I used to know a woman named April, and her two daughters are May and June. (Both still under age 12.)

True story. I remember back in the bad old days when Firefox had notorious memory leaks, so when building my latest PC, I put in 32GB. The monitor app on my desktop has only ever topped out at showing 30% of memory allocated.

Maybe it’s genetic, but also, my skin improved vastly after I stopped doing the things that harm it, primarily long, hot showers, scrubbing/exfoliating, and overuse of strong soaps. Plus, bonuses like no more oily hair, no more stinky socks, and greatly reduced pit odor. These things are backed up by good science; I just saw a WaPo article the other day with these recommendations from dermatologists. I see a lot of talk about exfoliating, and I know from experience that most people take long, hot showers, so I figure it’s worth passing that information along.

That is my answer, though. I shower in lukewarm water and a little bit of dilute Castile soap where needed, and wear wide-brimmed hats in the sun. I get compliments on my skin softness, people guess that I’m 10 years younger. Honestly, it seems to me that a good half of people’s elaborate skin-care routines are just trying to undo the damage caused by the other half. Our skin is really remarkable in taking care of itself, if you let it.

Clarke’s third law is that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. I have the notion that any technology becomes uninteresting and not cool once reaches the level of magic. We are tactile and inquisitive creatures, so objects that appeal to our hands and perceptions are cool. Once we can no longer grasp the parts, literally or metaphorically, they’re no longer alluring.

Phones, cars, screens, computers, anything. Why is Amiga HAM mode fascinating to many people still, even when they’re emulating it on a 32-bit-depth screen that can concurrently play high-quality video streamed over the Internet? That’s why.

I’ve put some effort into improving my visualization since learning about aphantasia. Upon reading the prompt, I was able to imagine a colorless ball, but with shading to indicate a 3D shape, like a preview render in a CAD program. That’s progress! It didn’t have a size inherently. For the table, I could picture a white, rectangular plane hovering in a black void. If it was a normal dinner table size, then the ball was something like a softball or basketball.

And that’s it. That exhausted my ability to visualize. No person, no push, no motion. Best I can do is to see the white rectangle after the ball has rolled off of the edge.

I saw a melanistic eastern grey squirrel this summer, which Wikipedia tells me has a prevalence of about 1 in 10,000. It was just pokin’ around my campsite when I woke up one morning. Oh! And I just remembered seeing eyeless fish and salamanders in caves.

My grandmother died.

First thing that came to mind is a song by a band that I can’t even find online. I have the song as an .mp2 file. How’s that for obscure?

Here’s one that is online: Technical Jelly (Live) - Honor Among Thieves

The boat in the old photo (from 1928, apparently) is casting a pretty good wake, and the man aboard is holding a tiller attached to a rudder. It’s impossible to tell for certain with the low-res image, but entirely likely that one of those shapes in the boat ahead of him is an inboard engine.

Nah, like 50% of it is just telling people to restart their computers.

Salt is a preservative, so salted butter will last quite a lot longer when unrefrigerated.

Scenario: I want to call a friend in Bulgaria. It’s 11:23AM GMT. What’s he likely to be doing right now? With timezones, I can quickly calculate that it’s 2:23PM local time, and intuitively know. Without, I’d have to look up a timetable of daily activities in Sofia.

I guess if I called regularly, I could memorize the timetable, or maybe roughly calculate an offset in hours to add or subtract from GMT to intuitively relate his schedule to mine. For example, my dinner time is about 11PM GMT, so his dinner time is about 7AM GMT.

But, I wonder, if I went there to visit, would it be easier to memorize the local timetable, or just do the math when I check the time?

I would make the written English language 100% phonetic.

Nobody speaks written English, so how do we know it’s not already phonetic?

Almost literally true, which is why it makes a great response to OP’s question.

Oh, hell, classes just resumed at the university here, so the new batch of freshmen is here, and some days I feel like it. But I don’t count the Cold War as a war, just like the Holy Roman Empire wasn’t holy, nor Roman, nor an empire.

When I was born, the United States wasn’t involved in a war.

Case-sensitive is easier to implement; it’s just a string of bytes. Case-insensitive requires a lot of code to get right, since it has to interpret symbols that make sense to humans. So, something over wondered about:

That’s not hard for ASCII, but what about Unicode? Is the precomposed ç treated the same lexically and by the API as Latin capital letter c + combining cedilla? Does the OS normalize all of one form to the other? Is ß the same as SS? What about alternate glyphs, like half width or full width forms? Is it i18n-sensitive, so that, say, E and É are treated the same in French localization? Are Katakana and Hiragana characters equivalent?

I dunno, as a long-time Unix and Linux user, I haven’t tried these things, but it seems odd to me to build a set of character equivalences into the filesystem code, unless you’re going to do do all of them. (But then, they’re idiosyncratic and may conflict between languages, like how ö is its letter in the Swedish alphabet.)

That’s true, but our theory of physics is far more complex than those simple patterns. It actually consists of many, many interrelated theories that mutually reinforce each other. And that so many of them describe phenomena described with c as a term strongly indicates the speed of causality of pretty fundamental.

In any case, I’d be very interested to learn how it shakes out, but I probably won’t be around in 300 years to do so!

Ah, but “major technological breakthroughs” != “major technological breakthroughs concerning faster-than-light travel”. Certainly, there will be more of the former in the next 300 years, but our understanding of physics precludes the latter.

The quality of our understanding of physics is proved by the technological advances that we’ve already made with it. Yes, we’re missing some major pieces, like how to unify general relativity and quantum mechanics (how to quantize gravity), but the problem that physicists face on this front is actually how stunningly well the Standard Model holds up, and has so far resisted attempts to break it. It’s highly unlikely that we’ll discover anything which completely upends the laws of physics as we know them.