Eh, that doesn’t really answer it. Months are about 30 days long. First, there are better numbers than 7 to fit in 30. Five 6 says weeks would work much better for this. Second, moon “phases” are completely arbitrary. Really there are only two “phases”, waxing and waning; anything else is arbitrary subdivisions.

The real reason there are seven days in the week is because there are seven moving objects in the sky. (From a human perspective.) There are seven days of the week:

1. The Day of the Sun
2. The Day of the Moon
3. The Day of Mars
4. The Day of Mercury
5. The Day of Jupiter
6. The Day of Venus
7. The Day of Saturn

These are the seven days of the week. They’re named for the seven great moving lights in the heavens. Everything else is a fixed star or invisible to human eyes.

I think the better metaphor will be the printing press. That also caught society completely offguard. We went from a world where knowledge dissemination and speech was tightly controlled by religious and political elites to one where any crank with a press could share their fringe views far and wide. While this had its benefits, it also had its drawbacks. The printing press gave us the Protestant Reformation, but it also gave us the witch burning craze.

Only when the road construction crew gets too drunk and starts playing around with the steam roller! 😁

Numbers going down to levels comparable with numerous other diseases is very much the pandemic “ending.” By your logic, the Black Death never went away. Some people still die from Yersinia pestis each year.

It’s one thing to mask up in a real pandemic. It’s another to advocate for a position where humanity will have to remained masked from now until the end of time.

That’s nothing. We had to install a firmware update on a chef’s knife! 🤣

We’ll never evolve to that point. Unless the environment people live in is pretty constant for thousands of years at a minimum, evolution will not be a factor. We’ve certainly been farming long enough for it to have some evolutionary effects. Look at the genes on lactose toleranace. Maybe if we lived in a world with jobs like today for the next ten thousand years. But that seem extremely unlikely. Historically, even just the idea of working somewhere other than your home would have been odd up until just a few centuries ago. In early modern Europe, even most manufacturing was done as literal cottage industry.

This is just a function of modern life. Your brain wasn’t built for sitting in a cubicle. It was built for hunting, gathering, and telling stories and singing songs around a fire. Childhood is just a lot closer to that natural state of things. Growing old didn’t kill your childlike sense of joy and wonder. Working a job did.

I suppose especially if the freezer had a drain line and a defrost cycle, a regular freezer would dry out a body quite effectively over a long enough time. (Ideally you would remove the moisture from the freezer entirely, not just leave it in the freezer as ice. Maybe a DIY approach to mummification could go like this:

1. Obtain chest freezer with a defrost and drain line feature.
2. Place body in bottom of freezer.
3. Pour a large quantity of salt on the body until completely covered.
4. Turn on the freezer and let it sit for a very long time, like a year.

The problem with just freezing the body, without removing the moisture, is that to me this isn’t true mummification. To me at least, a “mummy” is something that can be left in ordinary room-temperature conditions and not undergo further decay. While freezing a body will preserve it while cold, the minute you warm it back up it will start to rot. To be a proper mummy, it has to be able to survive outside of the freezer. Removing moisture would be critical for this.

I don’t know why I’m writing about this. But sometimes it’s fun to approach unhinged problems from a real engineering point of view. Sure, you can read a book on how the ancient Egyptians did mummification, but that’s not exactly replicable today by ordinary people using commonly available materials. The Egyptian technique requires a lot of skill, many specialized tools, and a lot of rare ingredients. What I’m wondering is with modern technology, if there’s a way to democratize mummification, to allow it to be approachable by the common man using readily available tools and materials with little requisite knowledge required.

I wonder if it’s possible to affordably DIY a freeze dryer large enough to hold a human body. In principle such an innovation would allow low-cost, low-skill DIY mummification.

China. A second socialist revolution. First, there’s actually precedent for it there. Revolutionaries could call themselves restorationists, promising to fulfill the original revolution’s abandoned mission. Maybe a version that actually empowers workers and builds bottom-up social democracy. Socialism without the authoritarianism. What better country for a socialist revolution than the one that gave us 9-9-6? China is ripe for a socialist revolution.

Meanwhile, I imagine the actual historians and scholars who study and teach of the classical world professionally rarely feel the need to drop lists like this.

Also you must be able to quote at length from the original Time Cube by memory.

Tell her that most girls lose their cartwheel magic as they get older. Encourage her to keep it up and to not ever be afraid to do one!

I certainly wouldn’t put it past home depot to hire elementary school kids!

Most people who breathe are good people. Most people running the big AI companies are not. That is the difference.

I’m not sure he’s really comparable to the typical ICE case. Obviously if you’re fighting the deportation, you’ll be in the camps for months. But my understanding is that people in there are under constant pressure to sign paperwork agreeing to a rapid deportation. They get paperwork shoved in their face in a language they can’t read and are told to sign it. ICE agents actively try and trick immigrants into signing away their rights, thus allowing their rapid deportation.

Ultimately, all this is being run by racists who want as many brown people out of the country as fast as possible. They don’t just want to keep millions of brown people in cages for the fun of it; they want to deport millions of brown people. And as long as we’re not in full “extermination camp” territory yet, achieving that goal means moving people through the system as fast as possible. Stephen Miller’s aims are advanced by brown people sitting in plane seats, not brown people sitting in cages.

I remember a story from awhile back about a court case involving an immigrant that was voluntarily seeking deportation, but was still being held by ICE. But the article treated it as a surprising oddity. It was such a notable occurrence that it was the exception that proved the rule. As far as I know, generally, if you’re willing to sign away your rights to appear in immigration court, you can get out of the system pretty quickly by opting for voluntary deportation. That’s almost certainly what Milo did.

None of this to excuse any of ICE’s crimes. But as I understand it, if detained immigrants are willing to sign away their rights to fight the deportation, they can move through the system fairly quickly. Again, it does the racists no good to prevent the people they hate from leaving.

You’re ignoring that the real problem is that when AI is concerned, tech companies have demonstrated that they have a rapist’s understanding of consent.

Eh. I can’t complain about the results. Feels fine! 😅

That can be arranged… 😂