This happened to my dad once when I was a kid, but obviously not with a cell phone but rather his keys. We learned a few things that day, one of which is that cast iron storm drain grates are even heavier than they look, but the other was that if you get your hands on a big prybar you get all Archimedes in its face and not have to lift the damn thing.

If you’re e.g. an average apartment dweller and haven’t got a 7’ prybar in your shed, I don’t know what to tell you.

As he told it, Paul hated Christians and then had a vision of Jesus who told him off about it, and then he had a big change of heart and invented (modern) Christianity.

Arguably they didn’t. The modern trappings of Christianity were invented out of the whole cloth from Paul of Tarsus, when he had a “vision” of Jesus conveniently not seen by anyone else purportedly while he was traveling on the road to Damascus. Notably, all of this went down some decades after big J’s death.

It was Paul who discarded the bulk of the Jewish stuff, either out of desire to make it more palatable to his Roman peers or, possibly, simply because he was a raving nut. Paul was a self-described persecutor of the existing Christians, so he would have been in a pretty good position to know what their beliefs were to use as a starting point.

College is not a test of intelligence. It’s a test of your parents’ finances, perhaps, and your ability to conform and play the game, and in some cases one’s willingness to cheat as well. In my experience very few people come out of college any smarter than they went in, and given the preponderance of people who seem to major in beer the opposite may in fact be true.

What worries me is not the number of people who manage to stumble through college and still some out the other side stupid. Based on my personal experience with my client base, what keeps me up at night is the sheer majority of people who apparently cannot read and possess no critical thinking skills whatsoever and probably shouldn’t be trusted to tie their own shoelaces, but some asshole still saw fit to issue these people drivers’ licenses, insurance policies, mortgages, and allow them to buy giant SUVs and guns.

Everyone played Quake with arrow keys at first because its controls were still archaic and mimicked Doom. Mouselook had to be enabled with the +mlook console command, and otherwise holding / would allow you to “mouse look” but only up and down, and only as long as you held it, and it would spring back when you let go and moved. Thus nobody was likely to figure out mouse aiming by accident just by messing with the mouse, or even by exploring the available in-game options.

Quake’s controls did not define the standard FPS layout going forward, rather the modifications people made to their setups for deathmatch did.

You could fiddle with the key bindings in OG Doom using the setup program, albeit not in game, which is the fate that may have befallen you. OG Doom’s default controls have the arrow keys for moving forward and backwards and turning, and you strafe by holding down Alt and using the arrows or via the undocumented at the time period and comma keys (or < and >, if you care to think of it that way).

It was pretty common for deathmatch nerds to make left and right or possibly A and D the strafe keys, and use the mouse for turning. Pushing the mouse fore and aft also moved you forwards and backwards which was nonsensical in hindsight, but vaguely understandable for a game that has no vertical aiming. A popular hack at the time was a mouse driver patch which essentially nullified your mouse forward and back movements to near-zero while leaving left and right intact, so mouse users wouldn’t be always be backpedaling off of ledges or mashing their faces into walls inadvertently.

Isn’t that because the arrow key layout on the Apple II/GS was, like many 8 bit home computers, famously awful and also batshit insane?

IBM had the lock on the inverted T layout for a long time, and others had to find creative ways to follow suit.

This is true in a certain nonspecialized sense but thanks to thermoclines, pynoclines, haloclines, and various other physical phenomena that basically amount to scientific voodoo, there are parts of the ocean don’t actually intermingle with each other despite being ostensibly physically connected. Thus the ocean naturally divides itself into various separated regions regardless of what we think about it.

I was obviously being deliberately facetious. Relax.

Even before then. They’re originally listed in Exodus. Fun fact, after the tablet smashing incident when Moses goes back up the mountain to get a new set carved in Exodus 32, several of those listed by god in the process of creating the replacements are different from the first ten. Depending on where you split the clauses, there are as many as 18 commandments between the first and the second sets.

Deuteronomy is a recap, including only the first ten, but also manages get the explanation for the sabbath wrong as compared to previous chapters. Then it goes on to claim “these are the ten commandments and god added no more” which as we just saw is an untruth.

Even in Ye Olde Testament Times, an effort was afoot to deliberately mutate the terms and conditions in order to suit the current authority.

*Asterisk.

^{I’vebeenwaitingmyentirelifetomakethissnidecomment.}

Teflon. Goddamned Teflon. Did your podcast mention Dr. Kenneth Berry? (No, not the nutrition quack. The other one.)

Dr. Roy J. Plunkett gets all the credit for the discovery of Teflon and it’s true that his name appears on the patent for the process for creating the actual material. As it was the dry powered precipitate wasn’t terribly useful as a consumer product and mostly only saw use being pressed into solid forms for making highly corrosion resistant gaskets and seals for e.g. nuclear equipment.

