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This is awesome, and also bordering on dwarven !!SCIENCE!!

The only thing that stops a bad guy with a flask of acid, is a good guy with a flask of acid?

Or maybe the good guy's flask should have a buffering agent?

Yes, but it doesn’t matter, these people don’t read the Bible.

They do read the Bible though, at least in my experience. I've gone to a number of different churches, Evangelical and otherwise, and the Evangelical or otherwise Calvinist folks were the ones that read the Bible the most and in the most detail — but perhaps also the ones who came to horrible conclusions the most often. Like that you should shine the light of Christ into the world by blocking women for promotion at your job, because 1 Tim 2:12 says that Paul does not permit them to have authority over men. (Real example, if possibly the worst one I've seen.) Maybe my experience is not representative, but I don't think the problem is primarily that Evangelicals don't read the Bible.

I have a long theory about some of the ways that Evangelicalism distorts Scripture, but one root of the issue is that (IMHO) Scripture was written by humans, reflects the biases of the authors and their societies, and has a lot of horrible things in it. If you take a sola scriptura view and then read it through a lens that's been cultivated over years to reinforce patriarchy and supremacy (see e.g. Manifest Destiny, the curse of Ham, etc) then you will end up absorbing the genocidal and supremacist bits and not the hospitable and altruistic bits.

For them, it’s just an excuse to do whatever it is they’re doing.

For sure. People don't want to repent. They want to find justifications for what they were already doing, or planning to do.

I think the point might be reasonably condensed to:

• Africa is big and diverse, and its internal geographic barriers (particularly the Sahara) are more significant than the ones dividing it from Europe and from southwest Asia.
• Some parts of Africa have thousands of years of written or otherwise well-documented history, and each part has seen several waves of significant change, including colonization from other areas of Africa (e.g. by Egypt or Mali), from Europe (e.g. by Rome), and from southwest Asia (e.g. by the Umayyads); and colonization of other areas (e.g. of the Iberian peninsula by Morocco).
• For some parts of Africa, the latest round of European colonization is arguably less significant than previous changes.
• Thus, for serious discussions of history, "pre-colonial Africa" is not a useful division to make: you won't be able to say anything meaningful without more precisely specifying the time and region (e.g. "medieval west Africa").
• This isn't fixed by changing to "pre-European Africa".
• Both "pre-colonial Africa" and "pre-European Africa" additionally suck because, instead of using a more relevant division, you are using a less-relevant Eurocentric term.

So I wrote a long-ass rundown of this but it won't post for some reason (too long)? So TLDR: this is a 17,600-word nothingburger.

DJB is a brilliant, thorough and accomplished cryptographer. He has also spent the past 5 years burning his reputation to the ground, largely by exhaustively arguing for positions that correlate more with his ego than with the truth. Not just this position. It's been a whole thing.

DJB's accusation, that NSA is manipulating this process to promote a weaker outcome, is plausible. They might have! It's a worrisome possibility! The community must be on guard against it! But his argument that it actually happened is rambling, nitpicky and dishonest, and as far as I can tell the other experts in the community do not agree with it.

So yes, take NIST's recommendation for Kyber with a grain of salt. Use Kyber768 + X448 or whatever instead of just Kyber512. But also take DJB's accusations with a grain of salt.

People do build water control megaprojects to route (canals, aqueducts) and store freshwater (dams and reservoirs) and to prevent flooding (levees, dikes, etc). Cross-country aqueducts are just hugely expensive and generally don’t move enough water to be worthwhile.

Kyber is a to-be-NIST-standardized lattice encryption scheme.

I worry that Buzzfeed’s meaningless AI regurgitation is what most of the internet will look like in 10 years. Ask an AI for its take on an already silly question (Europe is large and diverse) which it is patently unqualified to answer. Maybe ask in English for good measure, guaranteeing further bias. Then take the meanest, most body-shaming and stereotyped answers and post them straight to the website, with a disclaimer that the assholery therein isn’t your assholery, it’s the AI’s assholery.

It really feels like a scene from Idiocracy, but with the dysgenics replaced by AI.

Some further flavor to reinforce this: as I understand it, abortion is legal in the Netherlands until the fetus is viable, which was estimated to be 24 weeks but due to better care for premies IIUC it’s moving toward 22. After this time it is only legal in the case of serious medical problems: eg a risk to the life of the would-be mother, or because the fetus isn’t viable due to a defect. Until this year there was also a 5-day waiting period for abortions; I think that’s no longer legally mandated but the doctor still has input. I believe they also require more medical scrutiny after the first trimester.

IMHO these are common-sense restrictions, though you could argue about the exact details. Abortion is accessible if you need it, but after a certain point a fetus is close enough to a person that its interests must also be taken into account.

The official abortion rate in NL is slightly over 1/3 of that in the US. It may or may not actually be the lowest in the world: it’s hard to collect statistics in some places, especially where abortion is discouraged or illegal, or even in places where you would get one with no medical supervision (by pills taken at home).

The Netherlands also has a low maternal mortality rate, around 1/5th of the US, and also one of the lowest in the world (says CIA world factbook), though I’m not sure how consistent these measurements are across countries.

The US could achieve these things too, and likely have a lower abortion rate than it can achieve even through draconian restrictions. But it would require proper education and medical care, and that’s not what certain states want… they want the crueler option.

A absurd grump for an absurd headline: What toasts my buns about this article is that it uses hot dogs as a unit of “size” when it really means length. The asteroid is actually the size of millions of hotdogs, because asteroids and hotdogs are both three-dimensional.

Yeah, crêpes seem like the wrong dish.

As an American, I think that natural peanut butter is delicious in the right context. It goes well on puffed rice cakes, with a little salt if it’s unsalted. It’s good with celery as a snack, and it’s an ingredient in some sauces. It can dry out your mouth, so make sure to drink water too.

The classic American use is peanut butter sandwiches, optionally with jam. IMHO these are pretty mid, but their main advantage is that they’re energy dense and don’t require refrigeration. So they’re good for hiking, at least if you have enough water.

Edited to add: also good in cookies, with chocolate, with bananas, and probably some other things I’m forgetting.