Whether apple stems are perpendicular or parallel to the surface of the fruit.

If I make a typo, rather than autocorrecting or deleting a few characters I delete the whole word and re-type it from the beginning. That way the correct spelling gets into my muscle memory and I’m much less likely to make the typo again in the future.

The two that immediately come to mind are Clarence Darrow and Cicero.

The current version of Affinity is great and will continue to work forever—there’s no need to switch to an alternative if you’re already using it. I just don’t have much hope for its future development.

Just over a year ago.

The Affinity Suite is great, but I’m suspicious of its acquisition by Canva—I’m afraid their solution to “bringing the suite to Linux” will be turning it into a web service.

They’re NFPA 704 signs.

A steelman argument (the opposite of a strawman).

This Is How You Lose the Time War

My theory is that the inhabitants of K2-18b are deliberately flooding their atmosphere with dimethyl sulfide to make it unappealing to humans.

Before copyright, storytellers sharing and reusing characters, settings, and plots was the norm. It’s the way humans evolved to tell stories, over tens or hundreds of thousands of years. We instinctively want to hear stories about characters we know, and to see new twists on familiar tales (aka “shit getting weird”). It’s why franchises, fan fiction, and adaptations are so popular.

And copyrights were never intended to protect the work of artists—they were first introduced after the invention of the printing press to censor subversive works being written for a newly-literate public, and quickly evolved into a means of creating monopolies for commercial printers. Writers were eventually given a stake in order to create a new rationale for copyright laws after they were suspended due to public backlash—but that was a minimal concession by the real commercial beneficiaries, not the main purpose.

We thwarted two aerial attacks that the enemy was preparing to launch

That kind of sounds like they had inside intelligence—did the Defense Department accidentally add them to a planning thread?

I loved the way the different storylines and characters were tied together, some intricately and some just loosely, as well as the multiple perspectives, timelines, and storylines.

Try The Fifth Season by N. K. Jemisin.

(4) you pass, barely

That implies that 1, 2, and 3 are all failing (perhaps with different degrees of embarrassment). If all failure is equivalent in practice, you might as well maximize the non-failing outcomes and go with A.

Small phones, structuralism, and Mr. Rogers.

Don Mclean’s Vincent.

“West Martians”.

“This Land”.

No, not any more than someone telling you the plot of a book would count as reading it—that’s generally the extent of the original work’s content that survives the process of adaptation. (Possible exceptions are faithful adaptations of stage plays like Shakespeare or Euripides—in that case watching a subtitled production might be considered the equivalent of reading the script.)

Jumping off the ISS wouldn’t cause you to de-orbit—it would just put you in a slightly more elliptical orbit that would eventually intersect the ISS again.

And if you did get into an orbit that took you down into the atmosphere, no parachute would save you—parachutes are for slowing to a safe landing speed from terminal velocity, not from orbital velocity. You’d need to go through atmosphere too thin to fill a chute, but still fast enough to burn you up.