monotremata

(For math people: this can be modeled as a hypergeometric distribution with N=48, K=13, n=8, k=0.)

I suspect most people haven't heard these terms. But they should have studied basic combinatorics in high school, and that's all it really is. You had a pool of 48 people from whom to choose 8, but you happened to choose them from the specific pool of 35 not up for reelection. So the likelihood of that happening randomly is just 35 choose 8 / 48 choose 8, which is indeed 6.2%.

Let me know when they make the shift from "wanting themselves not to be feeling the pain" to "wanting different policies that protect everyone," I guess.

Same. Uggh. It was a bit like a fever, but so much worse. I was absolutely freezing and couldn't stop shaking and sweating, but I also couldn't really manage to distract myself with anything because my brain didn't work, so I just had to lay there and wait. There was also this overwhelming, crushing ringing sound and a feeling like old analog TV static, along with a splitting headache. Thankfully my family were around, of whom I was dimly aware, so I could tell that time was probably passing, and I could kind of gauge that I probably wasn't getting worse, or they'd take me to a hospital or something. That's about the limit of what I was aware of, though. It just felt like it went on a really long time. I suspect in reality it didn't last more than a few hours. I should ask; I'm sure one of them has a clearer memory of that aspect than I do.

Even if it was, why does it fucking matter?

Kind of a weird take in HistoryPhotos. This doesn't look like AI to me, but if it was, I would want to know that, and would think it didn't belong here.

I ran into this just yesterday. My dad's Windows 10 computer was reporting our printer as offline, even though it wasn't; it would queue print jobs, but never actually send them. It did this even though it had been printing normally less than half an hour beforehand. It's connected over Wi-Fi.

And I remembered having solved this problem once before, ages ago (I think like twelve years ago?), by digging through the old Microsoft forums and Google search results, and I had a dim recollection of what sort of thing the solution had been, but not the details. So I figured that, most likely, the fix had gotten undone, probably when I switched him to IoT LTSC edition so he could keep getting security updates. (Both my parents were basically unwilling to switch to 11.)

But when I pulled up search on a browser to see if I could reconstruct the solution I'd found all those years ago, instead I got all this SEO and AI slop. Page after page that claimed to have relevant information, and didn't. After about fifteen minutes I decided I was better off trying to dig through the settings myself and see if I could reconstruct it from my own memory, kind of like driving through an old neighborhood and seeing if I recognize any landmarks.

I did manage to fix it that way. There's some kind of dumb aspect to the way Windows gauges whether a printer is online that doesn't work if it's connected over wifi. The workaround is to go into the properties for the printer, tell it to change the settings (which brings up a very similar-looking but not actually the same panel), go to the "ports" tab, scroll down to the TCP/IP port with the address of the printer, choose "configure port" which brings up yet another dialog, and at the bottom of that check the box marked "SNMP enabled." SNMP is "Simple Network Management Protocol," and lets Windows check the status of the printer in a more sane manner. After doing this the printer reports itself as online and prints normally.

But yeah, I had to rely on my rotting meat storage because our global worldwide network of supercomputers now only serves up blather designed to look like it might hold solutions but not actually contain any of them, because it's more profitable to delude you into reading endless ad-filled pages of slop than to solve your problem and let you leave.

*cloture

And then there's the federal minimum wage for tipped workers, which is a paltry $2.13/hr. If the tips don't bring that up to at least match the normal minimum (the $7.25/hr figure) then employers are supposed to pay them more to make up the difference, but they basically never do. Tip theft is also super common, including with some of the online ordering apps.

Honestly the idea that parasites all share a single, simple method of reproduction is the silliest thing in this comic. There's a cordyceps fungus that not only has a stage in an ant, it then swells and reddens the abdomen of the ant, takes over the behavior of the ant and forces it to climb to the top of a stalk of grass, and has it wave in the air until a bird mistakes it for a berry and swoops down and eats it. At this point it has a whole other phase of its life cycle inside the bird until it finally releases its spores in the bird's droppings.

(I probably have a few of the details here not quite right, as it's not my field of expertise, but it's along these lines, including the behavior modification and the two separate host species.)

There are so many kinds of parasites, and they do so many crazy things.

I've seen the term "plutonomy" (like, an economy for plutocrats) to refer to this. At this point almost all economic activity involves the rich, because the rest of us don't have enough money to amount to much.

I'm a little thrown by "20% efficient" when paired with "allows 94% of solar energy to pass through." Are they saying it captures 20% of 6%, i.e., 1.2% of the incident solar energy? Or are they saying 20% is captured and 94% passes through for a total energy recovery of 114%? (This latter is not physically possible, but that doesn't mean it's not what they're saying.)

Basically I would rather they listed the power output of the solar system in Watts.

*Agnew