The only time orcas see humans is when we’re flailing practically helplessly in the water—they’re probably trying to save us from extinction.

The Piper at the Gates of Dawn

Fish.

My apartment building turns 100 this year.

One of the crime scene cleanup photos shows a prominent pride flag in the window of the establishment, and the venue’s website says “Proudly Black-, Brown-, Queer-, and Women-owned.”

Could that have been the motivation for the attack?

There are three factors that might prevent you from using an online platform to share your opinion:

• The government might impose content restrictions on the platform

• The owners (or delegated moderators) of the platform might impose restrictions on its users

• The users of the platform might use its tools to police the opinions of other users.

“Freedom of speech” normally just applies to the first. Is that what you mean when you say you’re not “allowed” to speak freely?

the single largest federal law enforcement agency in the history of the nation

Are all those qualifiers even needed?

Are there any state or local agencies larger than the federal government’s? Are there any other countries with larger agencies? (China or India, maybe?)

Or can we just call it “the largest law enforcement agency in (western) history”?

Art is built on metaphor, which is an underlying connection between multiple meanings.

In semantic space, meanings are points while metaphors are vectors.

The brain generates a characteristic signal (from a sub-region of Broca’s area) when it detects grammatical errors—but it generates an identical signal when you’re listening to a grammatical sentence and need to re-parse it partway through. I think this latter case is actually the real purpose of the signal: every time it triggers, your brain is warning you that you need to stop and check the sentence again even if the meaning seems unambiguous. So the “pretending they can’t understand you” reaction could just be a reflexive response to that signal (i.e., the brain is telling them it’s confused even if there’s no logical reason it should be).

You could restrict it to cases where the victim and defendant belong to significantly different demographics, then.

You could expand that to a general principle for all criminal cases: select one judge that matches the demographics of the defendant as closely as possible, one that matches the victim, and one that differs to an equal degree from both.

He was originally jailed for life but at an appeal doctors told the court the rapes arose of sexual frustration arising out of his marriage to an “ambitious and demanding” wife. The sentence was reduced and he spent only about two years in jail.

Why are rapists seemingly the only category of offender judges always manage to find sympathy for?

They do say the rate of change was greater than the pre-COVID trend, but I don’t know if that means the level is now below where it would be if the pre-COVID trend had continued without interruption.

It’s interesting that the same stimulus (COVID) could cause crime to spike in the short term, then decline to below the original level.

I wonder if that could be a general pattern with societal trauma or social change in general—there’s an initial period of disruption, then a re-adaptation that creates an opportunity to resolve long-standing issues with the previous status quo.

It always seemed to me that the obvious conclusion to draw from the idea that some teens are under so much social pressure to align their mental and biological genders that they see suicide as the only alternative is that that aspect of society is in urgent need of fixing, not the bodies of the teens in question.

The “editor’s note” indicates that it’s not part of the original article—it would be misleading to insert it in the middle of the article if it wasn’t written by the attributed author.

It’s at the very end of the (desktop) article, immediately following the paragraph

“The path to unification might require fundamentally reconsidering the nature of physical reality itself,” he said. “This theory demonstrates how viewing time as three-dimensional can naturally resolve multiple physics puzzles through a single coherent mathematical framework.”

To its credit, the article does include a pretty thorough disclaimer:

Editor’s note (6/24/2025): While Kletetschka’s theory of three-dimensional time presents an intriguing new framework, its results have not yet been accepted by the broader scientific community. The theory is still in the early stages of scrutiny and has not been published in leading physics journals or independently verified through experiments or peer-reviewed replication. Publishing in Reports in Advances of Physical Sciences (World Scientific Publishing), while a legitimate step, is not sufficient for a theory making such bold claims. This journal is relatively low-impact and niche, and its peer review does not match the rigorous scrutiny applied by top-tier journals like Physical Review Letters or Nature Physics. For a paradigm-shifting idea to gain acceptance, it must withstand critical evaluation by the wider physics community, be published in highly regarded journals, and provide reproducible predictions that align with existing evidence—standards this work has not yet met.

The Time Cube guy was right all along!

My kingdom for the lord of all horses!