tpb

@nathanweisser I love the opening paragraph. What would you do without food or a way to move for a billion years? Umm, you would just die.

Truly imagine thinking this developed by chance variation and some goop getting struck by lightning.

@ChubbyFunsterGC Like Tolkien, make the names English sounding and then sprinkle in some of the "real" names that the names you use were "translated" from.

I have written TTRPG content with French-leaning naming conventions and people tell me they don’t like it because they don’t know how to pronounce it. Ex. Town of Auxenon or the peak of Montonnerre. Is it worth it? or should designers stick with English syllables?

I really would prefer that we actually punish the criminals who do crimes with guns, as liberals assure us is very important, before we get to punishing me for not committing crimes with mine.

@ApoloJedi_ Been thinking about this a lot with that recent Nature paper showing humans have "evolved" more than thought in the last 10k years. (It's selection for pre-existing traits or negative mutations)

Evolutionist: "evolution is simply change over time" Apolojedi: Yes, these changes are universally observed to be loss if biological information (devolution) or activation of a pre-existing trait (recessive expression). Evolution cannot produce new biological information

@Joel__Collinson @nattyover No sane person could look at this and think it's the product of random chance.

@nattyover Evolution is the ultimate engineer. Imitating and iterating on it is often a critical consideration.

Bacteria move around using a molecular machine called the flagellar motor that rotates faster than the flywheel of a race car engine and switches directions in an instant. After 50 yrs, scientists have finally figured out how it works. “My lifelong quest is now fulfilled.” Link⤵️

Christ is in the Old Testament.

Alright, so… Jesus uses this same physical symbolic language in John 6 (same as at the Last Supper) to point to a spiritual reality. He does this all the time. “I am the door,” “I am the vine,” and so on. He’s not literally a door or vine or bread or blood. Nothing in the passage forces you to suddenly switch to a literal reading. In fact, He even clarifies that He’s speaking spiritually, linking coming to him and be believing in faith to drinking and eating in that very passage. So when Jesus later reused this exact symbol during the Lord’s Supper, they would’ve known exactly what he’s talking about (belief, and faith, not ritualistic cannibalism of his body). Turns out, context matters, to which you Roman Catholics often flat-out ignore. Speaking of, look at the context of the Lord’s Supper. It happens during Passover, which is a symbolic meal built around remembrance. The bread and the cup already had symbolic, not literal, meaning tied to God’s deliverance. Jesus is simply taking those elements and pointing them to Himself, their true representation. There’s no reason, textually or historically, to think He’s turning them into literal flesh and blood. And this is where the Jewish context really matters. Jews were strictly forbidden from consuming blood. That’s not a minor rule, it’s a major one in the Law, and one that did not change. Cannibalism wasn’t just frowned upon, it was completely unthinkable. So the idea that Jesus is commanding His followers to literally eat His body and drink His blood doesn’t fit the world they lived in at all. It would have sounded offensive and unlawful, not like faithful obedience. I mean, think about Peter‘s reaction when he has the vision of eating unclean animals in Acts chapter 10. Why would they all of a sudden be okay with drinking human blood? So when you put it all together, the symbolic reading actually fits. It matches how Jesus speaks, it fits the Passover setting, and it aligns with what His audience would have understood. The literal view doesn’t have that same support whatsoever.

Most people were taught Darwin’s theory of evolution explains how all life came to be. What if that’s not the full story? Stephen C. Meyer says growing evidence is challenging that idea, and many scientists are now calling for a new theory of evolution. “There’s a huge difference between the idea that natural selection is a real process… and the claim that it has unlimited creative power.” “Many leading evolutionary biologists today are now calling for a new theory of evolution.” “They recognize that the mutation natural selection mechanism has limited creative power.” “It does a nice job of explaining small-scale variation and adaptation.” “But it doesn’t do a good job of explaining… major new body plans or new forms.” @stephencmeyer

They don’t want you to know this but the “we” who cured cystic fibrosis is… that’s right, Big Pharma

@MattWalshBlog No different from straight people who don't marry

Yes

@NewReaganCaucus What I'm seeing is some 51st state candidates. One even comes with an important man in a funny hat completely enclosed! (/s)

Yeah, Western Europe's problems precede Trump.

