This is a comic illustrating how some scientists used their recognition not to build understanding but to hurt others.

https://thenib.com/when-good-scientists-go-bad

But as the comic points out and I agree: the problem is not that scientists have political opinions, but how those opinions are expressed, the type of company they keep, and the means they use to forward those views.

I do not believe that practicing a profession should encourage a vow of silence on any subject or matter important to them that might offend someone somewhere. Discussion should always be encouraged. Silence only emboldens those who would like for ignorance to be the law of the land.

The eternal prison is like ....  OMG!  which way is up!!!

...

Thank the Legendary for Mags leading me through it!  Gives a whole new meaning to 'follow the tank~!' IMO~~~!!!!

My brother has this idea of doing just that.  The whole nine yards, too.  Races, cultures, languages, geography, climates, maps, politics... even space stuff like ship designs, star maps, solar systems, technobabble, etc.

Do you guys think there's a market for this?

(Suggested power is like the thread title says...)

(Also, mostly unrelated: the animated segments of that video make me think that Bluth had a hand in it, though almost assuredly not.)

For the duration of this song (YouTube says 5:20), everyone around cannot help themselves: Sort of like a train wreck... that's on fire... and still exploding... but safely behind what you hope is bulletproof glass so you keep watching in sick fascination to the exclusion of all else...

Some of the lyrics:

I'm your freak of the week

I'm the new black
I'm opium to thee
Will do anything
For popularity

and


Spreading like the plague
Hole in one, touché
Seven million views
In a single day
Who's your daddy now?
Who's leading the way?


--sofaspud
--

I use firefox and for some reason, ever since it had the problem with the certificates, links no longer change colour when I've clicked on them. This occurs on multiple webpages.

Also, There are websites where You click a link to start a download process, which no longer works.

I messed around with quite a lot of security stuff while firefox was being hinky, but no amount of messing around with the colour settings or the cookie settings has fixed the problem.

Googling hasn't given me any useful answers.

Any suggestions?

{Edit - bleh. Turns out that putting "remember history" was the trick.}

I knew that Elizabeth Peters' last Amelia Peabody Emerson book, The Painted Queen, was being completed by another author after Peters' Author Existence Failure in 2013.  Until last week or so, however, I somehow missed learning that it was published in '17.  Yesterday, I finally had the opportunity to buy it.  I've barely begun reading it, so there are no spoilers here, except that everyone who's alive in the six books set after this one will survive.  (That's a joke, son; why aintcha laughin'?)  But....

I did want to mention that the pinch-author, Joan Hess, in her preface, talks about her long friendship with Barbara Mertz alias Elizabeth Peters including "a lengthy exchange of weird presents involving sheep...."  Wisely, perhaps, she left unspecified why the weird presents involved sheep.  Let the trees begin their grand mal seizures!

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Considering that one dictionary definition of "carry on" is to "behave or speak in a foolish, excited, or improper manner," the designers of that famous poster, "Keep Calm and Carry On," need to make up their flippin' minds!

Some of you may have seen Rob Kelk's sig and thought, who is that dude?  Well, for a time, Michael Ignatieff was the leader of the Liberal Party in Canada.  But mainly, he's been an academic.  Which leads us to his latest job, President of the Central European University.

Viktor Orbán’s War on Intellect

So the end result here is that the most prestigious university in Hungary is getting evicted from the entire country so that Orbán's self-proclaimed vision of illiberal democracy can be fulfilled.  Reminder: this is the same country that made it a felony for attorneys to represent illegal immigrants in court.

May as well start this in Politics...

I call this sort of thing "blue-sky thinking" because it's pretty close to having my head in the clouds, except that I've actually given some thought to it.

Why not split the USA? It isn't as if you've been "United" since the Clinton Presidency.

Yes, I know - you had a war about this over a century and a half ago. But that was when the Whigs were still a viable political party. Things change.

There's this recent suggestion, and this de facto one from when Obama was elected President. It's remarkable how similar they are.

In both cases, the "left coast" goes its own way (maybe keeping Hawaii) with a left-leaning government; New England, New York, New Jersey, Virginia, and all states that border the Great Lakes (and maybe Iowa and Minnesota) become another country living under the old "Yankee" stereotype which quickly adapts to modern reality; and there's a big stretch of conservatism between them in the middle of the continent.

If this is going to happen, I can't see Texas not becoming its own country. (They already have a flag.) Maybe Utah, too. And Alaska would have reason to become its own country as well. Heck, Minnesota might decide to go it alone. If Hawaii doesn't join the "left coast", they they'd probably be independent, too.

There's an outside chance that Maine might possibly maybe decide to join Canada... but even I think that's unlikely.

I'm not sure what would happen in New Mexico and Arizona. (Or, for that matter, in Alberta; they might decide to join that mid-continent conservative country.)

Sure, there'd be pockets of people in each new country who would have preferred to live in one of the other countries. There's historical precedent for that, and a matching historical solution.

So... am I coming up with an alternate history setting here, or a reasonable political suggestion?

I had a level 50+ Mastermind on red side before sunset and managed to set up keybinds to keep them all in check.  Now with Homecoming a thing I naturally rerolled a MM and had to go digging to find bind files but there is a how to guide on them here! Skip down to the text files section, yes, those few in a txt doc will do the trick.


I can answer a few questions about it (mainly because I had to bash at it with a hammer to get mine working) once in game type "/bindloadfile c:\coxmmbnd\covbindsRobot.txt" (c:\coxmmbnd being the path to where I put my txt files, covbindsrobot.txt being where the "load XYZ" portion comes in.)  To test whether you need to tweak the files just summon your bots hit numbpad 0 then 9, if you get the place here reticle then it's ready to go.

I'll be on for a bit this morning and probably later on this evening showing my Pop the ropes since he's coming up for three weeks and loves him some MMOs.  

I can be a bit cranky at times but ya'll are my peeps so don't hesitate to ask for anything.

Running a standard Posi 1 the other night with Uni, MD, and Spud.

We had a fairly balanced group. Spud was on a Rad Armor/Dark Melee Tank, MD on a Titan Weapons/WP Brute, Uni on an Cold/Ice Defender, and me on my new Beam Rifle/Pain Corruptor.

We did pretty well... until we got to Doc Buzzsaw

The rest of the TF had thus far been scaled to level 9 (presumably due to the adjusted minimum level? We outleveled that pretty quickly), until we got to her

We beat everyone else. She ate us alive. We came back with full inspiration bars of nothing but yellows because we could barely hit her like she was some Vahzilok freakshow Matrix escapee, and when we did, we did SINGLE DIGIT damage.

She ate us alive a second time, though we got her to 50%

The straw that got us to dump the TF was when we looked at her info.

We were exemped down to 9 by the TF (on default settings, mind. I enabled no challenges) for some reason.

Doc Buzzsaw was Level 16.

After that, we broke down and gave up, but I dunno WHAT bug caused that, given she was the only enemy in the entire TF that had that happen, even in the mission that spawned her.