Schulze is great, but good luck explaining how it works to my mother.

Schulze is good for elections at STEM organizations. For the general public, something like approval voting or STAR are better.

Yeah, there’s a pretty big difference between a lawn in Vermont or Ohio, and one in Nevada or southern California.

Grass really, really depends on location and climate. I literally never water or fertilize my lawn; it looks fine.

The worse thing here is ecological. I keep my mower set to 4", and keep my lawn a bit longer than my neighbors. I see a ton of fire flies in my yard in the summer, and see a fraction as many in my neighbors yard.

Short lawns are terrible habitat, which makes them good for sports or a children’s play area. But 80% of my neighbor’s lawn is just aesthetic, which is something I really don’t get. Lawns are about as visually exciting as a beige wall. They’re a waste of space.

Fair. I should have said that many legless lizards aren’t snakes.

Not in the right clade, basically.

They look similar, but aren’t directly related. It’s similar to why legless lizards aren’t snakes, and bats aren’t birds.

No?

Proportional representation is where parties get a number of seats proportional to the percent of votes they get.

Proportional voting methods are often nation-wide, although there’s also e.g. mixed member proportional and local 3-5 member districts elected via STV like they do in Ireland.

Dinosaurs are currently defined as anything that descends from the most recent common ancestor of triceratops and the pigeon.

Which, as others pointed out is mostly due to dinosaurs being originally defined before we found the first pterodactyl.

If you want to refer to dinosaurs and pterodactyls, you could use avemetatarsalians (anything more closely related to birds than crocs) or ornithodirans (dinosaurs + pterosauromorphs).

Also fun is that there’s a number of crocodillians that look suspiciously dinosaur- like, like Shuvosaurus. Convergent evolution is wild.

They particularly look like diffraction spikes/starbursts.

Astigmatism, cataracts, glaucoma or smudged glasses can cause you to see starbursts when you look at bright lights at night.

Depends on how the product is described and what the warranty covers.

Like, if these are sold as decorative art pieces, swinging them around probably voids the warranty.

The only problem is that the functional replica anime sword section is probably going to be entirely empty. They’re basically all decorative wall hangers.

They’ll differ in build quality, though. Some might break if you swing them hard, others might break if you hit something with them.

Yes.

In particular, you ask questions like “what type of steel is this made out of” and “what kind of tang does it have”.

Yeah. Power plants are nowhere near 90% efficient.

It’s worth emphasizing, though, that they’re still way, way more efficient than car engines are.

Also, regenerative breaking saves a lot of energy. Basically, instead of using the motor to increase the cars speed, you use it as a generator to recharge the battery.

Many of these swordlike objects aren’t made to be swung, and are liable to break if you try it.

Yes - like the guy on the home shopping network who cut himself up when the stainless steel “practice” katana he was trying to sell snapped in half and flew back at him.

There’s a reason people call these wall-hangers “sword-like objects”.

it’s not unreasonable to expect the cool prop to feel like it’s not trying to fly across the yard if you swing it around.

You might think that, but most of these are called wall hangers for a reason.

Many of them have rat-tail tangs or are made with stainless steel. They might feel balanced, but are liable to snap if you swing them around.

Emacs is a bunch older than common lisp.

One of its more idiosyncratic design decisions was using dynamic scope, rather than lexical scope. They did add in per-file lexical scope, though.

It also just doesn’t implement a lot of common lisp’s standard library.

Although it’s been used for a fairly wide array of algorithms for decades. Everything from alpha-beta tree search to k-nearest-neighbors to decision forests to neural nets are considered AI.

Edit: The paper is called

Avoiding fusion plasma tearing instability with deep reinforcement learning

Reinforcement learning and deep neural nets are buzzwordy these days, but neural nets have been an AI thing for decades and decades.

Emacs unfortunately uses Emacs lisp, not common lisp or scheme.

So everyone who retires transitions from the working class to the owner class?

I’m not sure it’s that useful to say that a 70 year old retired engineer is owner class because they’re living off of the stock market returns of their 401k.

One important thing to realize is that different dialects of English have slightly different grammars.

One place where different dialects differ is around negation. Some dialects, like Appalachian English or West Texas English, exhibit ‘negative concord’, where parts of a sentence must agree in negation. For example, “Nobody ain’t doin’ nothing’ wrong”.

One of the most important thing to understanding a sentence is to figure out the dialect of its speaker. You’ll also notice that with sentences with ambiguous terminology like “he ate biscuits” - were they cookies, or something that looked like a scone? Rules are always contextual, based on the variety of the language being spoken.