nemo

This computational model doesn't match the fossil record which suggests the flaw is in the model, not the evidence.

Stuffit was created in 1987 by Raymond Lau - compression was useful in the days of 800 KB / 1.44 MB floppies.

AOL as a company with the name "AOL" started in 1991, and they started as Quantum Computer in 1989.

Cell phones started in the 1970s, so they are older, but not AOL.

The purpose is to practice slowly with care to learn the moves thoroughly so that when it's time to perform them quickly you'll know the form and can flow quickly - the teacher was showing slow demonstrations.

I've never fought anyone, but as I've been taught the moves in Tai Chi's martial technique are generally intended to put people down quickly and hard by doing things like breaking elbows, eye gouges, and other grappling intended to severely injure the other party, essentially breaking every MMA rule that would get you disqualified.

This all varies significantly depending on the teacher, my teacher studied Chinese grappling, Mongolian wrestling, Aikido, and other arts that I'm sure he brought elements in from.

My Tai Chi teacher (Yang Family) is also an Aikido teacher and he teaches Tai Chi as a martial art, interpreting the form in terms of blocks, grappling moves, joint locks, etc. He learned at least some of that from earlier Tai Chi teachers who treated it as a cryptic martial art.

Pretty sure it was as much a part of planning the first episode as his later decision to have Anakin build C3PO. The early Star Wars scripts and materials are all over the map, there was no plan. This script just makes that all the more clear.

Anyone who's watched jumpers hunt a while can see they're really clever little spiders. Always love finding them outside, they're little muppet spiders.

* yes, roughly the same Latin, and only in N. Africa & the Western European provinces, not the eastern provinces

>why does it always have to be a religious object if an object doesn't have a clear and distinct purpose attached to it.

Worth looking at how the Romans themselves thought. They were incredibly superstitious, overbearingly and obsessively religious (this is Roman Catholicism's roots), they believed in magic and spirits, constantly consulted oracles, augury, and other signs to make important decisions, and key roles in the Roman government was run by people who were also priests, in the Republic and early Empire most civic functions were also religious, and after Caesar they regularly deified their leaders.

Given that this object was clearly precious to its owners (found in treasure hoards/graves), wasn't used as a tool where it would receive any wear, and no one discussed it at all, a cult object would make a great deal of sense. Perhaps Gallic Rome had a regional cult these are tied to. There's a massive number of other Roman ritual objects, magic tablet, amulets, curse tablets, and other religious ephemera, the Romans really loved their cults and rites, if you have an unknown Roman object that's conspicuously not spoken about like these things, that itself is a fair reason to suspect the object might be used in secret religious/cult rites.

In that case this isn't a tool, it's a decoration. And if none of them are worn, then the decoration isn't imitating a knitting tool, since some would show wear if that were its actual use.

I don't think they would, geographic frequency actually does make the knitting tool idea more compelling, though none of the dodecahedra show any sign of wear from use which makes the knitting tool hypothesis sound unlikely - if the dodecahedra was a tool it wasn't used frequently at all. I don't think any hypothesis is all that compelling, they are very much a mystery.

No, that's not right at all. Those areas were all part of the Roman empire and thoroughly Romanized as well. They used generally identical Roman technologies in Britain as North Africa or Italy, spoke the same Latin, used the same building styles, clothing styles varied primarily by how many layers they wore, they had the same legal system, and shared Roman arts and culture.

Man of those countries speak Germanic languages now since they were invaded by Germanic speaking people after the Western Roman Empire collapsed, but there's still Roman ruins and old Roman cities to be found in all of those countries.

Roman North Africa was thoroughly Romanized by the era these start showing up, and the eastern provinces were as well. The might be some cultural reason these show up where they do, seems likely, it's very, very dubious that this cultural reason had to do with metalworkers identifying themselves since the sort of Roman metal working technology and culture around it was actually very standardized across the empire at this time.

They were very sought after, but it was very common for folks to put their money in a sealed ceramic pot to protect and hide it, either buried under the floor of their home somewhere or outside in some secret spot. There were regular wars, plagues, invasions, and other civic chaos that left many of these hidden troves long buried until someone later found them. Ancient peoples buried a lot of metal artifacts for burials or rituals (the Celts buried a lot of weapons in their rites) that have been recovered as well. Lots of circumstances need to line up, but the ancient past had many very chaotic eras. With metal detectors large numbers of troves are being rediscovered.

