I have a feeling that a few steps are missing between trololo and Monty Python… right? guys? Geez, I’m getting old.

It’s all in a day’s work for… bicycle repair man. <snort>

That’s just the way it is.

When Reddit was new, it mentioned Digg a lot.
When Digg was new, it mentioned /. a lot.
When /. was new (yes, I was there, too), it mentioned Usenet a lot.

At some points in time, the likes of The WELL, the Facepunch forums and Metafilter got their own mentions, prompting me to check them out.

The Weather Man… Cobra Verde… Even though the latter could have hardly ever been called mainstream.

The next iteration of gaslighting is already here: That it’s no big deal anyway since you can just use an ad blocker. Riiight, let’s all just turn our eyes away to make the monster go away. Surely, it’ll get bored and stop listening and recording, and surely, it will not sell its collected data off to banks, insurance providers, the government, law enforcement… right?

Normative nihilism is going to get us all.

Needs more “amazing.” Seriously, screw these corporate ass monkeys.

Far more often than not, even bloody revolutions do not achieve their goals, or lead to merely cosmetic and/ or short-lived changes. E.g. Kent Gang Deng investigated 269 major peasant rebellions over 2106 years of Chinese history. Guess how many of these actually rewrote history in any way, shape or form.
Recently, I’ve been reading several interesting pieces on the “Occupy” movement, the related G20 and other protests in the Western world, dating back as far as the 1960s. The bottom line being: asking nicely for some minimum demands that even conservative politicians can get behind, like capping CEOs’ wages, will not get the job done. In fact, some of the powers that be can use it for their internal power struggles and to show it off as a sort of legitimization folklore. “See how democratic we are? We even have protesters in little tents! Don’t worry, they aren’t hurting anyone.”
All hope is not lost, though, if new protest modalities can be found.

“The Black Hole” is such an interesting case, I really loved watching it as a kid. Reruns were shown on TV every other year or so when I was little. Once I bought the DVD, I realized just how corny it was… up until the point where Maximilian Schell made his Wagnerian entrance. From then on, it became a very different movie, something I could neither understand nor appreciate as a kid.

What in the world is going on with Elsie’s hand in the “second of the five photographs?”

• I found that on European platforms, you can speak anonymously and A LOT more candidly about topics censored on American ones, e.g. SH, nearly all “adult” topics covered in great detail, and what have you.
• My landlord would have a very hard time kicking me out for almost any reason, even if I turned the entire apartment into a swamp.

In fact, the only item from OP’s list that rings true to me is the boss one. They will always find a way of getting back to you, legal or not.

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Really good movie, BTW. A lot better than expected. Thanks for reminding me.

Men were depicted with pubes, though. See the article, too.
A female friend of mine actually did her bachelor’s thesis on body hair removal across certain cultures and time periods. Fun discussions were had.
Short version, body hair removal on both women and men has been around for a very long time and is subject to changes. Depictions of nude bodies follow somewhat different rules, though. If they are at all permissible, that is.

Crazy how dated this discussion is already.

Two for me.

Depends? Liquid nitrogen can freeze a lot of vibrational degrees of freedom in place, but if you want molecular rotations to stop as well, there’s no way around He.

Oh is that so?

Yeah, this one had me kind of excited. The atmospheres of Earth and Venus are, in fact, both quite aggressive, but Earth’s is very oxidative and somewhat acidic whereas for Venus, it’s the other way around. As a consequence, on Venus, stuff like carbohydrates would break down easily, especially in that kind of temperatures. As a consequence, life would have to be very different from Earth’s, and any search would have to account for that.
As for how phosphine could be created on Venus, maybe something like this: 4 H2O + 4 SO2 + H3PO4 → PH3 + 4 H2SO4, which is likely endothermic. So there would have to be a very specific advantage for a life form to bother creating it.