Profession can absolutely affect volume. Even without any hearing damage, any job that regularly requires that you project can become a habit.

I’m a chemistry professor at a community college, fairly well educated, and I flatter myself to say reasonably intelligent, but I still slip into what my wife calls my “teaching voice” in some social settings or even occasionally at home.

Me too. I was really wondering what sort of interview this was.

Not, you’re thinking of Deadshot. A deadlock is a Scottish body of water that has been polluted to the point that no life exists in the lake.

You’ll be hard pressed to find someone deny basic science in today’s world.

They didn’t outright deny it (out loud), but they cast doubt and equivocate about the parts that don’t agree with their preexisting worldview.

Jesuits have done some decent work for humanity, but they are not scientists, mostly because they start from a premise they want to be true and find evidence for it instead of the other way around.

Edit: in fact, why did knowledge need to be “curated” through the Dark Ages? I’ll give you a hint: it starts a “C” and ends with an “atholicism”

I can’t wait for the new album. Definitely a project that evolves with every album, so I’m excited to see where they go next

Depends. The cheap houses, yeah, there’s as fair bit of noise, but you can’t hear everything. From downstairs, you can hear when someone walks across the room above you, but not when they’re walking in other upstairs rooms. And from rooms on the same level, you can hear if someone is talking loudly in the room next door, but not enough to make out what they’re saying unless they’re yelling.

Well-built houses or buildings made for occupancy by multiple families usually have better sound insulation between the rooms/floors/units, so it’s not always an issue.

Edit: the plus side to that is I know all the noises my house makes at night, so as a light sleeper, I know when something is wrong in the middle of the night, and I only need one decent sound system for the whole house, which is great for listening to records while doing housework.

I’m all for science, but I don’t want to risk her coming back. The safest plan is to use fire and acid. I don’t know if it’s necessary, but fire and acid will finish off all manner of villains.

A clear example of Poe’s Law at work

Lordy, I hope there’s tapes

So much has happened in the 5 decades since the 2016 election…

If he wasn’t alone what would shooting him accomplish? You still haven’t actually presented a compelling reason he needed to be kept under a gun.

Once Bushnell was on fire and had stopped moving toward the gate/fence, you are correct, he didn’t need to be kept under a gun. However, if he had started to move in a threatening way or if he had been working with a larger group, having the guns drawn could have saved crucial seconds if someone else began to act in a threatening way. The security forces simply didn’t know what the fuck was happening, and in that situation, it is better to have the guns drawn and to be ready for the worst case scenario.

I think it’s understandable that people untrained for a situation like this would fall back on the default, I know I wouldn’t know what to do, but calling that “reasonable” as if it really makes sense in hindsight is a stretch.

That’s fair. I can get behind calling it “understandable” instead of “reasonable”

Considering the security forces had no idea whether he was working alone or what was happening, they obviously didn’t think they could rely on the metal fence.

Look, I’m all for a free Palestine and I agree that what is happening in Gaza is a genocide. I also think that voluntary membership in any American or Israeli law enforcement makes them complicit in the heinous acts perpetrated by American cops and the IDF, respectively. I don’t know you, but I’d guess that you and I agree a lot more than we disagree on these issues. I’m just saying, from the PoV of the security forces at the Israeli embassy, this was a potential threat to the embassy and their job is literally to prevent threats from harming the embassy. Without any further information to go on, their decision to draw guns first and get the extinguisher second is reasonable.

Stop him before he got any closer to the embassy. Obviously a gun won’t stop him from commiting suicide, but it could easily be the difference between one person dying and a much larger act of terrorism

Fair point, but I just meant that in general, chemical weapons are not in the same category as biological or nuclear warfare. But to your point about rocks in space, in the BattleTech (aka MechWarrior universe), orbital bombardment of any type is placed on the same level as nuclear warfare, which frankly makes a lot of sense.

I think the US even had a program that looked into the feasibility of using tungsten rods dropped (launched) from satellites (partly to get around the space weapons treaty) that would have been equivalent to dropping a nuke on a city without the nasty fallout or stigma.

I’m not familiar with the specifics of the space weapons treaty, but I do remember learning as a middle schooler that the three classifications of WMDs are nuclear, biological, and chemical, so maybe it’s no chemical weapons?

Then again, IMO, putting chemical weapons in the same category as nuclear and biological weapons is a bit like classifying rocks as the same level of danger as assault rifles and handguns, but that’s a separate issue

The idea that humans need the diverse micro ecology of earth in order to not become ill over the course of generations is pretty interesting.

Really pretty well-supported by current science, too. I teach chemistry at a community college, so maybe I’m an outlier, but I read a ton of current research about the importance of diversity in “gut biomes” and the damaging effects of monoculture on global ecology, etc.

It seems pretty clear that even if engineers could solve the physical and chemical issues with a generation ship, the limiting constraints are almost certainly going to be biological and ecological, and KS Robinson’s estimates for the upper limits seem pretty reasonable based on current knowledge

Someone what mentioned Kim Stanley Robinson’s Red Mars trilogy, and that is really good, but his book Aurora is almost exactly what you are describing.

Highly recommend.

Because not even his supporters and allies are going to remember him as anything

I’m going to have to disagree. If anything, I think Trump will be remembered as a useful idiot that McConnell and the Federalist Society used to pack the courts, most significantly the federal Supreme Court. Because of McConnell’s obstructionism and blatant hypocrisy, Republicans were able to confirm three young SC justices as well as hundreds of federal court judges at lower levels, effectively cementing conservative control of the judicial branch for decades.

That will be the legacy of Mitch McConnell, and we will suffer the effects of that gambit for long, long time to come.

I used to make a really good “graff” that was 1 gal of amber wort (made from DME for simplicity and a quick brew day) to 4 gal apple juice that always came out tasting like a back-sweetened British cider (edit: at 4.5-5.0% ABV without actually having extra sugar in it, so it could be bottle conditioned) and only needed a 1 week primary. You could definitely add apple pie spices to that base and get something special.

I miss that abomination. I need to start brewing again. Also, LMK if you want a recipe; I think I have an old BeerSmith recipe PDF in my Dropbox somewhere