@carleolson I had to read that 3 or 4 times to truly grasp the "Oregon-ness" of it 😄

@TheBlackHorse65 Yeah, well the counterpart is that I don't want to have to pay attention to Canadian politics, and I don't want to annex them, but we may have to if they keep cozying up to China.

RT @HumbleFlow: October 7, 1571—Islamic conquest seemed unstoppable. A massive Ottoman fleet sailed to crush Christian Europe. No one had…

RT @HumbleFlow: In 732 AD, a Muslim army swept into France. Nothing had stopped them before. Kingdoms had fallen. Cities had burned. Then…

@Pudnite @AsteroidWatch I mean, it's big enough to be bad news. But it's not "dinosaur-extinction-level" bad. If it gets close, we absolutely need to divert it.

@AsteroidWatch (Above post is obviously tongue in cheek, the asteroid isn't that big.)

I think you are probably correct. A focus on the verbal and textual abstract probably leads to a greater ability to manipulate within those fields. As for having a photographic memory, it can be a curse as well as a gift. There are quite a few things I wish I didn't have video recordings of imprinted in my mind.

By the way, @EveKeneinan , I'm not trying to sound like I'm bragging. I'm pretty bad with formal logic as an example, and with some of the posts you've made, I've been unable to follow them. But my ability to literally save pictures and create them in my mind has been such a fundamental basis of a lot of my mental experience it's very hard for me too imagine what it's like to have a mental life without them. Obviously it's very possible, But it's like discovering some of the people around you can't see the color red but can see ultra-violet.

@EveKeneinan You can't see images in your mind? Man, that's almost as freaky to me as those people who can't hear words in their mind, or read text in their mind.

I mean, as a Christian, I really am obligated to care to at least some extent about every human. But if I could at least remove some country's ability to affect us in any way, say by teleporting them to Earth 2, I probably would go with pretty much every country in the Middle East and northern Africa, all the way through Afghanistan, with the possible exception of Egypt and Jordan. It's not that those countries are more evil than all other countries, but I think they've been the most consistently annoying.

RT @JDVance: Here’s my view: I obviously disagree with some of Elez’s posts, but I don’t think stupid social media activity should ruin…

RT @JDVance: I cannot overstate how much I loathe this emotional blackmail pretending to be concern. My kids, god willing, will be risk ta…

While it's true that many important discoveries have been made with the aid of governmental grants, there is a problem with using this to justify governmental grants to science in general. The first is that we're notably not talking about all of the grants that didn't pay out. Funding science is an investment, and if we're funding a thousand studies with only a few breakthroughs here and there, we're not investing wisely. Where is the incentive structure for the government to make good choices about what we study? Second, where are the returns on our investment? Is the government making any money on Ozempic after funding the study of Gila Monster venom? This isn't to say that all governmental science is bad. The Apollo program, and the space program in general have been immensely beneficial to our nation. But they also had very clear and very definite goals and criteria by which they could be judged. You either can get astronauts up into space and to the moon or you can't. Your rockets either blow up or they don't. If the government is going to fund the science and do science it needs to be very clear what they are trying to get and be incentivized for success.

@BrianNiemeier The problem with all too many fields from science to cultural critique is that people will see a model designed to describe the world, and arrogate to it the power of a rule that controls the world.

@EveKeneinan Yeah, but I think we'd have to import a few million enterprising Chinese for that to work.

RT @GreeneMan6: It’s important to understand that “racism” is a manipulative linguistic frame. “Racism” is not some hard but consistent mor…

RT @GreeneMan6: Live in an hour:

@theSPSFC You know, I've read rather a lot of science fiction and I've never heard of you guys before in my life.