Whereas the study of thyme would fall under horticulture

Yeah, it does. Pretty sure buttons were less common pre-industrialization, limited mostly to more elaborate, fancy clothes. By the time adding buttons was cheap enough for the bulk of the population, design principles were already established.

I interpreted it completely differently, when you “duck”, you crouch down

You have now, officially, crossed the line.

I wore a bandana pirate-style

But my hair was only shoulder length. I’d probably combine that with a bun.

It lessens it, but that’s because I’m tasting liberally while I cook.

That’s why Primer is my favorite depiction of time travel. Machine turns on at your destination time, you get in at your departure time, and it spits you out in the past. This sacrifices freedom of travel (you can’t go back to before you first turned the machine on) to solve the point-of-reference problem (the machine moves normally with the Earth).

I think typically a Rachel also substitutes coleslaw for sauerkraut.

Ironically, I’ve found that in many cases, frequently I find perfectly correct grammar to be more a hindrance to communication than a boon. In certain cases, grammatically wrong leads to fewer misunderstandings.

Who told you God is omnipotent and above humans? Who told you he or she has emotions, or smites or becomes upset or wrathful?

Any God worth naming as such is so beyond such concepts as to be entirely inscrutable. It’s people that ascribe such characteristics, usually to influence other people. In any case, it comes from an inclination to anthropomorphize the unknown, to rationalize non-human phenomena through a familiar human lens. The conflict isn’t in God, it’s in God’s self-appointed biographers.

Did you misinterpret Starship Troopers to be straight endorsement of militant fascism?

yes!

There’s your problem. Just because an author writes a book with a world building premise does not mean they fully endorse the world created. In Stranger in a Strange Land, which came out less than two years later, the main character creates a free love hippie movement. The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, a few years later, is about a revolution against authoritarian oppression.

If a person names as his three favorites of my books Stranger, Harsh Mistress, and Starship Troopers … then I believe that he has grokked what I meant. But if he likes one—but not the other two—I am certain that he has misunderstood me, he has picked out points—and misunderstood what he picked. If he picks 2 of 3, then there is hope, 1 of 3—no hope. All three books are on one subject: Freedom and Self-Responsibility.

Heinlein wrote thought experiments. He wrote about the relationship between people and the society they live in. To that end, he wrote about a number of different kinds of society, and how people related to them. Insofar as you could ascribe any particular political ideology to him based on his writings, he was broadly anti-authoritarian. Nothing remotely close to a Nazi.

Uh, curious where you got that from, especially since I don’t see how you can be both a Nazi and a libertarian. Did you misinterpret Starship Troopers to be straight endorsement of militant fascism?

You should read Job: A Comedy of Justice by Robert Heinlein. This is basically the main theme

“Magic” has many definitions. There’s fantasy magic, stage magic, Hollywood magic.

Magick has had a consistent definition of “the science and art of causing change to occur in conformity with will” for a century. The “mysticism” is a very potent system of exploiting the associative nature of the mind to focus one’s will, and train the subconscious.

I think of anarchy like a guiding ideal: flatten hierarchies.

You can’t eliminate hierarchies. If you eliminate “official” hierarchies, you lack measures to prevent individuals from exerting their will over other individuals by force, which is just another hierarchy. As long as one person can swing a club at another, you have a naturally emergent hierarchy. Once you’ve created a group of people to stop people from swinging clubs at other people, you’ve invented a hierarchy.

The anarchic ideal would be a system of organization to minimize the club-swinging. The proverbial sweet spot between preventing oppression without being oppressive. But it all ultimately comes down to club-swinging, you can’t have a purely anarchic system without enabling private power. The best you can do is aim for the flattest possible hierarchy.

I thought about this recently and it does make sense. You’ve gotta test the spring so you can use the right amount of force

Eh, the 80s and 90s were a marked shift towards usefulness. Gotta maximize shareholder value, dontcha know.

You and me both buddy, although “sprinkling” somewhat understates my general approach.

if it ain’t broke

Ironic choice of words

There’s just really not a very useful reason outside of “because we can”, so it hasn’t really been a priority. Still, that’s kinda the point of the Artemis program, so we’re getting there.