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A trait being selected for doesn’t always mean it’s desirable to the individuals who have it.

With an average-sized spoon, every spoonful could be a different type of 6 bean soup—it’s like getting five thousand soups in one!

If any element of the Marvel universe respected the laws of physics, it would break the rest of the franchise.

if the death is actually only a means to an end and not the end itself

I would restrict the intended end to institutional change—it’s not an assassination if you kill someone for their parking space, but it is if you kill them for their school board vote.

Edit: I guess I’d also have to add killing someone purely for their notoriety.

Depends on whether you see the primary function of houses as housing people, or as providing their owners with a competitive return on investment.

We can’t do both at once.

They gave my younger sister a traditionally masculine name, so apparently they were already out of ideas on that score.

It’s a good name for a baby born with horns protruding from its head.

I don’t know if it’s what you had in mind, but MediaWiki (the software WP runs on) has “interwiki” features that let MW instances easily reference each other’s articles; and other MW plugins (like Wikibase and Sematic MediaWiki) have features that let MW instances share their underlying data.

If you’re arguing for a particular public policy, then it’s not necessarily hypocritical (which isn’t to say it’s good).
If you’re arguing for social change based on personal behavior, then you should lead by example.

I don’t have a thermostat, but I have indoor and outdoor temp and humidity sensors, and a window position sensor. HA notifies me (via lighting color) if I should open the window because the outdoor conditions are better than indoors, or vice versa.

Take all this with a big grain of salt—it’s based on the oddly naïve assumption that the police are trying to catch the actual instigators, and that they need real evidence to get convictions.

In my experience, the objective of the police is to create a particular public narrative (which they present to the media after the fact): the police acted with restraint, respecting the peoples’ right to assemble, until a handful of agitators turned destructive and the demonstration threatened to escalate into a major riot—at which point they swiftly intervened, caught enough of the agitators to prevent an escalation, and saved (most of) the city’s businesses from destruction.

Now, they do want to intimidate the crowd to keep things from escalating too far, but they also want to allow for some destruction to legitimize their tactics and to support the argument that the police force needs more officers. So they leave the actual instigators alone, because they’re useful to their narrative (up to a point) and because the police don’t want to engage with a group prepared to fight back. (What they really want to avoid is a large crowd seeing the example of multiple people physically resisting the riot police without being immediately subdued.)

Instead, they target:

• Journalists, street medics, and legal observers, to remove the demonstrators’ sense of institutional support and legitimacy;
• Anyone whose mugshots will alienate public support—the homeless, minorities, and anyone whose face is vaguely weird or scary;
• Anyone unable to resist a violent beating (like the disabled, elderly, and children) for pure shock value and crowd intimidation; and
• People who came dressed in black bloc fashion, but are clearly by themselves, passive, and not part of an organized group.

These last are the only ones they will try to prosecute, and often their black bloc attire plus the testimony of cops who claim they saw them engaged in destructive activity will be enough to get a conviction. In this case the anonymity of their dress backfires, because the cops can pin the actions of anyone with similar clothing and body type on them by claiming they saw the act first-hand and caught the suspect immediately afterward.

Meanwhile, the real instigators are convinced that they escaped due to the brilliance of their tactics and not because the cops had no interest in catching them.

That said, all this goes out the window when dealing with Trump’s federal agents: they’re working from different narratives with no pretense of protecting businesses, maintaining local support, or respecting anyone’s rights.

“Info tax”.

Civil disobedience can overlap with both direct action and protest. But that’s my point: we were only ever taught about the latter.

One misconception I had about civil disobedience from what I’d learned in school is that it’s a reliable means of drawing attention to your cause: your willingness to expose yourself to legal consequences will communicate to the public how critical you consider the issue to be.

What I learned from witnessing it first-hand is that officials and the media will invent their own narratives about your actions out of whole cloth, and the statement the public thinks you’re making may bear no relation to your intentions.

For over three billion years, all we know of the evolution of life is from the chemical signatures it left behind, and from the genetic information of the surviving descendants. From that we can conclude that all current life arose from a common origin roughly coinciding with the first chemical signatures of living activity, and the most parsimonious explanation is that life arose on earth only once. But it’s also plausible that some of that early chemical activity was produced by forms of life that arose independently, but were displaced by ours before the emergence of multicellular organisms.

fe·lic·i·ty | fəˈlɪsədi |
noun (plural felicities)

1. intense happiness.
2. the ability to find appropriate expression for one’s thoughts.

Ironically, the thing that most effectively poisons AI content is other AI content. (Basically, it amplifies the little idiosyncrasies that are indistinguishable from human content at low levels but become obvious when iterated.)

Just saw a YouTube documentary that reminded me of this comment—it describes how Galileo made his lenses by hand from window glass using an artillery ball as a grinder.

For one thing, the idea that there are “bad” genes stems from the outdated idea that there’s a one-to-one correspondence between genes and physical traits—but the reality is that most genes govern hundreds or thousands of traits, and most traits depend on similar numbers of genes. So bad traits usually result from the wrong combination of genes that are not bad in themselves—take sickle-cell anemia, which results from the wrong combination of genes that by themselves offer malaria resistance. (Most cases are far more convoluted than that.) If you remove the genes that cause the “bad” traits, you’re also removing the good traits they cause in other contexts.