Another laziness by the professors is using book questions instead of just writing their own.

When I taught I told my students that the book was a resource for studying the material from a different perspective than the one I gave in lectures. Not actually required for the course even though I didn’t have control over it being listed as required on the course listing. And I told them if they wanted to get it, they should find the cheapest copy they could. I’ve heard you can sometimes find very cheap electronic copies (wink wink).

It is funny to see the questions you write end up on Chegg though.

A favorite for me is “That’s not a good prize!”

Good suggestions, and yeah if someone has an accent I’m trying to identify I’ll usually ask about the accent and region I think it’s from.

I still feel a slight ick from “originally.” And usually I’m talking with people from my general region and I’m really just asking what local town they grew up in, so it’s sometimes more “did you grow up in [current location, or area they’re talking about]?”

IMO 59/60 should be about the max for a first term president. That would put them at retirement age if they serve two terms. I think Walz is a great choice to make the whole thing more palatable to progressives like me (who feel that now for a third time in a row we’ve been deprived of a fair primary). I do wish the VP were a little younger than the president to set them up for a run of their own afterwards. Not sure if Walz has any intention of running afterwards, but we’d be right back to a retirement age candidate if Kamala serves two terms.

Personally, I’d like to see more presidents in their 40s or early 50s. That’s plenty of time to get “experience” while still in principle being able to understand the needs of the majority of people. Plus it helps that they’ll still live for a while in the world they shape after their term.

I really hate that racists have ruined a perfectly good question. I often want to actually ask people where in the US they’re from, but I can’t ask the straightforward “where are you from?” if the person isn’t white because I know it can easily be interpreted as the racist version.

Instead I now ask “are you from [city we’re in]?” to try to make it clear I’m assuming they’re from the US.

Yeah, man. I’ll gnaw your face off.

- Teh C.

I said consummate Vs. Consummate!!

We had that light switch installed for you so you could turn the lights on and off. Not so you could throw light switch raves!

That’s weird since I just got an email for a “payment due” on 8/15. It is so fucking exhausting to try to keep up with all the bajillion different “payment plans” and if you don’t choose the right one based on all the misinformation out there then fuck you, you don’t get the tasty breadcrumbs we’re leaving in hidden corners.

I am so tired of my student loan payments changing or being threatened to change all the time. Just tell me how much I owe you each month and leave me the fuck alone. I need to focus on budgeting groceries.

Sheesh, now I feel actually attacked a little. I was being mostly hyperbolic, but you can do really useful things with complex figures in presentations. For example: revealing elements sequentially to build up to the final figure or altering opacity of different elements to bring the audience’s attention to specific parts of the figure.

This sequencing can sometimes very subtly alter the size of the figure as you change elements, so the default positioning will slightly change from one slide to the next. Most people won’t care or notice when a figure slightly drifts by a pixel or two during these sequences, but it bothers me tremendously so I add adjustments to keep every variation of the figure aligned on the slides.

I feel personally attacked. Brb, making presentation slides in beamer and compiling 1000 times to get the figure to the exact right pixel.

I definitely won’t make any changes to the figure later that will make me have to adjust the position again. Why yes, this is better than PowerPoint, why do you ask?

Shoutout to Prestogeorge Coffee & Tea in Pittsburgh. Haven’t been able to find coffee I like better than their roasts. I get their Antigua Guatemala Continental (dark roast) and Nicaragua Shade Grown (medium roast) and blend them together when I grind.

They used to have a Nicaragua Honey Processed coffee I’d get, but it seems like they don’t carry that one anymore so I switched to the shade grown.

IMO, an agreement to get married should be a mutual discussion, not a surprise. My wife and I also decided to get married by having a discussion and then went ring shopping together. We went with a blue topaz. Super pretty and didn’t break the bank.

You need to grapple with this and figure out how to acknowledge the damage the DNC did to the party in 2016. You are only continuing to hurt party unity by pretending it didn’t happen.

I’m not saying Bernie would definitely have won or anything. Chances are Hillary would have won in a fair election anyway. I’m saying the people were robbed of a fair election so we can’t know what would have happened. If you’re truly interested in justifying democracy you should be outraged by that rather than denying it.

But sure, a pithy “lmao” definitely does the trick too.

…In an unfair election with the organizing body tipping the scale all throughout the process. So no, you can’t point to the votes to wave away the corruption that influenced those votes.

Oh, come on. You can’t justify a corrupt process by pointing to the final results of the corrupt process.

I itemized for the first time this year so I couldn’t use it, but I did fill it out completely as a comparison point to make sure itemizing was worth it. It was pretty painless, not very different from free filing through various other companies.

We are nowhere near advanced enough to say that life, complex or intelligent, doesn’t exist anywhere near us. There is no reason to believe an intelligent spacefaring race would make themselves so obviously detectable that us stupid primates could see them. And for non-intelligent life, we’ve been able to confirm mere thousands of planets. We have a very long way to go before we can start talking about the meaningfulness of a lack of life signatures in the atmosphere.

We haven’t progressed far enough to be detectable by intelligent life in other star systems, even the closest ones. The filter can easily be in front of us. It could just simply be that interstellar space travel is too infeasible, so intelligent species never reach beyond their home system.

Using racial slurs isn’t only damaging and insulting to the person being directly talked to or about. I suggest adopting a blanket position against racial slurs in any context.