About the PIN thing – I was confused too, because they never bother explaining to anyone. What actually happens is their system automatically e-mails you a new verification code (not a pin, if you ask me) while you’re on the phone, and you need to remember to check whichever e-mail account that is and continuously refresh until it comes up.

It doesn’t help that e-mail, like SMS text messaging, while being very fast is absolutely NOT an instant communication method. There can often be delays receiving a message with those technologies due to how they’re designed.

While this no doubt could have unforeseen legal consequences, I like the attitude of possibly recognizing the rich aboriginal history in at least parts of mother earth as a person as a means to practice good environmental stewardship.

Well, the [vehicle] has been towed outside the environment.

The provincial governments in charge of our single payor health care system made the conscious decision to keep the liquor marts open while banning in-person sales of tea kettles (and we call ourselves a commonwealth nation!) during a pandemic.

I think our single payor at least partially did this to themselves.

The headline said “could,” so I’m going to assume the headline is clickbait and the price hike will in fact make it cheaper, or dare I say, free.

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It’s street drug, otherwise known to chemists as 3,4-Methyl​​enedioxy​​methamphetamine. Some white trust fund billionaire got stoned and decided it would be funny to hear the media say a politician said something “on twitter,” so he decided to buy a website and name it that.

/s

Read between the lines in Amazon’s response.

They probably monitor the drivers for lip movements to see if they’re talking on the phone, but their monitoring can’t differentiate between singing or talking to one’s self and talking or singing to someone else, so everyone gets flagged. The drivers know the best way to avoid the ire of management is to simply not move their lips.

It may not be an outright prohibition, but it does have a chilling effect, which makes it as good as one.

[In my best nature documentarisn voice] Behold, what appears to be moving goalposts to the outside observer is actually a side-effect of the first-past-the-post system’s tendency towards two dominant parties.

Well, it’s not exactly in charge anymore.

And it’s not so much “made” as “funded”, and that was the one of the issues with Galileo. Galileo turned his anger towards the individual signing his cheques, when it was a layman who was rallying clergy against him. A good analogue would be the lay-led organization “The Catholic League” in the United States of America.

There’s so much that’s facinating about the Galileo affair, and that’s only the most recent thing I’ve learned: it was a secular opponent, Lodovico delle Colombe, who started adopting the appeal to authority fallacy by using religion as a defence against the theses behind Galileo’s studies.

If you mean humanity is filled with hypocrites, then definitely. I’m a hypocrite, too. Not that kind, but the “I want to raise my child to be at least not worse than I am” kind. Yes, the scandals are shameful. That’s why they’re called scandals, and it’s absolutely idiotic that the bishops (the administrative heads of particular churches) repeatedly thought covering things up was the right choice. Administrative ability should be a job requirement. Government transparency is a new thing, though, just in the past couple of generations, and business financial transparency more recently, so I imagine ecclestiastic administrative transparency will get will become an expectation in a few more. Give it 100 years or so, at least. Like I said: Slow.

As for the priceless artwork, would you rather the grubby little hands of the public and researchers have access to it, or keep it in a private collection? I suppose both have their pro’s and con’s.

There’s a subtle difference between backwards and slow. Slow moves forwards, but… slowly. It turns out “giving away the bride” was introduced by protestants, I’m guessing recognizing pagan practice at the time as a result of no longer treating matrimony as a sacrament.

Wow, even the Catholic Church is ahead of the game on this one.

This story is more uplifting:

https://theonion.com/worlds-youngest-person-born-1819568725/

I don’t think they’re suggesting taking it away from the rightful owner.

Emphasis on the ‘terribly’, then.

Squeezebox has been through several names through the years. It’s now called the “Lyrion Music Server.”

That’s probably true. Every drunk non-smoking russian I’ve met was just happy to make a new friend.

qt(333/106) and qt(355/113) are closer approximations anyway, with 4 and 6 decimal digits of precision, respectively.

There’s also 22/7, which is slightly more precise than 3.14 alone, but if you ask me, the first two nines which appear in pi lend themselves to a nice rhythm in English that are easily worked into a sing-sing mnemonic that keeps up until the “79” after the 12th decimal, when that falls apart. As a result, I’ve only memorized the first half of my rhyme:

3.14159

2653589

7932384

Sorry to say I don’t know more