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Cake day: June 16th, 2023

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  • It’s percentage of the entire population, if you organized everyone from lowest to highest IQ, what percentage of the entire population would you need to include for them to be in the top. It’s a little clearer when a point of interest is near the top. E.G. “person is in the top 1% of people in terms of wealth.”

    A less kind way to say it is ‘91% of people have a higher IQ than this person’.


  • I imagine if my occupation includes carrying a gun, interacting with citizens, and a historically high rate of extrajudicial deaths amongst people I am supposed to be protecting. A publicly accessible camera would be beneficial to easing the minds of those I interact with and providing evidence for any actual instances where I felt my life was threatened.





  • Linnaean taxonomy classifies apes and monkeys as two closely related groups. This is the classification system most people are taught in grade school.

    Cladistics is a style of classification that seeks to organize species and groups of species from when they branched off of other groups of species. In this style, everything is defined by novel features, but they are still members of the more ancient clade. Birds for instance, would be a novel clade emerging from Dinosaurs, and thus all birds are also dinosaurs, but not all dinosaurs are birds.

    Because there are two groups of monkeys with unique characteristics (new world and old world), and apes have unique adaptations not found in either group, we have no way of cladistically defining a monkey in a way that meaningfully does not also include apes.

    As a side note, this is where the phrase “there is no such thing as a fish” comes from. ‘Fish’ in the Linnaean sense are a huge and diverse category. Two random members of the fish class would likely be far, far more distantly related than a random mammal and a random reptile.










  • You don’t necessarily need to roleplay, but something like “I would like to play on their guilt by seeming hopeless.” or “I would like to bring up the horrible acts of the orc warlord to stoke their anger.” or “I would like to convince them to help by pointing out how their oaths may apply in this situation.” would really help sell the specifics. If you are just trying a flat check I have no real way to know what you are planning on doing other than just sort of charmingly asking “Please?”


  • The first few books (and really most of them that feature Rincewind) are not the best examples of his work in my opinion. Honestly the series evolves from cheap parody to suprisingly deep commentaries on life and society. Most of the books are standalone, so you don’t need to read all of them to get the best bits.

    Might I suggest ‘going postal’ or ‘making money’ as good examples of his later work that are particularly stand alone.



  • Little_mouse@lemmy.catoRisa@startrek.websiteGonna need a few rewrites
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    9 months ago

    I’ve always assumed that the Borg were once a truly egalitarian faction. One that seeks out other points of view in order to invite them into a collective where every voice has a share in the overall direction of the whole.

    I could see such a collective evolving into the current Star Trek Borg if things like fascism take root. A rabid xenophobia of thought that seeks to destroy any ‘wrong-think’ within the hive mind.

    It would explain a lot of the problems that the Borg seem to have. Why they never seem to learn from their mistakes despite their adaptability, why they all share one mind despite their quest for distinctiveness, why they have a single load-bearing queen despite their usual priority of hyper redundancy in all things.


  • Little_mouse@lemmy.catoRisa@startrek.websiteiPadd
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    9 months ago

    Honestly if I could just print up a new tablet instantly and without cost, I would have half a dozen around me when I am deep into a research fugue.

    Being able to quickly and easily flip between books or articles (or even different sections of the same book) while at the same time keeping the existing information up on a screen that I can directly reference is great.


  • “But, when I talk to people in general, most seem to not worry because they “have nothing to hide”, and most are only worried about their passwords, banking apps and not much else.”

    Sounds like they have passwords and banking apps to hide, You should demand their bank account and credit card details to verify that they have made no illicit actions.

    If they point out that they have no reason to trust you with that information, that’s when you point out that police, government, or corporate groups are made out of people just like yourself. They might have some codes of conduct, or a vetting process, but it just takes one person malicious or careless enough for you to be severely impacted.