Only if North and South Dakota merge into one state. DC statehood is perfectly fair to balance out two Dakotas

The real reason Texas A&M won't teach Plato. If the students ever found out I bet Plato's suggestion would go over big.

Each domino covers one black and one white square. When you remove opposite corners, you remove two squares of the same color, leaving the remaining squares unbalanced — there are different numbers of black and white squares. So the answer is no, it’s not possible.

This needs to happen in the Grand Budapest Hotel with the bellhop ferrying the messages

Dr. Smith of course

I would love to get into an argument with a flat earther by insisting that not only is the earth flat but it is sitting on the backs of four giant elephants riding on a giant turtle.

Not a very confident etymology. Seems like they're still in the pass-the-joint-here's-what-I-think stage of the research project.

Maybe that’s his name in dog letters

The main innovations responsible for humans’ success as a social species are gossip and in-laws.

Cover of the book “The Stupids Step Out”

It’s been tried

m.media-amazon.com/images/I/71C...

Apparently the term for this is rawdogging

I like your distinction between why and how functionalism. To me the key is to understand that they exist in parallel. Yes, emotions evolved for a reason, and yes, they have a real world job to do. You can’t understand wings just through evolution; you also need aerodynamics.

With proper marketing they could set up a roadside attraction and charge that much a head for getting a look at it

Same for me, but the blueberries are red and really big and called tomatoes

For example according to the relational model of quantum mechanics the fundamental unit of physical existence is interactions; particles are the abstract entities we posit in order to make intuitive sense of what’s going on. Elegantly explained by Carlo Rovelli in his book Helgoland

Oh there are idealists. Check out e.g. Bernardo Kastrup. Moreover the most serious, most deep thinking materialists have a concept of matter that’s very far from the idea of matter as stuff

Hyperion is I think the best sci fi novel of all time. RIP.

If your first name is Michael it’s a good idea to have a very unusual last name

His security detail should consist entirely of the starving orphans who were in line to get the USAID money. Only fair.

Middle powers need to respond to sovereignty claims by great powers with sovereignty claims of their own

I hate to fan the international flames, but has Minnesota considered applying to be Canada’s 11th province? It would solve some problems.

Kamchatka, like Greenland, is an important territory in Risk so I’m sure the Trumpian “brain” trust is on it

One interesting thing about classical music is that it’s all cover songs. Philharmonic orchestras are all like Beethoven tribute bands

Voldemort

LLMs will soon be choking on their own vomit. The next generation of LLMs will be training on content contaminated with AI slop so expect slopped up sloppy slop in the future

Minneapolis residents are painting tunnels onto brick walls and ICE agents are running into them. This is not funny.

Ideally a simple but foolproof way to tell if the vote totals have been altered

Seizing voting machines seems to be something in particular we should prepare for.

When you consider what is actually involved in invading Greenland you can see that the only way it could succeed is if Greenland and Europe preemptively surrender. If they put up resistance it's effectively impossible. Same with canceling the midterms -- if states resist, it's impossible.

The way Native Americans are treated in this country is one reason why Greenlanders will never agree to US ownership