The crazy thing is that the Dutch (or the people who lived in what is now the Low Countries) were winning that war pretty handily until like eight thousand years ago. Then they lost Doggerland to the sea.

Their descendants remember, though. The Dutch will rise again.

I sort of feel bad about raining on the parade of the person distilling isopropanol in his garage earlier, but it really is dangerous.

But most of us chemists also need to be reminded of it. To the point that someone had to write a paper whose entire point is “don’t distill isopropanol”.

No no no no no.

I’m a chemist. Organic chemistry PhD, now a process chemist in the industry. I do this for a living. Do not distill isopropanol that’s been exposed to air for any meaningful length of time.

Isopropanol slowly reacts with oxygen in the air to generate peroxides that, when you concentrate them down, EXPLODE. Source. Sorry, not an open access journal. But please take my word for it.

Unless you have a way of confirming the peroxide levels in your isopropanol are near zero, do not concentrate it down by distillation. You’ll blow up your glassware, which will probably expose what you’re distilling to your heat source, which will generate a secondary fireball.

PLEASE do not do this.

Billionaire evil is a sliding scale from normal rich guy evil to comic book villain evil. He’s less bad than his peers, even if the stuff he does (like the cost plus drugs thing) are maybe just for PR.

We eat him later than others. But we do eat him.

I bet she drinks prune juice

Admission: I stole it.

qntm’s cool science fiction stories are my favorite.

Worse: your sleeper ship arrives at what should be a pristine planet. But FTL capable ships beat you there. And they ruined the planet over a few thousand years. And now they’re sending out refugee ships of their own.

The small beings are being brought to the slender building of magic!

1. Hack together a proof of concept
2. Works well enough that management slaps a “done” sticker on it
3. Pile of hacks becomes load bearing
4. One or two dependencies change, the whole thing falls over
5. Set evenings and weekends on fire to fix it
6. Management brags about moving fast and breaking things, engineers quit and become cabbage farmers and woodworkers
7. New graduates are hired, GOTO 1

I cloned the original website (it’s just a bunch of JavaScript) once the NYT deal went through and still self-host it. I changed a bunch of the UI text, specifically removing all the references to “Wordle,” and I think it’s just me and my friends that use it. Still works!

No, don’t you see, in an impossible hypothetical situation, they assume you’d do something against your stated values. You’ve been pwned by a person of logic and intellect, I’m afraid. I’m sorry, but you agree with them now.

Libertarianism is a theory espoused to those with good intentions by people that have bad intentions.

It doesn’t work for almost anyone. But it super works for some. That’s the point.