And then there’s the federal minimum wage for tipped workers, which is a paltry $2.13/hr. If the tips don’t bring that up to at least match the normal minimum (the $7.25/hr figure) then employers are supposed to pay them more to make up the difference, but they basically never do. Tip theft is also super common, including with some of the online ordering apps.

Honestly the idea that parasites all share a single, simple method of reproduction is the silliest thing in this comic. There’s a cordyceps fungus that not only has a stage in an ant, it then swells and reddens the abdomen of the ant, takes over the behavior of the ant and forces it to climb to the top of a stalk of grass, and has it wave in the air until a bird mistakes it for a berry and swoops down and eats it. At this point it has a whole other phase of its life cycle inside the bird until it finally releases its spores in the bird’s droppings.

(I probably have a few of the details here not quite right, as it’s not my field of expertise, but it’s along these lines, including the behavior modification and the two separate host species.)

There are so many kinds of parasites, and they do so many crazy things.

I think part of the joke was that a kickflip does not involve any change of direction for the skater.

Doing it on a weekday means it can be more disruptive to the status quo, but that also means more divisive. Doing it on the weekend means it’s easier for more people to participate and it can come across as more of a statement of unity.

I don’t think one is strictly better than the other. I do think this one will have an impact.

My cat’s name is Clark, which gradually sometimes became Clark-a-doodle, which became Doodle, which became Doodlebug, which became Bug and occasionally Buggle.

When I’m frustrated with him, it’s now sometimes Frettled Gruntbuggly.

Ritalin isn’t methamphetamine, but Desoxyn is, and that’s also used for ADHD.

🎶 The dream of the 90’s is alive in Linux🎶

Maybe punished for incitement, on the grounds that it was “directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action”? Tough to prove in court but as a bystander I’m frustratingly unsurprised the one thing followed the other.

Don’t forget that he paid for and directed a music video specifically to make fun of Kapoor. It’s called “Bean Boy.”

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=8XOQ6DbXXOo

It’s because, for the most part, it doesn’t actually have access to the text itself. Before the data gets to the “thinking” part of the network, the words and letters have been stripped out and replaced with vectors. The vectors capture a lot of aspects of the meaning of words, but not much of their actual text structure.

Yeah, drinking from the hose was a lot less problematic than just breathing the air, which was full of tetraethyl lead.

Introducing the new Amazon Ring Defender–the only doorbell with a live video feed and live ammunition! Don’t like what you see happening on your doorstep? Now you don’t have to be home to defend your castle!

Oh, I only minored in math, I’m no expert either! Yeah, your explanation was really fine, I just thought the “sum of a geometric series” thing might ring a bell for some readers.

Yeah, that’s basically how I remember it, though it’s not always stats–the terms are used in other fields of math as well. A first calculus class typically includes a proof that the limit of the sum of an infinite geometric series (a + ar + ar^2 + ar^3 + …) tends towards a/(1-r) where a is the first term and r is the ratio of successive terms, provided that -1 < r < 1. (Otherwise the series diverges and the limit isn’t defined.)

https://i.etsystatic.com/14338826/r/il/16c982/1826291573/il_794xN.1826291573_d5ep.jpg

Why would you think it’s only foreign agents who would use ICE as cover to disappear politicians they don’t like?

Yeah, I definitely read that as an effort to preempt the folks who were going to yell about how clearly this means the Flipper Zero should be illegal. Hacking has been so poorly represented in TV and films that there are a distressing number of people who don’t realize the term can even have a positive connotation.

Also the mathematicians wouldn’t decline to give an answer.

Are you sure? I only minored in math, but even I would struggle to provide an answer to this. It would have to be something incredibly vague, like “a number is a mathematical object that has certain consistent properties relevant to the field of study.” Because otherwise you get situations like “is infinity a number?” and you can’t answer categorically, because usually it’s not, but then you look at the transfinite numbers where you can indeed have omega-plus-one as a number. And someone asks if you can have an infinite number of digits to the left of the decimal place, and you say “well, not in the reals, but there are the P-adic numbers…” and folks ask if you can have an infinitely small number and you say “well, in the reals you can only have an arbitrarily small number, but in game theory there are the surreal numbers, where…”

So yeah, I’m not sure “what is a number” is even a math question. It’s more a philosophy question, or sometimes a cognitive science question (like Lakoff and Nuñez’s “Where Mathematics Comes From”).

I sincerely think that China’s massive government investment in solar panel production is the biggest thing our species has done about climate change. It’s the reason it’s now cheaper to build a new solar plant than to continue to operate an existing coal-powered plant. (Though we’re not doing that in the US, because we’ve bottlenecked grid connection requests, which is holding up a ton of new solar buildouts.)

I mean it’s not enough yet, but it’s made a huge dent in the problem. Economics actually favor shifting to renewables at this point. It’s just the entrenched interests working against it we have to overcome now.

https://genius.com/John-mulaney-the-comeback-kid-annotated