Why none in Roman North Africa or all the other provinces in the east which were also "the middle of nowhere" with the same needs of metal work as Gallia/Britain.

Romans used oil lamps for lighting generally, they had dipped tallow candles but the only uses we've seen of them in the imperial era are ritual use at altars, and dip candle use was generally later than the period the dodecahedra come from. The use of tallow dip candles that look something like a modern candle for illumination was adopted later than these artifacts, and those candles weren't well quality controlled, you can find images of them from the 500s, there's no apparent standardization on size.

>Any metal we find after 2000 years is a miracle.

That's not really true. There's regular finds of hoards of thousands of ancient coins that are in excellent condition, esp. Roman coins. You'll find there's an actually quite a large number of ancient metal artifacts archaeologists have discovered if you look into it. Certainly the preservation rate is very low since people tend to guard metal objects and recycle them, but things happen, today archaeologists estimate there's something in the order of 10-30 millions of Roman coins that have been recovered in museum collections and held by private owners.

This depends on the metal, of course, iron preserves poorly as does bronze, so those are rare, but gold preserves extremely well, and silver better than bronze, esp. in drier conditions.

One thing to keep in mind is the geographic distribution of these things. They're mostly found in the province of Gallia and Britain, and not in other regions. There'd be a lot of metalworkers in Rome and the surrounding cities in central and south Italy, but no artifacts like this have been found, and they've found > 100 of them now so the distribution is probably significant.

It has no bearing on this issue which will be identical for either Chrome of FF (or Safari, or others). Private browsing has nothing to do with server side tracking, so there's no "obvious" reason to respond by switching a browser over this.

The US oil sanctions were in 1941. At that point war was inevitable, the sanctions were a response to Japan's military machine rolling across British Commonwealth territories in the Pacific. The US wasn't formally aligned but was strategically aligned with the British and Commonwealth nations and the sanctions were a response to Japanese military aggression. The sanctions didn't start anything, they were only an action in the middle of a larger conflict, and it's a funny way to frame them as starting a war when they were a non-military response to Japanese military attacks.

> The US started the war with economic sanctions.

Like Ukraine started a war with Russia by economic alignment with the western powers, or Poland starting a war with Germany in WW II for their offenses against German citizens.

> This is a historical fact.

It's very poor form to introduce a not only controversial opinion but a wholly subjective one, then claim that opinion to be a fact. It erases any credibility you might think you have.

There were a number of gladiator schools that trained gladiators for combat, there's interesting ruins of Ludus Magnus, the largest of them: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludus_Magnus

As a past manager (and getting ready to manage another team now), the last thing I'd want would be for anyone on my team to have to deal with being swamped by inane requests from another team and that's something I'd step in to help with even unasked. As an IC whose time has always been highly valuable my current manager and none of my past managers would ever have put up with a group of people from another team interrupting me and squandering my time like that and would have stepped in as well.

It's not "tattle to the boss", it's using a manager as a resource to help a team work together more effectively. That's part of what they're paid for. If it was one person, a 1::1 could make sense, but they're getting swamped by teammates interrupting their work, it's not their job to deal with that and delegating it to the person whose job it is makes a lot of sense.

Sure.

>I can think of many other companies and rich owners who have done much worse things

Me too. He's still a trash fire of a human being on a moral level. The businesses that he runs aren't anything that I see as valuable contributions to society, of them SpaceX, the least bad, is still a trash fire of malfeasance that's doing harm to ground based astronomy and also allows Musk to interfere in world politics, as he did when he defended Russia by blocking StarLink access to Ukraine's offensives.

>is your main evidence of him being awful is that advertiseres pulled out of the platform?

