IheartIheartTesla

Yeah I'd hardly call the economy 'booming'. The metrics they use for those are typically rate of GDP growth and unemployment rate, for example. But once you start correlating the economy to people's feelings, you cant draw a straight line between rate of GDP growth and the latter. People are more likely to respond to inflation, cost of consumer goods, gas prices etc... which are part of economic indicators for sure, but all indicators are not equal in people's minds.

The etymology for the name 'India' comes from the Indus river, also called the Sindh river (actually the reverse, Indus is a bastardization of Sindh by outsiders). However, people living near the Sindh were called Sindhus (or finally, as Hindus). So for the Hindutva obsessed BJP, they should have no problem with the name India as the name of their beloved religion arises from the same root. Bharat itself is just the name of a dude the descendants of whom form a tribe that maybe were the OGs of India, but thats in my mind debatable. At any rate, the Constitution has placed both names on equal footing, so all this is performative garbage anyway.

You probably already know this, but Mercury's parents were Indian (from Gujrat), and his birth name was Farookh Balsara. Not only that, but Zoroastrian/Parsi Indians, which means their ancestors migrated from what is now considered Iran. Mostly to escape religious persecution, and they probably found acceptance for their heretic beliefs in middle-ages India. So you could consider him truly to be a citizen of the world, while on the surface having British nationality.

To be fair, curcumin is legitimately studied for various therapeutic stuff (primarily anti-cancer efficacy from memory). But of course, that's highly targeted towards a specific kind of disease from one component of it. For the rest, yeah its probably the 'essential oil' of Indian spices.

It is my understanding that straight women write, and consume, about 90% of 'Greek-loving' fiction

#NotAllDoctors PS- I am also a doctor. A doctor of philosophy, though, which per its original Greek meaning is a 'love of wisdom. In other words, a love doctor. How can you say we dont make good marriage material?

LD season 4 drops September 7. Believe its a 2-fer, so thats fun. I'd enjoy as much as Star Trek as we can, as who knows when some of these shows will return.

A question then to ask, maybe too obvious a question, is why didnt he mention any of this in his campaign ads? Might easily have convinced 13000 people in Georgia to vote for him if he prevented their nice suburban homes for being torched.

Yes to all of that. Although as I get older, I feel like asking "Why are you running experiments in the lab for 100 hours a week? This just means you didnt design them right in the first place" The other aspect to grad school is being among very smart people, some possibly smarter than you. This can lead to feelings of imposter syndrome etc., as well as bouts of depression as you question yourself. The only healthy way forward is not to compare yourself to others. Unfortunately much of academia operates precisely on being compared to others (most recommendation letters usually end with "I consider X to be as good as Y but perhaps not better than Z")

Just to bring this back to politics, but still keep the food theme, wait till the Iowa state fair where candidates eat deep fried food (such as those breaded hot dogs on a stick - corn dogs?) in an undignified manner in order to fit in. In fact, I think the state fair just concluded so maybe there are pictures of DeSantis awkwardly trying to do some of this and pretend it actually was delicious instead of bland compared to [whatever ethnicity he is] food

Not to bring down the tone of this mostly upbeat thread, but I just noticed a PhD student in physics at UNC-Chapel Hill is accused of murdering his thesis advisor. Its even in a field I may have more than passing familiarity with (but not directly related). For those of you in the process of getting a PhD or thinking of getting one, this isnt meant as discouragement, but I would suggest taking care of your mental health by going on vacations, taking a few days off etc not thinking about work. You are meant to obsess over a problem for years on end, but not having it consume your life is also important.

Well, hopefully the final word on MN is that even though it may vote reliably Democrat for many cycles and quite likely in 2024 too, you still have to spend resources and have a great ground game to ensure that outcome, since small changes or a couple of counties flipping can make it awfully close. Thats what makes it a swing state. Michigan in 2016 may have been an outlier too, but that doesn't mean every election we don't get palpitations here. Unfortunately, whatever Trump tapped into still exists and you just need one round of apathy from a certain segment of D voters and ....poof.

