There’s no chance that I would travel to Qatar or Russia, but living in Canada there’s a good chance I would have traveled to the US (I’ve probably gone there between 5 and 10 times in my life).

Now there is little chance that I will visit the US in the foreseeable future.

People are bastard-coated bastards with bastard filling.

• Dr. Kelso from Scrubs (original series)

As a Canadian, there is a small but nonzero chance that I would go to an event in the US, in normal times. These are not normal times, and I will not set foot in the country.

That is the difference between Qatar, Russia, and the US.

I’ve been a developer for 25 years, and I enjoy reading the Dolphin blog. It reminds me that there are people out there who are incredibly dedicated, brilliant, and happy to solve technical problems just for the joy of it.

The length they go to to recreate even hardware bugs fills me with awe.

Even though the blog is filled with highly technical discussion, it is written clearly and excessively. I absolutely recommend it.

You might want to look at something like Drupal as an alternative to WordPress. Drupal tends toward a lot more open source for its plugins (which they call modules). As a developer myself, I also find it better engineered than WordPress, although maybe that’s just because I used Drupal more.

I think they should be upfront with people that when they go to her concert, they’re not hearing her sing live, at least most of the time, and they are not hearing the band play live.

It should be obvious that no singer could do several 3-hour shows a week for more than a year, and not have it affect her voice.

Just check out the Wings of Pegasus YouTube channel, to see where two different concerts in different countries had exactly the same music (vocal and instrumental).

I know several people who spent thousands of dollars to see her in concert. I’m not going to go out of my way to ruin the memory for them. They got the experience they wanted. But I’m also not going to pretend that it was a musical experience.

Was that guy named Emmanuel Macron? He met his wife when he was 15 and she was 39. He was in a class with her daughter.

Soap (although of course some soaps are actually detergents in disguise) can’t necessarily replace shampoo. Soaps can react with hardness in the water and leave the residue on your hair. Detergents like shampoo do not react in that way. On the other hand, replacing your soap with a detergent like shampoo or body wash would be fine.

It would be a good idea to spell it correctly, then:

Atheist

I remember upgrading from a Commodore Vic-20, with 3.5 KB of RAM, to a Commodore 64 with 64 KB. I was already in university at the time.

Not to mention that the Germans themselves took a few years out, and then put a lot of the Nazi political machine back in charge.

Does anyone remember when Kurt Waldheim, UN Secretary General for 9 years and President of Austria for 6, turned out to be a former nazi? Whoops ie!

You mean RPN, right? Reverse Polish Notation.

Alternatively, they could go to one of the “penis temples” in Japan. I know that there is more than one, because a Google search turned up this one, and I have been to another in southern Osaka Prefecture.

The one that I went to was actually devoted to fertility and appeasing The souls of aborted/miscarried babies, but it had its fair share of penises as well.

I would recommend using Language Transfer.

It has courses for about 10 languages. All of them are sets of MP3 files, about 10 minutes each. You can download them from soundcloud, listen via YouTube, or install the simple but very effective app.

I think you would be shocked at how natural and effective this system is. I have been using it to learn Spanish as my fifth language, and it is easily the best language acquisition system I have ever used short of living in the target country. It explicitly avoids and discourages memorization.

It’s completely free, but the creator asks for donations to cover his expenses. Believe it or not, one man has created courses for French, Spanish, German, Italian, Greek, Turkish, Arabic, Swahili, and recently Japanese.

You might think that they have already forgotten the warm welcome that Vance received when he went to Greenland!

Chariot of the Gods, by Erich von Däniken, was actually published in 1968. The nonsense has been going on for quite a while.

There was a story recently about music companies being sued because it turns out their audiophile editions of vinyl records were typically pressed from digital sources (to save money, even though audiophile pressings were being sold for many times the price of regular ones), rather than through a fully analog chain.

A group of international sommeliers were unable to detect that the red wine they were tasting was actually white wine with food coloring in it. I think that the bar for genuinely assessing wines by taste is very low.

Some estimates place Putin’s wealth at hundreds of billions of dollars. There is no way he’s going to face any consequences.

The Pulitzer Prize-winning book The Soul of a New Machine, chronicling the development of Data General’s Eagle computer in the 1970s, one of the characters is a microcode developer, responsible for hardwired logic that runs the CPU.

Part of his job is managing electrical impulses that last for microseconds or nanoseconds. One day, the team comes in to find his workstation abandoned, with a note on the monitor saying that he is going to join a commune in Vermont, and never dealing with a unit of time smaller than a season again.

The tech may be ancient for us, but it’s a superb book.