They might not have read Joyce but I can guarantee they were reading Steinbeck, Hemingway, Poe, Whitman, Dickinson, Twain, Vonnegut, Lee, Salinger, Frost.

All the novels and poetry in the American canon, the stuff high school students groan about having to read today, were once bestsellers in their day. You don’t get to be a bestseller back then by selling only to millionaires.

I think that has more to do with technology and the attention economy than anything else. Working class people used to read books a lot more than they do now. Then along came TV (aka the idiot box) to soak up those free hours. Now it’s all Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, Netflix.

Isn’t that how it was for the majority of history? Minus the AI crap anyway.

Still, the average person has incredible opportunity to see some of the very best art, as long as they live in or near a big city. Admission to most galleries or museums is not expensive at all.

Nonsense. My phone screen uses red, green, and blue to make up each pixel. The white pixels have their red component all the way at full brightness. Therefore there is a lot of red in the picture.

You could also see this by opening up the image and looking at the red channel which would not be completely black.

Did they test the soil and plant a control crop of corn only in nearby similar conditions?

When it comes to gardening I’ve heard countless stories of people trying some intervention and declaring “it works for me” without ever having tested the conditions or using a control. Those kinds of results can be safely ignored as unscientific.

Heck, one thing I’ve noticed with gardening is that even if you attempt to plant a bunch of crops under identical conditions (as best as you can manage) there’s so much variability that you get widely varying yields from one plant to another for completely unknown reasons.

Is there any evidence that living legumes make the nitrogen they fix available to other plants nearby? I thought they locked it up in root nodules and it only becomes bioavailable if you chop and drop the legumes so that the nodules break down and release nitrogen into the surrounding soil. Otherwise the legumes are just going to use the nitrogen for their own growth.

That’s a philosophical question, not a scientific one, since it’s by definition beyond the ability of science to answer. It suffers from the infinite regress problem which many people invoke God to solve (the uncaused cause) but that’s not very satisfying, is it?

I care less about realism than I do about having interesting decisions to make. I think it’s a really big challenge for game designers to make it fun and interesting for players — even highly skilled ones who love to strategize — without the game bogging down by having too many dice rolls/decisions to make.

No, in our current best-supported model of the universe (Lambda-CDM) the concept of “before” the Big Bang is meaningless. It is the apex of the spacetime “bell” from which everything emerged.

“Before” the Big Bang is nonsense. It’s equivalent to saying “head north from the North Pole.”

Definitely stronger than humans, pound for pound, but probably not as strong as gorillas!

You’d have to be really strong to hold a shield that large, with that much steel reinforcement, without strapping it to your arm.

How does one rotate a shield that’s strapped to your forearm?

YouTube! Search for reel mowers.

Even brand new they can be bad if they’re not properly made or adjusted at the factory. Think of a pair of scissors where the blades don’t make good contact. Couldn’t cut newspaper with that!

Seems pretty clear to me: they’re going after the Lego and Minecraft crowd. That is, little kids.

They’re terrible if they’re poorly maintained. A well maintained and sharpened one is very easy to mow with. The blades cut the grass like scissors!

Ahhh okay. Another approach to insect control (that doesn’t rely on trees) is a predatory bog. Loads of predatory plants as well as water with (insect / amphibian) predators of mosquitoes and flies.

Can be quite beautiful and special!

And before the petrol mower there was the mechanical reel mower. My grandfather had one of these beauties. They take a bit of extra care and maintenance (sharpening, cleaning, oiling) but they do a great job and are much easier to push around than you’d think! Super lightweight and much safer around kids and pets too. Plus they’re basically silent compared to those extremely loud engine varieties (petrol and electric)!

Do you have any trees back there? If so, the next step is to build bat boxes to attract bats to live there. They will eat those abundant insects and be very happy! Eventually it should become less annoying!

He probably made a lot more than that on the video. Plus he basically told the world it’s not worth it. Kind of a bad deal overall for the sellers. No wonder they didn’t want him filming inside the cafe!