TheVat

English is my second language (I don't have a first one). And I can't quite figure out what the puzzle wants. Anagram, Sator Square, acrostic, what? Hint is....steps? chest? cheat?

Here at Penrose Tile Co. our goal is to cover the Earth's surface with aperiodic tilings, consisting of our two types of cement rhombi: kites and darts. Interviewee: When I saw your advert, I knew immediately that my deep hatred of biological groundcover, advocacy of universal paving, and love of aperiodic tesselation would be a perfect fit with PTC! How soon can I start?

I don't think so. Membrane doesn't affect flavor and will add a tiny bit of collagen (a good thing) to your coffee. On the road this week, so am slow to reply here. Many useful ideas, though I am not driving over walnuts for a week then working them over with a jackhammer and a sawzall or whatever the next steps were. Another money saver: make your rice go a little farther, and and add protein, with saved nail clippings.

Do the letters form a linen grid? I hope they aren't a result of redlining. 😀

Wood sticks filled with graphite. Very cheap, completely reliable, easy to erase mistakes, reduces plastic waste. Pens I only use for signing documents, or exterior labeling on a box where smudging could happen. Coffee bitter and acidity is also reduced by tossing a couple crumbled eggshells in the pot. Sweetens a mediocre blend. For tea, loose leaves allows you to get exactly the strength you want, and avoids ingestion of microparticles of polyester from a bag. Also cheaper because you aren't paying for the bagging process. Brewing should be brief, 4 minutes or so, because any longer and tannins build up, ruining flavor and irritating the gut.

Thanks, that was sort of how I was looking at it. It seems like this might work.

When I posted, I went to thread direct from activity list, assumed this was in the Lounge. Yes, a thread this frivolous should move there. I don't think poking fun at the vanity of politicians requires posting personal pics. Here are my balls, anyway:

Yes, I've noticed I have to not let my eyes linger on brain teaser posts shown on activity list. Not sure how that would be fixed. Maybe put SPOILER in large font, at top, which at least decreases chance of looking at the rest?

Not clear on definition of shape, e.g. any n-gon? Or literally any shape that's an enclosed space? Does it count as touching only on the perimeter, or must the shape not be around a point? Are fractals involved?

If one is pumping deep water up, why not use it for an OTEC system, producing reliable clean energy? Ocean thermal energy conversion (OTEC) is a process or technology for producing energy by harnessing the temperature differences (thermal gradients) between ocean surface waters and deep ocean waters. Energy from the sun heats the surface water of the ocean. In tropical regions, surface water can be much warmer than deep water. This temperature difference can be used to produce electricity... https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/hydropower/ocean-thermal-energy-conversion.php

Pointy headed Hilary Clinton tormentor, Trey Gowdy...

Turns out simpler than I at first thought. Good one.

Wondering if there are leagues with some sorting by weight and BMI, or similar. Some gender disparity between body size, bone density and mass, explosive (fast-twitch) muscle strength....seems like you would need some limits to prevent injuries. American football is already pretty hard on bodies and brains, even among the mutually brawny.

Wait, this is American style tackle football, with both men amd women on teams? That seems...problematic.

IIRC the town of Ukiah, CA has an annual haiku festival. Perhaps it's easy to guess why.

With green burial, conversion into soil, plants, animals that eat those plants, fungi, worms, soil nematodes, and (if your mortician was lazy and irresponsible) residues of mercury from dental amalgam leaching into the soil. Make sure you find a reputable and environmentally aware mortician, if you want a green burial, so that your fillings will be properly removed.

Har! Wonder if those old Up Pompeii shows have survived. Sounds like a series possibly influenced by Stephen Sondheim's sixties comedy, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. (which was also inspired by the farces of Plautus)

Seems like restoring a rainforest somewhere, or expanding a seagrass meadow, would fix more carbon than this approach, which sounds more like a recipe for giving marine mammals a case of the trots. MgOH is a laxative.

The spouse and I sometimes refer to AI as Artificial Idiocy. Note that the IBM "Watson" after defeating Ken Jennings and the other contestant on Jeopardy, was not able to participate in the chat at the end of the show. Or figure out that Toronto was not an American city, or that having a leg and missing a leg are not the same thing (a question about an Olympic athlete), or notice that another contestant had just given the wrong answer ("the 1920s") and amend its own answer accordingly. Bear in mind that Waton's entire purpose and design was to play Jeopardy.

So how did that work out for the planet's biosphere?

Hopefully this https://www.climatechangenews.com/2012/01/24/warming-oceans-face-co2-tipping-point/#:~:text=The world's oceans will absorb,cause surface temperatures to rise. will help underscore the necessity of focus on land emissions reduction. And fertilization proposals, like iron fertilization, are pretty controversial given the level of ecosystem tampering involved as well as dubious effectiveness and ROI.... https://www.nature.com/articles/545393a

Side note: when I murder someone and bury their body, it usually involves someone's excessive use of a subwoofer in a car stereo. Hopefully we're reaching the point where most audiophiles experience paranormal anxiety as they pass my house and they then turn down the bass. When considering my death, I always imagine it to be decades in the future. 😀 I have read somewhere that it is more common to die around one's birthday than would be by chance alone. No idea how that could be or even if it's factual. Maybe related to the rigors of celebrating?

My speculation is that absence of consciousness is what would magnify the threat of AGI. Without it we could have an AI more easily arrive at absurd solutions to problems or pursuing one goal to the exclusion of all others. It's what some AI theorists have called "the paperclip maximizer" problem. (Nick Bostrom, iirc) Having self aware consciousness might allow an AGI to question its own drives, especially if they were narrowly focused. Say that it wants to solve an exceedingly difficult math problem and decides to convert the whole earth into computational machinery to implement this.

Still needs evidence that this would absorb more than a miniscule fraction of CO2 emission. The overwhelming proportion of ocean absorption is just the gas dissolving in water. And waters are warming, which would decrease their capacity to hold dissolved gas. And pump sediment, which has mass and is heavier than water, so you would be doing some lifting, too.