In a very traditional Afghan restaurant I used to frequent, if you ordered something really spicy, they’d bring you these small mint drops afterwards to chew on, no extra charge. Worked very well for me.

Those who don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it.
Those who do learn from history are doomed to look on helplessly as everybody else repeats it.

This fantastic opening quote must have also been Marx’s weirdest flex.

Solé’s fantastic and extremely recommendable book “Phase Transitions” covers this as well. Quoting Janssen et al.: “even when the group is faced with negative results, members may not suggest abandoning an earlier course of action, since this might break the existing unanimity.”
“More generally, the underlying problem here is why complex societies might fail to adapt […]. Even if there is some social perception of risk, short-term thinking often prevails when facing long-term vulnerabilities. Such undesirable behavior is often favored by a combination of incomplete understanding of the problem, together with the misleading view that all changes are reversible.”

Surely that took a lot more practice than doing a cucumber. So I was told.

Needs more “amazing.” Seriously, screw these corporate ass monkeys.

During the times of Caesar, Belgica started just north of Paris.

Two for me.

Yeah, this one had me kind of excited. The atmospheres of Earth and Venus are, in fact, both quite aggressive, but Earth’s is very oxidative and somewhat acidic whereas for Venus, it’s the other way around. As a consequence, on Venus, stuff like carbohydrates would break down easily, especially in that kind of temperatures. As a consequence, life would have to be very different from Earth’s, and any search would have to account for that.
As for how phosphine could be created on Venus, maybe something like this: 4 H2O + 4 SO2 + H3PO4 → PH3 + 4 H2SO4, which is likely endothermic. So there would have to be a very specific advantage for a life form to bother creating it.

France has a land border with Brazil - in fact, it’s its longest border with any country. But I realize that non-contiguous countries pose quite a challenge for this type of layout.

It’s all perfectly logical to you, isn’t it?

When I first came here, this was all swamp. Everyone said I was daft to build a castle on a swamp, but I built in all the same, just to show them. It sank into the swamp. So I built a second one. That sank into the swamp. So I built a third. That burned down, fell over, then sank into the swamp.

I’m already chafed.

Then again, maybe there’ll be discounts for partial nudity.

I just watched that video of the white cabbage larva with the smaller larvae exiting its body. Jeez, it’s still alive after THAT? Life’s rich pageant, I guess.

he Beak Too Big For He Gotdamn Head

We have explosive

Ever seen DMSO solidify upon cooling? I wouldn’t even call it vitrification, it obviously has macroscopically large crystalline domains. It would be like putting rocks in your veins. I mean it kind of works fine for single cells because the failures* can be treated as a statistic, but anything on the scale of organs will become damaged just too badly.

* See e.g. what happens to frozen sperm cells: “chromatin disruption through protamine translocations, DNA fragmentation, and lesions to genes involved in fertilization capability and embryonic development […] are known consequences of the cryopreservation process.”