Since I'm already on blood pressure meds I decided to skip this shouting match yesterday, I presume out of this lot of deplorables there are maybe a couple I could live with if they end up being President. Also disappointed to see two people of Indian origin there, at least Ramaswamy didnt do a Jindal and try to fit in better by converting or changing his name.

Yeah, fair enough. I only bring some of the silly episodes up as a counterpoint to those (no one here of course) who seem to think a musical is not Trek, somehow. There has been so much stuff in Trek ranging from the profound to the absurd that I accept it all. With varying degrees of enjoyment of course, but everything is part of the sausage.

This is purely an emotional reaction, but I am worried by a few cultural signifiers such as the modest success of "Sound of Freedom" and the overwhelming one of "Rich Men north of Richmond" that there are some undercurrents of dissatisfaction that we are not taking into account (similar to 2016) that could mean trouble in 2024 if we don't address it head on.

So no one liked "Bride of Chaotica" where Janeway/Mulgrew vamps it up? Or "Someone to watch over me", the Pygmalion/My Fair Lady knock off? I think the latter was what kicked off the Seven/Doctor saga. At any rate, the actors playing B'Elanna and possibly Beltran as well are MAGAts or MAGA-adjacent, so its soured my appreciation of the show a fair bit.

Consider humans...... At any rate, its a good point; reminds me a bit of the debate around the Tamarians. Namely, how could a race that speaks entirely in metaphors become a spacefaring race with technology superior to the Federation? You'd spend 3 days trying to fix the plasma flow through the secondary conduits of the naecelles, just explaining to your colleagues what you mean. Or simply asking for a metric allen wrench. However, there may be other communication pathways through which this is made easy.

Review of Ep 10 SNW (shamelessly stolen from the internet): I guess the Gorn tried that in a small town.

Everyone's favorite Democrat is at it again: Well, it makes more sense now. If he needs to run as in independent and win, and sometimes caucus with the D's, then that may be the best option.

I have no idea what the Ohio ballot measure means for the 2024 general, since the modest polling before had it losing (even though there were many undecideds, usually they are believed to break for the status quo). But regardless, good on Ohio. The 2024 general is far more concerning. It was a bit mind boggling to see DeSantis flailing and essentially swatted aside by Trump before the debates even began. Crossing fingers the economy stays relatively stable till then.

Figuring out that every time someone sang, the quantum improbability field experienced a spike (and that you'd need to get to 344 GeV to shatter the rift) is pretty much a linear correlation that simple models are very adept at finding out, but thanks for explaining in a very non-patronizing way what present day computers are incapable of doing regarding grammatical concepts. At any rate, I said I enjoyed the episode and just wanted a bit more talky exposition the way TNG excelled at (same thing happened with the dilithium mining episode too) Apologies for missing a couple of lines of such explanation which doesnt even make sense based on how simple the solution was what Uhura found. At any rate, not interested in going down this rabbit hole further regarding my minor quibbles with a mostly enjoyable episode.

Look up Reina del Cid's rap about Star Trek technobabble. It should be on tiktok or youtube somewhere, I lack the skills to post it here. Pretty hilarious.

This is very easily disproven by taking a look at her approval ratings before the election (spoiler alert, she did great with independents because of the way she handled the pandemic). Further, since you know so little about Michigan politics, maybe you could look up petitions that were on the ballot at the same time (another spoiler alert, look at what the overturning of Roe v Wade did to abortion laws statewide). At the very least, use some data to back up your assertions rather than some gut feeling you have. Literally all you have posted is devoid of any such thing underpinning it.

I liked it a fair bit (although I did feel the middle dragged a bit), however, the entire plot was paper-thin. From the reason for their singing (it was never satisfactorily explained how subspace folds interacted with brains to trigger the singing) to the eventual conclusion (some gibberish about voltages that made no sense). If you are looking for patterns a computer would be the first place to start, and in fact, by TNG they were routinely asking computers for analysis first. I can only imagine these ships are fitted with ENIAC level punch card operated gizmos.

Havent seen it yet, but I'm sure I'll enjoy it. One of my biggest gripes with Disco is how serious and portentous it always was (everything had to be of galaxy threatening importance). SNW manages to blend seriousness with lighthearted fun (in the spirit of TNG sometimes)