You are describing Indiana Jones. Graham is talking about getting funding for what is effectively Crystal Skull research. These are not opposing sides of the same coin. Ancient Apocalypse is not an outreach program for more general archeology funding.

This is not about calling the people watching the show idiots. It’s about Graham and his ilk being more beholden to their pet stories than actual research and trying to convince people that they are the One True Archeologist.

A conspiracy theorist complaining about how “the establishment” won’t take him seriously is not a gateway to people seeking out education. It’s an avenue for those people to mistrust actual research in a field because it doesn’t mesh with their preconceived notions. Much like Flat Earthers the problem is not a simple misunderstanding that will self correct. It’s a belief that the “Truth” is being hidden for nefarious purposes because a story is more intriguing than knowledge.

This is not how people get more interested in Archeology, or whatever discipline, or what drives funding for that discipline. This is what cuts budgets and drives people away because “the establishment is a hidebound in-crowd.”

Star Trek is attention grabbing. It doesn’t mean we should depend on time travel to save the whales. Not being able to separate fantasy from reality is not a scientific viewpoint. Actual education about any of this would be steering away from it, not into it.

The answer to all questions about advanced ancient civilizations existing is “probably not”. There are interesting examples that push back the earliest evidence of some things, like the Antikythera mechanism, but the only thing that is evidence of is that gears are older than previously thought. “Could there have been an ancient globe spanning civilization that only used wood or was on Antarctica or for some other reason has surviving no evidence?” is the same level of question as “Could there be a Discworld?”. The infeasibility of proving a negative is not the same as “yes this existed”.

Ancient Aliens level speculation on ancient civilizations is religion without a sacred text, inventing fantasies of a utopian past out of whole cloth because of an imagined fragment of a thread.

“What if every star was a human soul?” is not an interesting astronomy question to get people into astronomy. “Big Astronomy” not awarding grants to study that, is not a conspiracy. It’s due diligence.

Using a platform to say “What if [random speculation that has no basis and can’t be tested]” is not useful science outreach. It’s someone pretending to be science-y.

A person’s sole redeeming aspect being “being an engaging speaker” doesn’t make them a useful object lesson, it makes them yet another snake oil salesman. That’s not new or unique. That’s being a charlatan. Which is what people don’t like about Graham.

Next up, Maxwell.

Turns out the secret to defeating entropy was demons all along.

Yes

Have a few ebooks and audiobooks in calibre that have been removed from Amazon/Audible. Nothing dramatic drama wise as far as I can tell other than the license expiring/moving.

It’s nice not having to worry about it.

I’d put money on the nurse being a roleplayer / watcher. It’s a character attribute you can have in DnD 5e and I believe pops up in a few other tabletop games, so like, golems/robots “don’t get tired.”

Also totally possible he just likes older media of course.

There are ~20,000 objects in orbit large enough to be tracked as hazards. Personally unclear if that includes active satellites, but that’s ‘only’ another ~10,000.

There are ~100,000 airline flights a day worldwide.

How crowded does the sky look with planes?

Yes space junk is a thing to be concerned about / regulate. But at the scales involved it’s basically negligible. We’re orders of magnitude away from any kind of cascade or locking ourselves out of orbit or any other doomsday scenario.

IIRC its more just poor notification of low battery.

If you’re moving and the battery gets low it can not have enough power to keep the board stable. Early ones I feel like I remember hearing they would just ‘stop’.

Which were Facebook branded/partnership.

I do think it’s weird those flew under the radar when people flipped out so much about Google Glass.

See also SEO. Or marketing in general I guess.

In theory, you have a better widget so you want to get it to the top of the relevant search results. In practice… 10,000 people trying to make money off a lemon pie recipe create a hellscape of mostly indistinguishable garbage that technically fits the description.

This is the only reason I haven’t bought one yet. I have no use/need for a new laptop, but really like the idea at the very least over… every other manufacturer really.

Being able to choose/swap out ports alone would be fantastic.

This is like asking if using left handed threaded screws would make it easier or harder for China. They’re already the ones manufacturing all the components and the device itself. Removing/adding a step in the process doesn’t change anything.

DRM hampers legitimate customers / repair without actually doing anything against piracy.

LLMs are at least a quaternary(?) source. They’re scraping secondary/tertiary sources. As such they’re little better than asking passersby on the street. You might get a general idea of what the zeitgeist is, but how true any particular statement actually is will vary wildly.

Math itself is designed to describe relationships between things. That doesn’t mean you can’t mock up a ‘reasonable seeming’ equation that is absolute nonsense after further examination, but that a layman will take as ‘true enough’.

LLMs don’t cite things. They provide an approximation of what a human might write. They don’t know what they’re writing or how it relates to the ‘real world’ any more than any other centerpiece of a Chinese Room.

Also SHARP

So you’re not a fan of ortho keyboards?

I feel like I’m missing something in what you’re saying and that law actually makes the school’s actions illegal. The whole point of CROWN acts is that natural hairstyles have been discriminated against.

The school’s dress code / attitude is the ‘old’ version.

I think we agree? Breeds have tenancies towards certain behaviors and pits tend to be singled out in part because they’re popular, so there are more incidents, and in part because they’re strong, so the incidents tend to be more serious.

But that doesn’t make the order less arbitrary.

If Huskies/Akitas/Malamutes were more common and in the news a lot and they decided to ban “wolf-like dogs” or somesuch that would also be questionable.

Part of the problem is it isn’t a breed.

Part of the order (request? whatever it is) is to define the breed first. Which makes the rest seem pretty reactionary. Not far off from saying “ban dogs I find scary”.

Was curious before about setting it up on a Samsung TV, apparently can sideload an app or something? Didn’t look too far into it because Plex ‘just worked’. Will have to revisit that.