“Scratch” his itch for some of that killer skunk weed, the devil’s lettuce!

Did Sagan say that in writing? I know he wrote a few things about his experiences with pot, but those were informal, anecdotal writings, and this sounds much more formal, almost like a public statement meant for publication, or a speech.

Back in the early 00s, I had the supreme pleasure of discovering Alec Guinness as George Smiley in the BBC’s miniseries masterpiece Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy from 1979, then the sequel and conclusion three years later, Smiley’s People, not as transcendent but then again, how could it equal, let alone surpass, perfection.

Around 2010, my first reaction upon hearing of a remake was of complete disdain - “here is an already perfect miniseries, what is it with this incessant compulsion to remake everything?”
So I didn’t watch the Gary Oldman movie until a couple of years after it came out, it was playing on TV and decided to give it a try.

To my utter astonishment, I realized I was watching what was to become my favorite film of the entire decade. What an achievement!
Now I love the film and the miniseries equally, as separate mountaintops.

Ah yes… good ole-fashioned nazi Germany!

This is the mechanism that makes Cepheid stars regularly and predictably change intensity

Doesn’t it also make the Cepheid noticeably swell (then deflate) in circumference? Or does it maintain the same basic size, and it’s just storing magnetic bubbles of hot plasma like a halo, before bursting and releasing all that accumulated material?

The dynamics there due to sheer gravity, magnetism and levels of energy/radiation that are utterly alien to our daily experience.

Well… you keep on giving the most rabidly ignorant, recklessly greedy bigoted zealots the keys to the kingdom every 4-to-8 years, what did you expect?

Then when Democrats can’t fix everything quickly while under constant zealot attack and sabotage, you reward the saboteurs with the keys to the goddamned kingdom again. All while you proudly proclaim that you’ve got it all figured out, because you read a blog post or tweet somewhere:
bOtH pArTiEs ArE tHe SaMe LoL aMiRiTe WhY bOtHeR vOTiNg?

Centurion Haddock in the times of Elagabalus.

EDIT: Hadocus?

If they wanted to use the term “deeply wrong discrepancy”, maybe they should have gone with the difference between the universe’s expansion predicted by quantum vacuum energy and the actual, much slower observed rate of expansion.
By “much slower”, I mean that the theory and the observations differ by something like one hundred and twenty five (!!!) orders of magnitude.

An elegant device, for more civilized times.

Yep, this is the one I was scrolling down to find.

Godfather.
Godfather 2.
The Conversation.
Dog Day Afternoon.
The Deer Hunter.

All five Best Picture Oscar nominees, three winners.

Imagine getting drugged at some seedy nightclub and you wake up without a kidney… then a week later you get drugged again and wake up with the same defective kidney stuffed back inside. A full refund!

Echoes of - “The internet is not a dump truck, it’s a series of tubes”.

And that’s all for today’s installment of “But Wait… There’s More!”

Man, it feels hot even in black and white.

To us as a species just barely out of the African steppes and valleys, it registers as some sort of secular magic, is like being mesmerized by a kaleidoscope or being at the center of a room full of mirrors.

To pull out extra dimensions from math, and be able to see how the tips of our new lines wave about. To zoom in on the Mandelbrot Set. To consider infinities nested within infinities. To see how Pi literally goes on forever. To notice how Pi seems to pop up nearly everywhere, including where it wasn’t expected. To see prime numbers go in outward spirals and making intricate patterns that seem to comply with the golden ratio.

This is all very poetic, too. Maybe the purest kind of art. Surely the most rigorously rational, coming up with utterly unexpected and surprising structures, beyond our ability to imagine just with our senses at play.

This new cat color was detected around 5 megaparsecs distance from the Milky Way, in the general direction of the Leo constellation, using the Very Large Cat Ear Antenna Array at the 21 cm wavelength of the microwave part of the spectrum.

Is there a way to put NIN into both extremes of Angry and Horny?

The bearcat!

WiFi being in the microwave range of the spectrum, surely it packs information much more densely and efficiently than lower wavelength frequencies like radio ever can.
But then WiFi can’t turn a goddamned corner and into another room ten yards away.