I guess I've been lucky. Although the majority of my extended family is poorly educated, lives in rural areas, and has a certain set of toxic political views, my close by family is well educated and lives in urban areas.

I haven't had to share a holiday meal with one of the toxic people in probably decades.

Suspiciously similar to a trick parents use on their children. "Do you want to eat the peas first or the carrots first?" Gives them the illusion that they made a choice about what to eat.

It looks like Larson had trouble figuring out the composition of this comic.

I'm guessing it went like this: He needed to put the sign somewhere that it could be read, so he put it up high. Then he put the door high so that the panel wouldn't have a lot of empty space. But then, he needed to add stairs to the door, and suddenly there wasn't enough room for all of the victims. So, they're hanging in this strange little space next to the stairs that probably wouldn't exist in real architecture.

If you can radically change your political views like Fetterman has, based solely on a personal experience and not logical argument, then you never had a rational basis for your new views.

Even if everything Fetterman said was true, it's still damning.

Also, he was elected based on the views he professed at the time of the election. Even if he personally changes, he still owes it to his constituents to act like the person who they thought they elected. It's like he doesn't even understand the most basic principles of representative democracy.

You need to make a choice to continue using Facebook

This reminds me of the movie War Games, when WOPR says, "The only winning strategy is not to play." The only correct choice to make here is to delete your Facebook account.

For all of you guys that aren't going to read the relatively long article, here's a TL;DR

The artist in question is Devon Rodriguez, who you will more likely recognize if I say he is "the painter who draws people on the subway, from TikTok."

He did a gallery, and this critic, Ben Davis, said that these types of subway portraits are nothing new. The portraits are good as far as realistic portraits go, but as an art critic, the portraits themselves are not very noteworthy. The videos of him making the portraits are what is noteworthy.

Devon Rodriguez didn't like the review and pointed his fans at it. His fans didn't actually read the review (nor did Devon). The fans really got stuck on the part where the critic said that you might not recognize the artist until he called him "the painter who draws people on the subway, from TikTok."

On Saturday morning, I woke up to a tidal wave of anger from Rodriguez on Instagram, tagging me across scores of posts. Hundreds of his followers went on the attack, swarming my Instagram: “loser,” “hater,” “pathetic,” “jealous,” “your a dick,” and on and on and on. There were many creative variations on “kill yourself.” Others said they were going to get me fired, or said things like, “we are going to start a cancellation campaign against you.” A large number thought that defending Rodriguez meant calling me bald, ugly, fat, or whatever they thought could get under my skin. Most didn’t seem to have actually read my article. A contingent went after my wife. “Some women will do anything for money,” one commented. That one was funny, actually.

Meanwhile, Devon makes public posts saying, of the critic, "love will always outshine being a hater, I hope I taught you that today."

The critic goes on to say that Devon Rodriguez's videos are obviously faked, and posts the most obvious example he could find, where another TikToker dances on the London Underground for 30 minutes while he makes a sketch of her that clearly seems to be from a photo not taken at the time. The whole thing has multiple camera angles, and then she acts surprised when he reveals that he drew her.

He ends talking a lot about how problematic parasocial relationships can be. These are where a lot of people feel like they "know" a famous person, but he clearly doesn't know them. And the celebrity ends up with a lot of people acting all wacky to defend him.

Also, any number whose digits sum to a multiple of 3 is divisible by 3. For 51, 5+1=6, and 6 is a multiple of 3, so 51 can be cleanly divided by 3.

When things go right, it's "I". When things go wrong, it's "We". These are Musk's situationally preferred pronouns.

They give a bit more context in this video. (from 2017)

By the way, I got that link from an article in The Guardian, and I can't find anything in either of those two articles that really adds on top of what was known in 2017. It could just be hard for a layperson to understand, and so was oversimplified?

TLDW is that researchers have known for decades that this tablet showed the Babylonians knew the Pythagorean Theorem for 1000 years before Pythagoras was born. So, that part isn't new.

They seem to be saying that what's new is that they understand each line of this tablet describes a different right triangle, and that due to the Babylonians counting in base 60, they can describe many more right triangles for a unit length than we can in base 10.

They feel like this can have many uses in things like surveying, computing, and in understanding trigonometry.

My take is that this was a very interesting discovery, but that they probably felt pressure to figure out a way to describe it as useful in the modern world. But we've known about the useful parts of this discovery for forever. Our clocks are all base 60. And our computers are binary, not base 10, just to start with.

We overvalue trying to make every advance in knowledge immediately useful. Knowledge can be good for its own sake.