Professors don’t always teach in their actual area of expertise. I had a German language professor whose PhD was in Philosophy and activity published in that field, in English, German and French journals. It does seem like an odd combination, but probably not a lot of students signing up for a class in usability of buttons, even from the fields you would expect to study them .

The owner shut down his McDonald’s for the afternoon for this. Trump declined to wash his hands, dropped a batch of fries, and “served” a few “customers” through the drive through window. So yeah, basically a photo shoot.

Those scenes are just there to establish that he’s capable, intelligent and talented in the ways the agency needs, so it’s plausible they would recruit him. Never-mind that they also establish the way he looks at the world and approaches problems which is then forgotten immediately.

You’re thinking of Scandinavian regional delicacies and certain seasonal special dishes, none of which I’ve ever had the misfortune of smelling, and serving those to prisoners does sound pretty inhumane. All Scandinavian food outside of those that I’ve tried or heard of tasted or sounded delicious.

Yeah, a little of column A, a little from column B.

That is interesting. I imagined it more like an abstract physics problem than an actual scene. My ball was about 6 inches diameter, made of a nonspecific hard but not very dense material similar to, but not necessarily solid plastic, of no specific color. It was in the center of a table roughly 3 x 6 feet in surface at normal sitting table height, and was also of no specific color or material. The person was just the vague notion of a person applying a push slightly off from across the short axis of the table. The ball bounced slightly on the generic idea of a floor as it rolled away. My mind quickly supplied the additional details when requested, but not until then. (Yellow ball, wood table, etc). If I’d been asked in a way that didn’t feel like a physics problem, but instead asked me to imagine a scene, I would already have had many of those details in my mental view.

My sister works in real estate, and she was asked by a Realtor she works with what the law was on disclosure for a house the seller said was haunted. In most US states, it’s legally required to disclose any material fact about known issues with the property, though how it’s worded and what that includes varies from state to state. She had to look it up, and in North Carolina, haunted is not a required disclosure, though it is in some states. I joked that haunting should count as an “immaterial” fact.

She was laughing about the whole thing until she went by the house herself to make sure everything was ready for the photographer. She heard a noise in the basement and checked. There was an old black man dusting the shelves. She mentioned she wasn’t expecting anyone to be there. He was very polite and explained that he took care of the house, and not to worry, he’d stay out of the way. She went upstairs to let in the photographer. When she went back in the basement there was no sign of the man, even though the only way out was past her. She looked around the whole house for him before she locked up but he was gone. She asked the seller about it, who casually explained that that was just old Terrence, who had taken care of the property for her grandmother, and had died many years ago. Since then, he just sort of appeared around the house occasionally, “tidying up.” (I’m writing this from memory, so some details are probably wrong, especially the name, but it’s the gist of story as she told it.)

They did not mention any of this to the buyer, and don’t know if they ever experienced anything as they never contacted them about it.

WW2 started several years after America ended the Prohibition, and the ice cream barge was commissioned in its later years as the war in the Pacific dragged on. Still, I don’t think the navy was providing alcohol rations, so I imagine it was quite the party atmosphere when the ice cream barge showed up.

an ice cream barge

For those not familiar, the WW2 US Pacific fleet included, no joke, a barge originally built to deliver and mix massive amounts of concrete that was refitted with food grade surfaces and a huge cooling system to supply ice cream throughout the fleet. I mean, it was navy “ice cream” from powder, but it was still a luxury that boosted morale wherever it went. I can only imagine how much it would have hurt Japanese morale if they had found out the US had so much resources to spare that they could waste them on industrial quantities of frozen treats.

I had a housemate who fried sausage patties and eggs in my cast iron skillet every morning for a couple of years. Gave it a good wipe and that’s it. I’d cook other things in it sometimes and wash it up if needed. The seasoning on that thing developed into a deep black that was so smooth you see your reflection in it and you could fry an egg without oil and it came off clean with just a nudge from the spatula. It was beautiful.

We went our separate ways and it quickly degraded back to a more normal “good enough” level of seasoning. It was great, but I’m not frying up a fancy breakfast every morning for it.

Yes, hallucination is the now standard term for this, but it’s a complete misnomer. A hallucination is when something that does not actually exist is perceived as if it were real. LLMs do not perceive, and therefor can’t hallucinate. I know, the word is stuck now and fighting against it is like trying to bail out the tide, but it really annoys me and I refuse to use it. The phenomenon would better be described as a confabulation.

YES. YES! A square is a rombus is a parallelogram! You see it too! There are no parallels in this diagram, only lies and trickery!

Ties are worn around the base of the neck, and the neck is the flexible thin part that connects the head. I see position A as being well below the flex point, which would be like wearing the tie low on the shoulders. That’s why I would prefer it at the bottom end of the joint, position C. One could reasonably argue that anything above where the body narrows down towards the neck is part of the neck, in which case A would also make sense.

Semantics on where a neck starts aside, position B is clearly at the top of the neck and is therefore just nonsense not even worth considering.

Also position C lets the tie hang neatly down the front of the body as it should, rather than dragging the ground or dangling loosely in midair.

A square? A square?! Wake up sheeple! That things not even a rombus! Don’t you see the lies? Look at the lines! Look! Not all rhombuses are squares, but all squares are rhombuses! All squares are rhombuses and look at this thing they try to call a square. Where are the parallel lines? There’s got to be parallel lines, don’t you see, or then it’s not a rombus and all squares are rhombuses. Don’t forget that, don’t let them take that fact from you and perpetuate their geometric lies. Does no one even remember what a rombus is? This is, this is basic geometry here that you should have learned in middle school or elementary school, but then you just forget it, and let people trick you with these misleading definitions and fancy diagrams but you have to remember that a Square. Is. A. Rombus.

I’m imagining that his wife will never hear the end of it. “See honey, and you said I didn’t need to carry two guns around all the time. Well look who was right about that.”

Oh yes, I was cheekily agreeing with that. It’s always good to spread the information that the end result of a person who isn’t specifically trained in rescue swimming attempting to swim out and rescue a drowning person is almost always just the two drowning together, even if the would-be rescuer is an otherwise strong swimmer.

I realize that other comments have already explained the law better than I could. I still wanted to say that fortunately, jumping in to drown alongside them doesn’t legally count as “helping,” so there is no expectations for anyone to do so.

As an American that confusion is the entire reason I opened the article. Then I saw “Australia” and “Crown Prosecution Service” and stopped being confused.

He’s not upset that he’s being labeled as cisgender, he’s upset that the labels cisgender and transgender exist in the first place. He actually knows what the word means, that it’s not an insult, and that it accurately describes him. He’s acting insulted specifically to spread the idea that the word cisgender is an insult. He’s doing this to push back against our society normalizing the concepts of transgender and cisgender. If he was only upset about himself being called that, I would agree with you that we should just accept his odd preference and move one, but he’s actively working against anyone being called cisgender or transgender. That’s the problem and that’s why people are not being tolerant of his label preferences.

I would say it’s symbiotic to the continued survival and propegation of their genes, but not to their well-being as individuals.