It was a lot better than I expected it to be… but to be fair, that wasn’t a very high bar to clear.

Hopefully the muscle man is just muscle. Otherwise he risks injuring his knees by overstriding like that.

You’re giving transphobic bigots too much credit; no one reads a verse saying that eunuchs aren’t allowed in the temple and infers that it’s a sin to be trans.

They aren’t reading the Bible and then developing prejudices based on what it says; that’s not what’s happening here.

Instead, what they are doing is starting with the prejudices they already have and then fishing through the Bible trying to find anything that even remotely matches so they can twist it into a post-hoc justification.

In this specific case, that verse doesn’t justify their position in any way shape or form.

The only reason anyone would interpret that as condemnation of trans people is if they’re actively looking for excuses to condemn them.

First off, that verse is talking about eunuchs rather than trans people, which is actually a really important distinction.

Further, that verse doesn’t even say that being a eunuch is bad; it just says they’re not allowed to enter the temple. which, for what it’s worth, hasn’t even existed for thousands of years.

Moreover, it is immediately followed by a verse saying the same thing about anyone whose ancestors (up to 10 generations back) were illegitimate children.

So, you can’t interpret it as saying that it’s a sin to be trans unless you also interpret it as saying it’s a sin to have great-great-great grandparents who weren’t married.

You’re right that neither the Bible nor any other religious text is a legitimate reason to persecute people, but that’s not what’s going on here.

They aren’t motivated by what the Bible teaches, they’re motivated by bigotry and performing mental acrobatics to try to find anything in the Bible that they can somehow twist into an excuse for their bigotry.

I feel silly now for not realizing that was a stage name.

I straight up thought her actual name was “Whoopi”.

Yes and no… with a real (not digital) piano it actually does matter how you hit the keys. If you don’t press quickly enough the hammer won’t have enough momentum to actually strike the strings.

I believe this effect is more pronounced with a grand piano, but the same thing can happen with an upright piano too.

EDIT: It’s not as finicky as with other instruments, though, so your core point is still a good one… just with caveats.

Technically, “bail” is a word… it’s not the right word but it is a word.

Entering and escaping are two wildly different things.

It can enter, but not escape.

Absolutely. I don’t want to minimize the importance of the new discoveries in any way; I’m just saying this isn’t the great surprise the original post seems to think it is.

I took a physics course at a community college over 20 years ago and one of the things that stood out to me was the professor telling us not to overthink or assign too much romanticism to the idea of black holes.

His message was basically “it just means the escape velocity is greater than the speed of light… if you plug the size and mass of the universe into the escape velocity formula, the result you get back is greater than the speed of light, so our entire universe is a black hole.”

If this was being discussed at a community college decades ago then I think the new discoveries aren’t as revelatory as they would at first appear to the general public.

This is already the case in large parts of the world, and it changes almost nothing.

People mostly still dress the same regardless.

The reality is that people don’t need to be forced to wear clothes. That’s almost always their preference.

For example, public nudity is legal in Washington state, but other than at nude beaches or rare public events (such as the Fremont solstice parade), you never see anyone naked. Even toplessness is rare, even with men.

“Great” meaning “very large”, not “very good”.

Gatsby turned himself into a larger than life character.

That is what I think the title is trying to get at.

Yes and No.

Yes, everything increases in difficulty but the increases in difficulty are asymmetrical.

The difficulty of reversing a computation (e.g. reversing a hash or decrypting an encrypted message) grows much faster than just performing the computation (e.g. hashing a message or encrypting one).

That’s the basis for encryption to begin with.

It’s also why increasing the size of the problem (e.g. the size of the hash or the size of a private key) makes it harder to crack.

The threat posed by quantum computing is that it might be feasible to reverse much larger computations than it previously was. The caveat on that, however is that they have a hard limit of what problems they can solve based on the number of qbits they have.

So for example, let’s say you use RSA for encryption and someone builds a 1024 qbit quantum computer. All you have to do is increase your key size so that it would require 1025 qbits to crack, and then that quantum computer wouldn’t provide an attacker any benefit at all.

(Of course, they’d still be able to read your old messages, but that’s also a fundamental principle of cryptography; it only protects you for a period of time)

It’s just a matter of preference, not quality.

The problem is that you’re eating too many bears. You need more variety in your diet.

Your compost bin should be mostly green vegetables, followed by smaller amounts of fruits and grains. Keep the bears as just an occasional treat.

Also note that subsequent cooking doesn’t prevent food poisoning.

That will kill off the microorganisms that are the root cause, but it won’t remove the poison that they already produced.

It wasn’t being marketed and sold as a meme product. It was being marketed and sold as critical safety equipment.

On top of that, it was being sold during a pandemic when such equipment was being used continuously by large segments of the population.

It shouldn’t be surprising that large numbers of people bought it; the company selling it lied to those people to trick them into buying it.

The perfect material for Tesla’s new cyberboat

Adding on to this; I’d be very surprised if there was a locality within the U.S. that didn’t require every building to have carbon monoxide detectors, but again, voting doesn’t even have to occur within a building.

In short, no.

Voting in the U.S. is run by the individual states, and each one sets their own rules and policies.

The federal government does set some minimum rules that only apply to federal elections, but those rules don’t even require the use of voting booths: https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/CFR-2024-title11-vol1/pdf/CFR-2024-title11-vol1.pdf

No, that’s not a fetish.

People only call that a fetish because of ingrained racism.

They think interracial dating is somehow abnormal or unnatural, which is how they land on the term “fetish”.

I.E. someone is telling on themselves when they suggest that interracial dating is a fetish.