The S1 ED coming back put a giant grin on my face. It feels good to take a break from the heavy stuff these past few episodes with some light hearted good vibes in this episode

They fired him for that? What did he have to do to keep his job in that situation, pull out Kirk's corpse and fellate it? A fascist got what he spent his life working to deserve. It's the crowning achievement of his life work to build a stochastically terrorized society that can be bent to the whim of billionaires and autocrats. There's no need to pussyfoot around like this is a national tragedy unless you are more interested in upholding the status quo than you are in reporting. Oh. Right...

It's might not be a payphone, it might be an emergency phone. Never been to Korea, but some really long bridges in the US will have these spread across the bridge span so that if you break down and don't have access to a working cellphone, you can walk to them and call for assistance after pulling over. The Chesapeake Bay Bridge Tunnel comes to mind

Not really, he wasn't. The myth of Nazi/fascist competence comes from a combination of propaganda and "right time, right place" in terms of when they took the reins of the German economy. A kind of funny example that isn't Nazis, but their contemporary fascists, Mussolini's Italian regime damaged the on-time performance of trains in Italy, but the regime kept saying the trains were running on time to the point where it's become a whole saying about excusing fascism because of its competence/results ("at least the trains run on time").

Instructions unclear, hid roadkill bear in Central Park

There are people who retire on 1/1000th of that. This man made almost a lifetime's worth of money in the same amount of time it takes most people to get a single good night's sleep. Truly unfathomable wealth hoarding behavior

Ah yes, the west. The monolithic political entity that definitely involves nobody who is critical of Donald Trump's ravings. Trump and his sycophants have no place to criticize thanks to his words and actions. Anybody who gets behind his proposed annexations has no place to criticize. But there's a lot of daylight between those groups and the entirety of "the west", both within and without the US. If Brazil or South Africa want to criticize Trump's annexation threats, their involvement in BRICS wouldn't invalidate that criticism so long as they are also willing to criticize the threatening words and actions of Jinping and Putin. The world is not (yet) composed of 1984-esque political monoliths, and there is no need to voluntarily give up that heterogeneity in order to silence criticism of aggressive and threatening geopolitics

Am one of those "assholes". Kamala was far from my favorite candidate in 2020, but I just donated a hefty (for me) chunk of change and will be volunteering. I didn't need perfection, just a feasible path to victory in November and now we have it. I'm so pumped right now, project 2025 no longer looks like an inevitability. LFG!

Radiation does not by definition make things it impacts radioactive, and most of the lingering effects that we associate with radiation have to do with radioactive particles that are left behind by the atmosphere. Since there is no particulate matter traveling between the sun and Mars (photons not withstanding), the surface of Mars would not be expected to acquire radioactive properties from an acute solar radiation event like this one. However, an entity on the surface of Mars would be exposed to radiation from the Sun, much more so than an entity on/near earth and it's magnetosphere (Mars' thin atmosphere and distance from the sun probably helps reduce that disparity relative to something in say low earth orbit, but I don't think it fully equalizes or shifts the scales). I am not an astrophysicist, so there's at least a 20% chance I got part of that wrong.

Pi is an infinite series of non-repeating digits, and yet you will never find the letter A in pi because there is a 0% chance of the letter A being a digit in a decimal system. By the same logic, infinite possibilities do not guarantee that every conceivable state occurs, if that conceivable state has a 0% probability. As finite beings, it is very difficult for us to accurately distinguish between a 0% probability and a infinitesimal probability, so we end up circling back to "we don't know"

Based on the Wikipedia article on biological immortality referencing species that live for a couple hundred years and the Wikipedia page on armillaria ostoyae mentioning living specimens that are multiple millenia old (and thousands of acres large!), I'm guessing that may be what the prof is referring to?

Actions or action? I was infuriated by the railroad strike response, and I'll never view that as anything but a miserable decision, but Biden was also the first president to join picket lines with the UAW strike and, for what it's worth, leaders of the railroad unions did give him some credit for helping negotiate for the sick day benefits they were able to earn in the months following. He's no Mother Jones by a longshot, but grading the balance of his actions on the curve of US politicians, he's a C+ at worst