I never understand why some Christians mock other Christians for this. This is a tangible part of the Second Temple. Both Jews and Christians believe that Gods presence rested in the Temple. Which is why it’s significant to both Jews and Christians

@cremieuxrecueil What led to the government declaring sugar unhealthy?

Fun fact: Sugar consumption only became associated with bad outcomes after healthy people started taking the government's advice to avoid sugar. The harm signal is a result of selection based on differential uptake of the belief that sugar is bad!

French is right about a need for greater kindness in political discourse. But I’ll tell you what’s troubling to me. He behaves as though he and Russell Moore are representatives of that kind of kindness. And yet, as @conservmillen pointed out , his misrepresentation of her positions on toxic empathy was very much not kind. The same thing goes for Russell Moore likening her to Nazis. He could’ve argued with her thesis on toxic empathy in a straightforward manner. Instead, he called her about the worst name that anyone can call a political opponent in the modern era. This is some of the nastiest, cruelest rhetoric you can see out there. And yet, because they couch it in kind of scholarly terms, they pretend that this is not cruel. And because they don’t sound off in the way that some ordinary person on Twitter who doesn’t have their level of education or expressive ability would, they position themselves as the nice men with the clean nails. And my point is, the nice men with the clean nails publishing columns in the New York Times have been incredibly cruel. They’re just a little better at hiding it.

This is a misunderstanding of the situation. Gaza receives among the most aid per capita of any place on earth. The food is limited because Hamas never developed a real economy that includes food production. Instead, the entire population is reliant on food aid. Hamas fully controls the aid because the aid groups coordinate with them so, while there is no shortage overall, there is always a restriction on who gets it. Hamas uses that control to also control and abuse the population.

@pythagoras999 @SambidWasti @MJTruthUltra I think most people would consider me maga or maga adjacent, so I'm not sure that's a great point in context.

@__tpbpp @SambidWasti @MJTruthUltra You're confusing the MAGA people with science. The one thing you'll never find is a MAGA scientist. The two don't mix.

🚨 RFK Jr just destroyed Democratic attempts to say Tylenol is NOT linked to Autism Foxx: A new Danish study shows Tylenol is not linked to autism RFK JR: That study is GARBAGE! According to their own study, they only included women who were PRESCRIBED Tylenol, which accounted for only 2% of the women… silky considering it’s available over the counter. Nobody gets a prescription for Tylenol. The industry has the capacity to generate these studies all the time and it’s fraudulent! Unbelievable… rumble.com/v78mw16-rfk-jr…

A common Roman Catholic talking point about praying to Mary or other deceased Christians is that they’re not really “praying” to them at all. They’ll say they’re simply asking for intercession, no different than asking a friend on earth to pray for you. But that comparison breaks down real fast. If I ask a friend here on earth to pray for me, I just ask. I tell them what’s going on and ask them to keep me in their prayers. Scripture actually encourages this kind of mutual care among believers. But that’s not what’s happening with Mary. I don’t - build statues of my friends and kneel before them. I don’t - burn incense or light candles in their honor. I don’t - call them a co-mediator between me and God. I don’t - use language for them that the Bible reserves for God alone. And I certainly don’t - bow in prayer to them so they can pass my requests along. At that point, the “it’s just like asking a friend” argument isn’t just weak, intentionally misleading. Whatever is going on in those practices, it goes far beyond simply asking a fellow believer to pray.

@SkyPixWeather Sadly this will get way less attention than "orange man bad" on Reddit.