Dr. Kenneth Berry’s picture is not hanging in the hallways in DuPont’s offices. His name appears on no plaque. He’s not mentioned in the Wikipedia article about Teflon. When it comes to DuPont’s puff pieces and their official history, you’ll notice that in the gap between the accidental discovery of that weird slippery white powder and its advent as a consumer product there is inevitably some dismissive handwaving and use of the passive voice. Oh, “it was discovered that…” and “DuPont engineers determined that…”

They don’t mention that Dr. Kenneth Berry was the inventor of the solution form of Teflon. He figured out how to dissolve and suspend it in liquid, and by extension how to actually apply it to surfaces in a useful manner. He did not invent the pan, but he was instrumental in figuring out how it could be done. And it was Dr. Berry who ate the first fried egg cooked on a Teflon surface — not Marc Grégoire. It’s quite clear. Dr. Berry’s patent was applied for and granted in 1951. Grégoire’s, 1954.

DuPont doesn’t mention this because Dr. Berry also knew damn well what nasty chemicals DuPont was using to produce Teflon, and to some degree he knew where and how they were dumping them. He documented all of this he could, stored it in a bank deposit box, and wrote it into his will that these documents were to be released to the public when he died in 2008. In retaliation for this, DuPont memory holed him. He is persona non grata there, even in death.

I know this because he told me so. Dr. Berry lived in the town I grew up in. It’s not in whole thanks to him that we know the full story of the deeply evil things DuPont has done, but it is certainly in part. I was knee high to a grasshopper at the time so the significance of this was surely lost on me. I know, however, why my mother was so insistent that we never owned any Teflon pans.

Dr. Kenneth Berry: Lived, invented, developed a conscience, once shot my stuck kite out of a tree with his shotgun, tattled on DuPont, died.

Section 1. Subsection (h) of section 14-283 of the general statutes is repealed and the following is substituted in lieu thereof (Effective October 1, 2017):

(h) (1) Any person who [wilfully or] negligently obstructs or retards any (A) ambulance or vehicle operated by a member of an emergency medical service organization while answering any emergency call or taking a patient to a hospital; [, or any] (B) vehicle used by a fire department or any officer or member of a fire department while on the way to a fire, or while responding to an emergency call; [, or any] or (C ) vehicle used by the state police or any local police department, or any officer of the Division of State Police within the Department of Emergency Services and Public Protection or any local police department while on the way to an emergency call or in the pursuit of fleeing law violators, shall be fined not more than two hundred fifty dollars.

(2) Any person who wilfully obstructs or retards any (A) ambulance or vehicle operated by a member of an emergency medical service organization while answering any emergency call or taking a patient to a hospital; (B) vehicle used by a fire department or any officer or member of a fire department while on the way to a fire, or while responding to an emergency call; or (C ) vehicle used by the state police or any local police department, or any officer of the Division of State Police within the Department of Emergency Services and Public Protection or any local police department while on the way to an emergency call or in the pursuit of fleeing law violators, shall be guilty of a class D felony.

Sounds like this shitstain needs to see how their “anxiety” plays out in prison.

It’s easy: The input side is the high voltage socket, and the output side is an abyssal cable squid nightmare that sprays out into 128 individual male type C plugs, each on the end of about a 6" long pigtail. By the time you’re done plugging all of them in, your vehicle is charged.

Oh, there are vanishingly few hardware vendors I hate with a greater burning passion than Sony. Over the span of literal decades, Sony has consistently and systematically found so many ways to piss me off that I will never give them another red cent so long as I live. I will happily pay slightly more money for a slightly inferior version of whatever gadget from somebody else rather than deal with Sony’s bullshit.

The most succinct summation of this I’ve seen is a turn of phrase once again lifted from Daniel Rutter:

You are not your brain. You are something that your brain does.

Not until somebody shuts off the investor money faucet for AI. Then they’ll come crawling back — although inevitably not until after they go whining to all the world’s governments about wanting a bailout.

But hey, look at the bright side. We’ve already had the cryptocurrency mining boom and bust, and “AI” boom and soon to be bust. There’s still time for some idiot to invent the next tech scam fad which will conveniently require a shitload of hardware for no recognizably useful purpose.

I can confirm this to at least some degree. Part of my job involves marketing and this unfortunately requires at least some minimum peripheral contact with professional marketing people.

They’re idiots, at least on the creative side. They live in a bubble of their own making and are among the worst people on Earth for predicting how regular people think, interact with products or websites, or make decisions.

However, they also get piles and piles of cash shoveled in their direction by executive types who are also idiots, in the vain hope of an ROI that is legendarily fuzzy and also extremely easy to fudge. Thus, the machine churns on.