A fox of the same species was found in a much older grave in another part of Argentina nearly a decade ago. It may also have been a pet but its diet was not analysed.

As usual, it’s more the article (and especially the headline) than the science. Here is the Abstract of the study.

It’s much more about the specific burial and the inferences that can be reasonably drawn about South America before the introduction of dogs from the north 5k years ago. It references multiple burials with non-dog canids from across time periods in S.A., including at least one from about 4k years ago, as well as many other remains scattered in with human burials. It seems to build on existing theorizing that pre-Columbian practices might have changed more slowly than post. Then there are the statistical arguments. If you occasionally find a fox in human burials, based on the number of human burials you didn’t find, you can feel pretty confident that there were more foxes buried with humans.

Most unrealistic part of the move, and by god I’m including TIME TRAVEL, is that Scotty would be both dismissive of and insanely good at keyboarding text entry and use of a 1980s computer. Either he’d be pissed off because because there was no way to use this antique, or he’d be delighted at the chance to use his historical reenactment skills.

Ahh, got it. Never got very deep into Westworld.

Unexpected Shakespeare. Nice.

And yummy.

True, and I suppose that’s a certain filter of its own. I suppose the main thing that makes me roll my eyes is that having done SETI by half measures for a handful of decades, the article is asking if it’s time to assume that the rather presumptuous (though not absurd) zoo hypothesis is “the answer”.

This all is what it is. The results so far imply virtually nothing about anything, except I suppose that there is not a very close civilization intentionally listening for our types of signals and eager to communicate back.

Q is a little bit nervous about Floridaman Santa being his upstairs neighbor. Go Gators.

From SETI’s FAQ:

If an extraterrestrial civilization has a SETI project similar to our own, could they detect signals from Earth?
In general, no. Most earthly transmissions are too weak to be found by equipment similar to ours at the distance of even the nearest star. But there are some important exceptions. High-powered radars and the Arecibo broadcast of 1974 (which lasted for only three minutes) could be detected at distances of tens to hundreds of light-years with a setup similar to our best SETI experiments.

Every moment adds to our data of course, but the idea that we’re at some sort of tipping point in how we should perceive the odds of extraterrestrial civilization is silly. Some of this feels like sour grapes from aging nerds who come to believe that it won’t happen in their lifetimes, so it is obviously never gonna happen.

There’s rarely a strict cutoff for this sort of thing. If you’re on the edges, it’s sort of “whichever feels right”. I am only a year older than my wife, and we were both born in the late 70s, but I had a brother 7 years older than me and she was her parents’ first. Based on the TikToks she sends me, she identifies as a millennial. I am much more in tune with the Gen X zeitgeist.

I remembered this episode existed, but forgot what they looked like. That facial appliance and makeup looks a lot like the Odo/Founders ones.

Wrong answers only?

Fuzzy
Nurture
Vegan
Morn
Iceman

Sorry, I know I’m outside genre parameters here, but all I can think of is THIS.

And well we should. Honestly, a “torch?” For the electric light that you could easily flash on and off if you wanted or wave around to flash in someone’s eyes?

WHERE IS THE FIRE, NIGEL?!?!? THERE’S NO FIRE!

I like The Orville. I’ve watched the entire run of the show. Much like you with LD though, I don’t quite get how people love The Orville. It strikes me as leftover TNG episodes with a Find and Replace, followed by a liberal coat of Seth MacFarlane’s very particular set of Gen X influences. The morality is often pretty clumsy and I can almost imagine Seth and the writers being frustrated by the ambiguity that a good Trek episode can leave you with. Then, the way it had to start with a more Galaxy quest vibe to get a show order from Fox, followed by Seth wanting it to be more serious but also still be a Seth show, it’s kind of all over the place. I also find some of the acting performances to be amateurish to the point of distraction.

And for all that, I still like it. It scratched an itch and has a lot of heart. On the whole, it’s more than the sum of its parts, but for me it still has a ceiling. I like it about as much as I like Discovery, which I have also watched in its entirety though only once. The two shows’ issues are very different though, with the exception of tonal whiplash.

