Sheng Wang had short hair when he first got into the standup game:

https://youtu.be/Qvo9stCkbyA

Both Jimmy O. Yang and Sheng Wang are hilarious, but you should recognize that they are two different people.

I’m convinced that Damon Baehrel is a semi-fake restaurant. Like, it’s real, but doesn’t actually take reservations or serve real guests, and the owner/chef lies about everything in order to seem more mysterious.

This article from 2016 lays out the case.

So I don’t think it’s a particularly good example of fine dining, as it’s doing a lot of things different from a normal restaurant that is open to members of the public.

Author of The Six Habits

Is this lady the hitchhiker from There’s Something About Mary, copying Stephen Covey’s Seven Habits of Highly Effective People?

Hitchhiker : You heard of this thing, the 8-Minute Abs?

Ted : Yeah, sure, 8-Minute Abs. Yeah, the exercise video.

Hitchhiker : Yeah, this is going to blow that right out of the water. Listen to this: 7… Minute… Abs.

Ted : Right. Yes. OK, all right. I see where you’re going.

Hitchhiker : Think about it. You walk into a video store, you see 8-Minute Abs sittin’ there, there’s 7-Minute Abs right beside it. Which one are you gonna pick, man?

Ted : I would go for the 7.

Hitchhiker : Bingo, man, bingo. 7-Minute Abs. And we guarantee just as good a workout as the 8-minute folk.

Ted : You guarantee it? That’s - how do you do that?

Hitchhiker : If you’re not happy with the first 7 minutes, we’re gonna send you the extra minute free. You see? That’s it. That’s our motto. That’s where we’re comin’ from. That’s from “A” to “B”.

Ted : That’s right. That’s - that’s good. That’s good. Unless, of course, somebody comes up with 6-Minute Abs. Then you’re in trouble, huh?

[Hitchhiker convulses]

Hitchhiker : No! No, no, not 6! I said 7. Nobody’s comin’ up with 6. Who works out in 6 minutes? You won’t even get your heart goin, not even a mouse on a wheel.

Ted : That - good point.

Hitchhiker : 7’s the key number here. Think about it. 7-Elevens. 7 dwarves. 7, man, that’s the number. 7 chipmunks twirlin’ on a branch, eatin’ lots of sunflowers on my uncle’s ranch. You know that old children’s tale from the sea. It’s like you’re dreamin’ about Gorgonzola cheese when it’s clearly Brie time, baby.

italics

Is this a slur for Italian people?

I’ve been pondering orbs, don’t know what y’all are doing.

Which room though?

recipes are basically an engineering text

I would love to see more systematic recipe formats.

Around 15-20 years ago there was a website called “Cooking for Engineers” that used a table format for recipes that was pretty clever, and a very useful diagram for how to visualize the steps (at least for someone like me). I don’t think he ever updated the site to be mobile friendly but you can see it here:

Cheesecake
Dirty Rice

He describes the recipe in a descriptive way, but down at the bottom it lists ingredients and how they go together in a chart that shows what amounts to use, what ingredients go into a particular step, what that step is, and how the product of that step feeds into the next step.

You’re thinking of indigo.

Red

Orange

Yellow

Green

Blue

Violet

That’s 6.

The law falls back to a bunch of hidden rules if the language isn’t explicit.

“No vehicles in the park” is a simple rule, but then poses problems when you have to ask whether that includes baby strollers, regular bicycles, or electric assist bicycles, whether there’s an exception for ambulances in an emergency, etc.

Somewhat famously, there was a case a decade or so ago where someone was prosecuted under Sarbanes Oxley’s obstruction of justice provisions, passed to criminalize Enron-like accounting coverups. The guy was convicted for tossing undersized fish overboard to avoid prosecution for violating fish and wildlife rules. The statute made it a crime for anyone who “knowingly alters, destroys, mutilates, conceals, covers up, falsifies, or makes a false entry in any record, document, or tangible object with the intent to impede, obstruct, or influence” a federal investigation. So the Supreme Court had to figure out whether a fish is a “tangible object” in the meaning of the law, when it is clearly a “tangible object” within the normal meaning of the term, but not the type of object that stores records, as everything else described in the criminal statute.

So that just means, in the end, simplicity of language can betray complexity of meaning underneath. Lawyers tend to prefer to make things clear up front so that there’s no uncertainty later on, and that just leads to unreasonably complicated language.

But imagine describing an area in meter•feet instead of square feet or square meters. That could really piss everyone off.

You don’t need an extra document to define each term as it is expected that others in the field will understand the language used.

For lawyers, it’s the opposite, actually. Lawyers are overly cautious and choose to explicitly define terms themselves, all the time. If they can reference a definition already in a specific law, great. But they’ll go ahead and explicitly make that link, instead of relying on the reader to assume they know which law to look up.

So any serious contract tends to use pages and pages of definitions at the beginning.

Imagine programmers being reluctant to use other people’s libraries, but using the same function and variable names with slightly different actual meanings/purposes depending on the program. That’s what legal drafting is like.

Probably. But it’s also a bit of a difficult question to compare the two.

One prominent estimate is that about half of all humans who have ever lived died from mosquito-related illness, about 50 billion of the 100 billion humans who have ever lived.

For humans, it’s estimated that about 3-4% of paleolithic humans died from violence at the hands of another person, and that number may have risen to about 12% during medieval history, before plummetting in the modern age.

But that’s the comparison of direct violence versus illness. Humans have a strong capacity to indirectly cause death, including by starvation, illness, indirect trauma. How do we count deaths from being intentionally starved as part of a siege? Or biological weapons, including the time the Nazis intentionally flooded Italian marshes to increase malaria? Do we double count those as both human and mosquito deaths?

And then there’s unintentional deaths, caused by indifference or recklessness or negligence. Humans have caused famines, floods, fires, etc.

So yeah, mosquitoes probably win. But don’t sleep on humans. And remember that the count is still going on, and humans can theoretically take the lead in the future.

Ok but mosquitoes historically are the #1 killers of humans, by an order of magnitude

Homo sapien: am I a joke to you?

I would think that an ad for something would paint that thing in a favorable light, not make it look gross and weird and unappealing.

Same but also because I haven’t felt the desire to get taco bell without having been drinking first.

We shall name it of course after our beloved queen.

Yes, of course. Sorry.

Let it pass and hail to this glorious land, Virginia!

Er…What? Who’s Virginia?

The Queen of England, you dog!

Oh, right. Except…I don’t know how to put this. She’s not called Virginia, but Elizabeth.

I’m well aware of that, but she is, I trust you will agree, a virgin.

Er… Yeah, as far as I know. I mean, I’m sure she is.

But do we want to name a country after that fact?

Source

I mean that’s basically why a lot of us are great at small talk: we actually do care about the contents of that low stakes conversation with strangers.

No sorry this is gastro-entomology.

What is violet at the end of the visible spectrum, then? We call the higher wavelength stuff ultraviolet, and violet looks purple to me, so I’m having trouble reconciling this stuff with what you’re saying.