-- About Recent SPC Forecast Performance -- The story below from NBC, and others on the less-than-2% outlook's tornado occurrences in KS, some of which also note the watchless tornadoes in Lower MI earlier this year, grossly oversimplify reality on the SPC forecast desk. They rely on a lot of idle speculation by people who haven't worked it and just don't know. I've done SPC outlooks for decades, and as usual, will be brutally honest here. I know how it works there, from the inside. Read and learn. These insights don't lend themselves to 10-second attention spans nor quick sound bites. So this is long. Don't "TLDR" this post if you really care about actually learning how it works. I'll put the bottom line here, near the top: Chances are there is ***no smoking gun***. That may not suit rage-baiting and click-baiting, but it's simply reality. That's the lede. Here's the rest... Why no smoking gun? Far too much goes into a forecast to lay "blame" at any one factor. Like it or not, bad forecasts happen. They always have and always will. The aim is to reduce them over years, knowing that some events are so localized and/or extreme that both human and computer forecasts can't always nail them down. That's reality. Until forecasters have extremely high-resolution sampling of the real atmosphere on scales storms form and operate (a few miles), even the most sophisticated models, both from traditional, physics-based and AI/statistical packages, will suffer sometimes with localized subtleties. Guess what's involved in forming a dryline storm here vs. somewhere else, amidst capping and modest broader left? You got it, friends, localized subtleties. Yes, observational balloon data were missing and are, in bulk, important to models. Several scientific papers have shown this. *Maybe* that mattered here. Maybe it did not. Satellite-derived data matter too, and often more. How important was the lack of radiosondes to this case on this day? We don't know. As Alan Gerard alludes in his quote in the NBC story: that needs to be studied (using data-denial experiments). Until then, it's speculation to say how much that altered output at any of many levels of the atmosphere, from models that *variably* and *incompletely* influenced the outlook's positioning here. *Numerous* models are examined every forecast cycle, especially early-arriving deterministic ones, ensembles, and newer/quickly computed AI packages that work off historic pattern recognition. How they may be affected by missing input data can vary from model to model and by data type. It can be such a dense black box that such effects are simply unknown to the forecasters. We're not, and cannot be, privy to every nook and cranny of their physics or statistical equations. Forecasters often notice and account for model biases, but where they come from can be quite complex and not just tied to one factor. Between that and diagnostics that should precede models, it can be a veritable firehose of information, on deadline. With time, experience, on-shift mentorship of the leads and senior outlookers, and training, forecasters get better at situationally prioritizing what to drink from that firehose, when, how, and why. It is simply impossible to examine every possible diagnostic and prognostic detail from every data source. Models are not all that go into a forecast. So do diagnostics: analyses of surface and upper-air data. The latter factually do have holes that may cause analysis to miss subtle features, but was that true here? We don't know yet. Other diagnostics, such as satellite and radar-indicated features, and intangibles such as reading, research, forecaster experience, and intuition with specific situations, also play a role. It's even more speculative, and likely inaccurate, to say the lack of greater staffing affected the outlooks in these cases so far. [That isn't to say it can't, or won't, the rest of the season.] Though I recently retired, and was not a participant in these forecasts, I do know the principals involved. Everyone who did the outlooks for the KS day were working normal 8-hour shifts and not overtime. If "exhaustion" or "fatigue" were factors, it comes simply from the nature of rotating shift work, which is documented to be unhealthy mentally and physically, and a known carcinogen. Don't knock it 'til you've done it. Yes, with two retirements last month, 5 openings (out of 10 positions or 50% vacant) are on the SPC outlook/mesoscale desk. That is unprecedented. They need to be permanently filled with full-time forecasters, stat! A lot of fill-in shifts by both managers (one of whom is an extremely sharp and highly experienced forecaster), and less-tenured forecasters, will be needed until those are filled. Results may vary. That won't help, and yes, it might hurt! But it's premature and speculative to pin any single forecast performance so far, or the rest of this season, just on that. Again, forecasts sometimes simply miss. SPC has a well-earned reputation for, and internally motivated standard of, excellence. Excellence is not synonymous with perfection. Even I had some bad forecast decisions I'd like to have back. ;-) Outlooks at SPC do not happen in a vacuum. One or two names may appear thereon, but it's a team forecast. Internal collaboration is required. External coordination with involved WFOs is strongly encouraged if major changes are being made to a previous outlook. Otherwise, there is not enough time to coordinate every part of every outlook line with every involved WFO, who themselves also are busy with other tasks. Every minute doing that is a minute not spent doing meteorology. So there must be a balance achieved on deadline. I don't know for sure here, but it is possible that the 2% and 5% tornado lines that drove the "MRGL" and "SLGT" areas were suggested by, or compromised with, the WFOs serving eastern KS. Only they and the SPC forecasters on duty could verify either way. And even everything I've typed is just a superficial, condensed summary of the outlook forecast process. I did thousands of them, both the graphics and long-form text discussions, so give me the benefit of the doubt here.

@varadmehta No, no, I've finally become convinced by my friends who told me in 2022 that there needed to be the same number of SCOTUS justices as Federal districts and that this reality is completely apolitical.

It would be quite the irony, and hilarious to boot, if the way we got court-packing were if the Democrats flipped SCOTUS "naturally" somehow, and then the next time Republicans had a trifecta after that they added more justices to regain control of it.