Back in the 70’s and 80’s there were “Travesty Generators”. You pushed some text into them and they developed linguistic rules based on probabilities determined by the text. Then you could have them generate brand new text randomly created by applying the linguistic rules developed from the source text.

Surprisingly, they would generate “brand new” words that weren’t in the original text, but were real words. And the output matched stylistically to the input text. So you put in Shakespeare and you got out something that sounded like Shakespeare. You get the idea.

I built one and tried running some TS Eliot through it, because stuff is, IMHO, close to gibberish to begin with. The results were disappointing. Basically because it couldn’t get any more gibberishy that the source.

I strongly suspect that the same would happen with Trump’s gibberish. There used to be a bunch of Travesty Generators online, and you could probably try one out to see.

Don’t say, “against their students”, say, “against their customers”. Which makes it sound even more ridiculous.

My question is how much “likely” translates to “voted”. It seems easy to respond, “Yes”, when asked on the phone, but requires a bit more enthusiasm to actually go stand in line and cast a vote.

Actually…yes. At least for the “war criminal”. I think the point is that you can’t hide your inner feelings from the feather. So if you genuinely, in the deepest depths of your heart, have no qualms about bombing civilians then you’re fine.

I think this points out the fundamental relativistic nature of morality and how the feather copes with it. Everyone has some sort of moral compass, and the feather measures how true you were to it. And really, what more can you ask of anyone? Decide, for yourself, what is right and what is wrong and stick to it.

Putting aside the fact that a toddler probably lacks the intellectual or emotional development to have a truely personal morality, I cannot imagine that someone who “broods” all their life over kicking a kitten when they were three is anything other than the nicest most moral person you’ll ever meet. I don’t think that have any trouble with Anubis and Thoth.

https://youtube.com/shorts/zC8eSSvnYXg?si=cqs53b_6ggLjU7NP

Also, the final note on the bass is a mistake, but they left it in.

I wonder how depressed Giorgio Tsoukalos’s dog is???

Agreed, but I don’t know the mindset of those people and how to think of them. Do we just take them out of the voter pool? Are they potentially swing?

My take on 2016 was that the Dems were deeply unenthusiastic about Hillary - and who can blame them - so they didn’t show up to vote. On the other hand the Reps were stoked about Trump so they turned up at the polls.

Swing voters? I don’t get it. I cannot see any rational person sitting in the middle comparing Trump and Harris and picking Trump as a better presidential option. Irrational people? My gut tells me they they are probably sitting and the far ends of either camp.

My guess is that the people closer to the middle aren’t actually swing voters, but they are far more likely to have their enthusiasm to vote influenced than the true believers.

The big question, in my opinion, is how much - or how little - the polls reflect the enthusiasm to go out and vote. My impression is that Dem enthusiasm in high right now, while not so much for the Reps. It’s possible that a 50/50 poll may hide the fact that a big chunk of one of the 50% is much less likely to actually vote.

I’m Canadian, so I see the news but I don’t have day to day experience with US voters. Of course, neither do the 90% of Americans that don’t live in those swing states.

Isn’t that true about all US elections? There are no “undecided” voters, just Dems and Reps and the result is always based on who can motivate their voters the most.

Anubis and Thoth weighing the heart of the dead to see if it is as light as a feather before letting them into the afterlife.

I love the idea that there’s no “do this, do that”, or a concrete set of rules or commandments. But the idea that if you can look back on your life, and if your heart isn’t weighed down with the burden of all of the things that you did that know we’re just wrong…then you can go on to the afterlife.

It’s just no much more of a reasonable, adult approach to morality.

Generally, with RPN you work from the inside out letting the results from operations inside the brackets sit on the stack until you need them. So the need for Order of Operations isn’t removed, but you don’t need special keys on the calculator for it. You do have to keep track of what’s where on the stack, but this becomes second nature after a while.

I think there might be a better way to deliver “ballistic missiles to Russia”.

The travel eSIMs are a bit different. My Orange plan covers Turkey and the UK, which I specifically wanted, and probably Switzerland as well. For my wife, I needed to get a “world” plan that covered Turkey, otherwise the Europe plan would have covered the UK.

But that’s an important point. The travel plans are NOT the same as regular plans in some ways.

I would have a couple years ago. In a flash. We replaced our phones a while back specifically to have eSIMs. It truth, considering the cost of Canadian roaming plans the phones have already paid for themselves.

Both of our old phones were single SIM, so using a local SIM would mean disconnecting our Canadian numbers which would put us out of touch with people back home. Which means that this card wouldn’t have work for us either.

I was at the point of looking at buying a portable WiFi hot-spot, when I found out about eSIMs. So we went that route.

I have an Orange eSIM with a France number that I have kept alive by reactivating it at least once every 6 months. It’s good for all Europe, without roaming charges, so that’s easy to do. Having the same number all the time is convenient, but more importantly I have gone through the hassle of providing passport info to Orange, which is a government requirement if you want a number for more than a couple of weeks. I think that’s an EU thing.

The local number is good for calling hotels and for making restaurant reservations. Just having that is a game changer.

For my wife’s we don’t need a number, so I just use Nomad for her data only eSIM, and get a new one each time. The cost is about $12-15, and you get whatever carrier you get, but the service has been good so far no I keep using Nomad.

We can text each other using WhatsApp, and you can even use WhatsApp for voice calls. The sound quality is acceptable.

We bought phones that support eSIM because we do a lot of travelling. Canadian mobile companies charge usurious rates for roaming: $15/day! Times two phones. I can get 2 weeks of data only for Europe for about $11 total on an eSIM. With voice it goes up to about $25. Total.

It has changed our lives when we travel.

Note that even if you start with an integrated wifi/router you can always by a stand-alone replacement for one function and continue to use the original unit for the other. For instance, I use my ISP supplied wifi router as a router and turn off its wifi, then use mesh wifi for whole house coverage.

I don’t think that they did.

It seems weird to have a figure from Greek mythology paddling between what looks like a Christian heaven and hell.

It’s just a modern version of “Fuzzy Logic”