bregma

It has been my experience as a long-time worker with youth groups that the recent trend for gen-alpha girls names is to bring back Victorian-era names (Blanche, Pearl, Gertrude, etc) and for boys new names have been coined indicating testosterone or aggression (Trucker, Hunter, Killer, Fleshrenderer -- okay, maybe I made that last one up). One year every boy in my youth group seemed to be named Jaxon or Finnigan though.

There's definitely a new gendered name dichotomy going on. We'll have to wait a few years before these trends start showing up in the census data though.

Knock three times on the ceiling if you want to find out.

Also all the Stevies in the same generation.

Their parents were probably fans of American writer Margaret Mitchell's most famous novel.

Same with the current king Charles III of England. He is the first of that name to be king of the UK (and Canada, Australia, etc). Maybe people should revert to multiple ordinals, like James VI and I in 1603.

Well, see, the problem for me is mostly that white bread is just unhealthy. If I eat white bread, my blood sugar spikes. If I eat while wheat bread, it doesn't. Given the difference in cost does not even appear as a rounding error in my food budget, and that white bread has long-term negative health effects for this diabetic, I'll go with the more nutritious choice over the marginally cheaper one and get almost all my protein from better sources than grain seeds.

Make no mistake: I dream of gorging on delicious chunks of white sourdough bread hot and steaming from the oven. I just have good and indisputable evidence from my test strips that it is not good for me.

Ah, so historically things were build with a lot of slop. It was just the traditional kind with sloppy design, sloppy construction, and sloppy maintenance.

There is a lesson here to be ignored in the name of short-term personal gain.

Funny, I was just there last week. Without getting to know locals all I saw was olive trees and almond trees and some grapes and oranges, many hectares of abandoned farms, and wonderful villages built on the seeming near-vertical sides of hills with small gardens with lots of cabbages (it was October, so that tends to be what's left). I'm sure lots was hidden from my passing eyes.

The roads were, well, challenging. We followed Google Maps directions to one destination, but it's not very good. It led us through a medieval town made of stone where the roads were just a centimetre or so wider than our tiny subcompact rental car and then up a steep hill from which we could actually see our destination on the other side of the village. After letting the scent of overheated clutch and burning transmission oil dissipate, we did a 3-point turn with a sheer drop on either side and no guardrails and then back through the village, hoping the breaks were good and holding our breaths passing between the houses. Locals just stared and pointed the right direction without saying a word (I guess we were not the first strangers to be misled by the Googs). Anyways the roads are harrowing but make for great stories.

Also, we found an old abandoned quinta for sale that we'd love to buy (even has paleolithic rock art on the property) but they're asking 3.5 million euros, which is about 3.5 million euros more than I have for such things.

So I'm not surprised if there are local agricultural treasures. Isn't that the part of Portugal where they speak the country's official second language Mirandese?

Does whole wheat bread made from the same grain not have the same protein, or does removing all that fiber, flavour, and micronutrients somehow enhance the protein content and render it less expensive?

Because fields of wheat that grew too fast and too tall and fell over after a rain and rotted in the wet field is called a "famine".

My lawn, like what I consider a 'typical' lawn, is grass. Grasses spread through rhizomes. Rhizomes are one of the things that define grasses. The rhizomes are what let the grass survive going dormant in the hot and dry summer, the frozen ground and deep snow cover in the winter, and the frequent fires every few decades for which the entire local ecosystem is heavily adapted. And yes, grasses will reproduce sexually as well if left uncut/ungrazed/unburnt.

You point was that lawns are not normal. My point is that lawns are completely normal, at least where I live.

Not just any Roman soldier, he portrayed Lucius Aelius Sejanus, who effectively created the Praetorian Guard. With a full head of curly hair.

Neaderthals are classified as Homo sapiens neanderthalensis, we are classified as Homo sapiens sapiens.

Of course, it depends on who you are reading. There are plenty of disagreements on taxonomy among the published academics and 19th-century literature is still influential, and pop-sci writers and their AI pets rarely do thorough research.

