Accept that there’s going to be political diversity and social change (for better and worse) in spite of anything I might impose, and instead try to create an overarching framework to channel it into something other than violent conflict. One idea:

Let societies do whatever they want, but institute a “risk mitigation” tax (or other form of resource redistribution) based on size and similarity: if a social strategy is popular and widely adopted, it’s taxed at a marginally increasing rate until it reaches an equilibrium level; and the revenue is used to fund other, more experimental social strategies. This flips the historical dynamic on its head: instead of each society trying to forcibly convert the rest of the world to its own system, each society has an interest in discouraging others from following its example and trying something new instead.

I’d like to see them take variance (i.e., range of different sentence lengths) into account—my impression is that more-modern writing has a more dynamic mix of long and short sentences, which could skew the stats in an unintuitive way.

Consider two paragraphs that both have a total of 300 words:

• Paragraph A has three 100-word sentences.

• Paragraph B has two 140-word sentences and four 5-word sentences.

Paragraph B has half the average sentence length of paragraph A, but over 90% of the text of B is comprised of sentences that are significantly longer than any of the sentences of A.

That makes me think of the last episode of Severance, where two characters who have lost their memory of the external world are debating whether the equator is a continent or a continent-sized building.

Only if you distort them.

Progressing through the regular polyhedra from triangles to squares to pentagons to hexagons, pentagons are the only ones that don’t tile a plane. How do you figure they’re the best for buildings?

I claw my way out of a few feet of soil, and walk about thirty minutes to where the local Olhone maintained a ceremonial shellmound from 800 BCE until the arrival of the Spanish in the 1700s. By all accounts the Olhone were chill hunter-gatherers, so my best bet would probably be to befriend and join them.

They’d be more knowledgeable than me about everything in the local environment, so I don’t think I’d have much knowledge that would be of use to them. (They seem to have known of other nearby groups that practiced agriculture, but saw no need for it themselves.) I might eventually consider traveling north or south along the coast, but many other groups in western North America practiced warfare and/or slavery (unlike the Olhone), so I’d probably be best off staying put.

The current version of Affinity is great and will continue to work forever—there’s no need to switch to an alternative if you’re already using it. I just don’t have much hope for its future development.

Just over a year ago.

I guess technically, Raspbian.

The Affinity Suite is great, but I’m suspicious of its acquisition by Canva—I’m afraid their solution to “bringing the suite to Linux” will be turning it into a web service.

So “Tim Apple” is CEO of Apple, and Tim Pool is on the White House press pool.

Does Trump just believe in some kind of obligate nominative determinism? If I change my name to “Tim General”, can I sit on the National Security Council?

Killing flies eventually kills spiders by starvation.

The video is subtitled “Saxo-didge”.

If history is any guide, it’s about even odds.

If labor becomes worthless, money will be based on control of resources. Those with resources will sell to each other, and everyone else will have literally nothing to work with.

They may not have enough manpower to guard a more distributed site, especially if they’re afraid of internal groups seizing some of it.

Kirzhach is on the far side of Moscow from Ukraine. Did the drones fly over Moscow to reach it, or did they take a longer route?

It’s an emergent phenomenon—institutions will naturally behave in ways that increase their power, without that necessarily being the conscious intention of any given member.

The older the average pope, the shorter the average term, and the more papal elections in a given span of time.

One of the main powers of cardinals is electing the pope, so more papal elections means more power for the college of cardinals.

Looks like a Roman-style lozenge-shaped plate fibula.