I picked a particular instance of his regular expressions of bigotry since it's clear by the ramifications just how serious it was, but it's only one of a number of past racist and antisemitic episodes, I could have gone with his work to platform the worst of the far right on Twitter, many racist incidents at Tesla, his various sex abuse cases, his infantile labeling of a cave diving hero as a "pedophile" (while Musk himself deliberately chose to reinstate a Twitter account banned for posting child porn), I could have gone with his vindictive firing of employees who criticize him at his various companies, or his promoting "pizzagate" and other far-right extremism, his regular deception of investors at Tesla, and any number of his many other moral failings. The guy is a narcissistic sociopath who has made a long string of ethically dubious choices from the start to make his money with PayPal. He's a complete moral failure and always has been, this is why he's as successful as he is - he is clearly very comfortable transgressing moral boundaries that normal people are not.

>Will you retract your hatred if they all return?

I don't hate Musk, I mostly pity him, he's an absolute garbage fire of moral failure and knows it, it must be horrible. He spends a lot of time excusing himself and no time making amends and I see a pathetic, lonely, unhappy person incapable of establishing any healthy relationships with others.

Can you understand why some might feel resentment towards a wealthy billionaire capriciously abusing his wealth and power to be a glaring, overt mortal failure? If you look at the absolutely pathetic figure he cuts as a moral agent in the universe and think he's doing well, your values far out of the mainstream and to the far extremes. This is illustrated by the pullout of advertisers then he began posting anitsemitic hate and doubled down on it. Once that happened, the advertisers that were left bailed out because they are rational agents who recognize that Musk's brand of extremism is unpopular and toxic to their brands.

He might be an ok engineer, and he's a talented enough business manager, and some of his businesses might serve some public good, but he's still a deeply flawed moral agent making moral choices very clearly driven by hatred, ignorance, and greed.

Also, whatever blaming Musk for his moral failings might be, it's not scapegoating. A scapegoat is by definition innocent. Musk is anything but that.

>We admire the Victorian era bridge still in use but forget all the bridges that long ago collapsed,

Engineers tend to put care into building bridges that don't collapse, and have been doing so for millenia so collapses can happen, but are rare. "All the bridges that long ago collapsed" is in my opinion not all that many bridges, really [1], and lots of people remember the Tacoma Narrows Bridge collapse. I still remember the bridge collapse from the Northridge quake too.

Bridges are a special case of civic architecture where long durability and long reliability are taken into account that are kind of a special class, so they're probably not a great thing to generalize from.

[1] You can judge for yourself from here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_bridge_failures

I have read Euclid in Greek (and Proclus' commentaries on Euclid) and I'm a big fan of math history in general. My formal studies were tied in part to Greek mathematical history and axiomatization though more related to Plato & Aristotle, earlier stuff than Euclid. The issue here is your value judgments themselves, positive or negative, about Rome of the Greeks are actually stupid. The content of your thoughts outside those could be fine, but it's clearly very shallow, and until there's sufficient content there, your judgments are pointless. Once you reach that point that you have read widely in the Greek and Roman authors and read widely about the domain from scholars who are domain-experts, then you'd recognize that value judgments are not the point, and drop both your fetishization and your bashing, those are both stupid, and you're being stupid loudly here, you should be embarrassed. Rome is what it is, it's worth understanding, but turning it into some kind of historical foil for your bloviations is simply mindless and you should work to grow out of that.

This is my final statement on these matters, I have no interest in "debate" or conversation with someone who has no idea about what they're discussing and clings to strong value judgments over reason.

As someone who has studied these things for a very long time, perhaps longer than you've been alive, I have tried to help, but it is tedious.

I did a Classics major and an MA, started on a PhD, and carried on studying since then for a few decades. I was a Hellenist in school, not a Latinist, and I share your admiration of the Greek's intellectual development, but your understanding of Rome is deeply ignorant. I saw younger students who fell for that ignorant view for a while, but they tended to outgrow it. Your view is an especially common one among the poorly educated, it's very immature which is just what makes it appealing, but it really is a foolish take to cling to, and does you more harm than help.

I would suggest that you try taking a more modern approach to history that focuses more on learning about the subject while trying to see things without biases. Your value judgments about the Romans and the Greeks are where things fall apart for you, and they're unnecessary since there's actually no benefit in making that class of value judgment. If you could free yourself from that kind of thinking, and work as much as possible with evidence based reasoning about the past, I think you'd fare better in this domain.