Just last week I was in the Coa valley in the iberian penninsula observing upper paleolithic rock art that could only be credited to Neanderthals (because there is zero evidence sapiens has migrated to Portugal 35,000 years ago; Spain was still covered in ice sheets and provided a physical barrier). Excavations had found stone tools and even a burial at nearby sites. Chances are really really good you wouldn't be able to pick out a Neanderthal if one were wearing modern dress walking down the street. Those academics who classify them as a separate species are merely propagating old imperialistic beliefs from the 19th century.

But where I live there are larges areas of native grass that evolved to being trimmed short by grazers, spreading eagerly through rhizomes as a survival trait because of frequent brush fires. It gets killed by leaves every spring and spreads back by the fall but after a burn the trees are gone and its one of the early succession pioneers. A maintained lawn is just holding a post-burn condition in stasis.

Simplistic answers really work best when things are complicated philosophical questions.

Is that really a problem? And if it is, it will resolve itself soon enough.

Neanderthals were fully human. They were the same species (Homo sapiens) as us. We could interbreed and produce viable offspring and we often has similar customs (burial of the dead, lithic art, tool manufacture and use). There was no coexistence with a quasi-human "race", there was just coexistence with different peoples.

English is still strongly gendered: the animate and inanimate genders are everywhere. The masculine/feminine subgenders are still present in pronouns of the animate gender.

If English were to truly evolve to be non-gendered, there would be no "he/him/them" or "she/her/them", only "it/that/those".

At least playing Factorio 18 hours a day would keep them out of our faces for the duration of their term in office.

This is an incredibly disingenuous and specious argument.

The discussion is about US wine production and consumption. You present the aggregate total vale of all US exports in US dollars to 6 significant digits. Does the variance of the volume of wine exports in litres even show up in those 6 signifcant digits?

Consider: (1) is six significant digits of precision justified, or is it insignificant accurancy? (2) Do those aggregate numbers take into account inflation? (3) Do those aggregate numbers take into account the (not insignificant) devaluation of the US dollar? (4) Do those aggregate numbers include both goods and services?

No, if you were to make an honest argument by quoting US exports, you need to limit it to the volume of US wine exports in litres. Misdirection can be a great tool of propaganda but is not a useful contribution to interesting intellectual discourse.

Listen, as long as control-alt-T opens a CLI window that I can fullscreen you can do whatever you want with that self-Gratification User Interface crap.

The only change to the CLI since I first learned it over 40 years ago is that it's gotten bigger and clearer and most desktops allow me to have multiple CLIs I can switch between.

A graphical user experience is all about how to limit what I can do in an effort to make it easier to learn. Imagine a hammer designed for ease of use by a beginning carpenter: remove the dangerous claw and nasty thumb-crushing head and replace the handle in case you hold it wrong and you end up with a nice oven mitt. The chattering classes on social media can coo over its colours and textures. Meanwhile actual carpenters smirk, hitch up their trousers (or, often, not) and switch on their nail gun.

So go ahead and build your bike shed with a box a nails and a pair of taupe quilted cotton hammers with a pattern of garden vegetables stamped on the back.

Then you stack the courts with bent judges. I mean, what's the point of taking all that money if it doesn't get you what you want?

Do you really think he'll bother running for a third term when all he needs to do is declare the election results invalid and stay in office?

A bolt of broadcloth is far less titillating than the thought of touching someone's smalls.

In other words you could say constraint is the progenitor of creativity.

Is there a named meat option?

Sure, ultraviolet photoreceptors are cool. You know what would be cooler? What if birds, and their dinosaur ancestors, had evolved infrared phototransmitters that can lase? The world would be a different place. Imagine how upon hearing the distinctive call of the Red-Eyed Vireo animals and people would scramble for cover lest they become its next charred meal. On the other hand, self-roasting chickens would be a godsend for the industry.

Thank goodness birds are not real or this might have been a thing.

So does social media. Keep scrolling man, just one more hit.

Without fish and brewis Newfoundland is just... a big rock.

I don't think it is difficult to accept that fundamentals should be taught.

We spend years learning basic arithmetic like the addition of integers. You could very well argue that there is no need for that either because everyone has a calculator app on their phone. This is how dark ages begin.

They made programming so simple any idiot could do it. So they do.