I have come around on LD. I think it is a similar love letter to to Gen2 Star Trek but handles the balance of trek-to-humor better, and for all their cartoon antics, I’ve found the characters more compelling than The Orville’s.

A pretty large portion of the kits, components, and pre-built boards are from “obscure” Chinese companies already, so much of what you’d want is just sort of… there. As a single example, get a GMK67 for $35, 70 Milky Yellow switches (if you’re into linears. I am not.) for $20, and maybe a YMDK set of keycaps for $30-$50, and you’ve got a very presentable budget build under a hundred bucks. If you go hunting, you can probably find stuff you’d like just as much for even cheaper.

Tons of good mechanical keyboard stuff on AE. Not the absolute top of the line customs boards or keycaps, but almost everything else is hiding in there somewhere.

One, dude just played an instrument in the lower register. He fucked up. I quit trombone after a year in (small) part because what’s the fun in setting the bass line?

Two, it seems like Canon was sort of “rediscovered” in the late 1960s and the people just absolutely fucking loved that chord progression and pop musicians and their producers were no exception.

On a personal level, I first ran across it as a kid when I found a MIDI file of it on my Tandy PC, which was known for having above average samples for the sequencer, and I thought it was lovely too.

That’s the funny thing. As far as I know, you’re completely right. I am not seriously tuned in or anything, but talking to my father-in-law and my wife’s cousin (both Punjab-born Sikhs and no strangers to taking pride in their identities) as well as sort of generally keeping up with the basics in the news, the sense I get is that “Khalistan” as a movement very much peaked in the 1980s with Operation Blue Star, the assassination of Indira Gandhi, the subsequent riots, and culminating in the Air India bombing in 1985. Since then, it’s been a slow erosion as Indian identity has stabilized, as the democracy became a bit more robust (seriously being tested now), and Sikhs felt better integrated into the country. The idea of being effectively a weak buffer state between India and Pakistan just sort of loses its charm when the population doesn’t feel desperately repressed. The first Sikh PM was even a member of the Gandhis’ Congress Party. The diaspora is doing well, and in many western countries Sikhs serve as useful, informal cultural ambassadors for the nation of India.

Many Sikhs even supported the Modi and the BJP at first, but as the Hindu nationalists find success in oppressing Muslims, suddenly there are more voices that the Sikhs in Punjab need to be brought to heel as well, or at least that their concerns are unimportant and do not need to be addressed. Even still, most of the loud separatist voices are outside of Punjab and couching most of their rhetoric in peaceful terms, and the drive for any serious resistance remains fringe. Modi et al are fanning tiny embers of resistance that would normally be unlikely to cause great harm to India or the world. If they don’t stop shooting straw men, they’re going to create the exact problem they claim to be trying to fight.

Chekup.

Tangentially, the DS9 shapeshifter makeup looks EXACTLY like the people who go way too hard on their plastic surgery. You know, the 60yo people who want so badly for me to think they’re thirty that they get enough fillers that they no longer look how humans of any age are supposed to look so my brain resets and I mentally assume they’re seventy.

I’m not even completely opposed to cosmetic procedures. People have different priorities and psychological needs, but you’ve got to accept that you can only shave off so many years and approach your vanity with some strategy. We’re all fighting a rear-guard action here.

I mean, the anarcho-capitalists are fairly extreme, but the libertarians in general seem to be people who want to lock in the benefits they’ve got in the current system and remove any barriers to fucking over people who don’t have them. They also seem to forget that you can’t just declare that coercive force no longer exists. The best you can do is try to have some sort of consensus to apply it fairly and sparingly and in the pursuit of noble ends. All of their proposals are just variations on directing the thrust of that power to enforce the status quo when it comes to property holders.

The crazy thing is I’m not even particularly ideological, and I imagine our friends on the .ml domains would not be fans of me. I am just in favor of measures to moderate the worst tendencies of capitalism and to preserve the fact that no one succeeds in a vacuum, things like paying my fair share so people can have safety and opportunity. The Libertarians are just not what they claim to be, either because they’re evil or naive.