output).

If I’m reading between the lines what you are saying is that ”Andor is actually intelligent and high quality art … sci-fi can’t be high quality art”? I’m exaggerating to make a point.

Nope not at all, for example I personally would put the Expanse firmly in the genre of sci-fi. The major themes it explores centre around its setting; it doesn't happen to exist in a futuristic space setting; the entire show would cease to function as a concept without it. Major plot lines exist specifically to explore the "what-ifs" of that fictional future. And honestly, while I acknowledge it's intelligent and extremely well loved by its fans, it's one that I'd have trouble recommending to people that aren't big into sci fi, for that reason.

But compare that to something like Firefly, where's it's basically a heist/western that happens to be set in outer space.

Not referring to that actually, I think that was actually a great bridge to Ep 4 that helps put the story in context for casual fans.

More the presence of the Force and Jedi lore. They were so close to not having that be part of Rogue One but were still forced to include the mystical super beings in some way. Andor was able to fully detach from that baggage, focusing on the little people doing their part. And when they did bring in the Force healer in the second season, it was exactly how you'd expect average people to respond to a mystical power that you didn't directly witness. Hope, faith, skepticism, denial, rejection.

As far as Vader goes...it does make you wonder if he's just toying with Obi-Wan when he meets him like 3 days later...

I guess like with all categorization, genres are reductive generalizations. And I'm saying the sci-fi generalization is much less descriptive of Andor than the political thriller generalization is. You could transplant Andor to WWII historical fiction and it would be less of a change than changing the mood and story to fit what most people's preconceived notions of sci-fi is.

I guess in short, I'm saying that you really don't have to be open to the sci fi genre to enjoy Andor.

you are at all open to sci-fi

That is to say, a sci-fi setting. Andor would not be correctly put in the sci-fi genre, rather in the political thriller genre.

They did a really good job tying Andor into Rogue One, but yeah Andor is just far better in terms of pacing, etc. And because they have to rush the plot in R1 (meet Jyn, she doesn't care about the rebellion, oops never mind now she's leading the rebellion) it ends up seeming much shallower emotionally. They also seemed to have to have a bit of fan service.

Rogue One was my favourite Star Wars production before Andor, now I wish they could throw it away and remake it as Andor Season 3. It deserves to be told in full.

It wasn't entirely prescient...the OG SARS virus in 2002 followed a similar path (with a much more terrifying fatality rate). But that game and the movie Contagion certainly felt a little on the nose once the pandemic hit.

Parks for a novel game design, gorgeous artwork and tactile pieces. Mid complexity.

Pandemic Legacy for one of the best experiences you'll have with the same group of friends over months (cooperative, play through once over 12-24 sittings). The game builds in complexity as you play so it starts reasonably simple (though the first season starts with the basic ruleset of Pandemic so if you've played that it's a head start but not necessary).

Kingdomino and Cascadia for quicker terrain building games, I consider these fairly similar though Kingdomino is quicker and simpler. These I can play with anyone.

Paperback if you already like word games like Scrabble etc, and want to dip into playing a deck building game.

The Crew if you like trick-taking card games, it's a co-op variant to games like Bridge or Euchre.

Carcassone is an oldie but goodie. Very social compared to many competitive games, as though it's turn based everyone wants to have their say for what you should do with your piece. Compared to e.g. Wingspan where you're largely ignoring/out of the loop for what's going on with everyone else all the time.

This doesn't seem to comment on preexisting titles if I'm reading it correctly?

Sadly, the movie really shows it's age when the "cultural attaché" starts lecturing Robert Redford's character that "our countries are friends now". It's hard to suspend disbelief watching it nowadays

But it's set in the past, when relations between the countries were much friendlier. Do you have trouble suspending disbelief during fictional movies set in WWII, because the U.S. and Germany are now allies?

One overbearing player can hijack the whole game

I tend to just not play with people like that. I find those same people are typically insufferable with competitive games too.

It's interesting to me, the shift I've had to co-op games over the years (both board and video games). With one group of friends, we play exclusively cooperative games, whereas another only wants to ever play competitive games. For me, co-op is just so much more relaxing. It's also far more social, whereas playing competitive games the socializing usually happens outside of the game itself. You can definitely be over-competitive in cooperative games too though.

I think they're saying that because it builds on the previous result having any one effort claim a record doesn't really make sense.

Like imagine there was a record for longest novel published, and what you did was take the previous longest novel and add the word "hello" to the end of it. Does the person who added "hello" get the record?

Is there a way to do non-scalar multiplication? E.g if I want to say "what is the sum of three dice rolls" (ignoring the fact that that's not a normal distro) I want to do 1~6 * 3 = 1~6 + 1~6 + 1~6 = 6~15. But instead it does 1~6 * 3 = 3~18. It makes it really difficult to do something like "how long will it take to complete 1000 tasks that each take 10-100 days?"