And Hillary’s emails.

Depends how you define “tourist,” I suppose.

I missed that. Seems like they are already using it to send anybody they don’t like.

https://www.cbsnews.com/amp/news/guantanamo-bay-immigration-detainees-asia-africa-europe/

Like when our dog died, my dad tanned the hide, wore it as a cape, and played with the other dog?

And even with that, you are glossing over the Spanish Flu. The “peaceful” time since the '50s included numerous massive wars, not least of which was the Vietnam war.

The idea that every time period has its own chaos is the whole point of the song We Didn’t Start the Fire, written in 1989.

Anybody else remember Cheyney singing “bomb bomb bomb, bomb bomb Iran?”

I have been to many Nelson Mandela museums, and spoken with a lot of people who lived through the end of Apartheid. When he took power, both the black and white populations were gearing up for civil war. One guy told me that there were charts up at his school showing the likely kinds of grenades that could be thrown at him. Anyway, Mandela managed to calm things down. He might have been the only guy who could have navigated that exact time period. He did it through a series of policy changes, meetings with key leaders, and speeches. Entirely peaceful, but importantly, there had also been huge amounts of violence leading up to his release from prison and becoming president.

Did the racists change their minds? I don’t know. But the transition to the new government was peaceful.

Thousands of dollars for your books? Three books hardly counts as a collection.

I just finished marking student reports. There are some sections clearly written without AI, some that clearly are written by AI, and then some sections where the ideas are correct, the grammar is perfect, and it is on topic, but it doesn’t seem like it is written in the student’s voice. Could be AI, could be a friend editing, could be plagiarism, could be written long before or after the surrounding paragraphs. It is not always obvious, and the edge cases are the problem.

Perfect grammar and slightly unusual words in a paragraph. Could be a weird formulation from a student’s mind, could be AI. No way to really know.

South Africa doesn’t want him.

Yeah, that is terrible! Spending $50k on something that might be helpful or useful in the future! We should have used that money to purchase one JDAM kit so we can bomb more people.

A few years before WWI, Russia had a disastrous war against the Japanese, whom they had considered an inferior, small opponent that would be defeated quickly.

Time is a flat circle.

These are research grants. Trade schools do not do the type of research Harvard scientists do. It is the leading research institution in the world for many fields. Most of those grants are on the order of less than a million dollars and fund young, untenured researchers who will become the next generation of scientists. Alum sponsorships are almost always earmarked, and never for research purposes.

Stopped at re-entry to the US.

Just had a prominent colleague return from a conference in Italy. He was stopped at the border and questioned for several hours, making him miss his flight.

NASA is about to have its budget slashed, which will be devastating for space science. Private industry does not and cannot fill the gap. Please write to your congressman to save NASA and science funding: https://www.planetary.org/advocacy-action-center#/53

Yeah, defense spending is something like half the discretionary budget. Obviously the place to start when cutting waste, but not politically viable for arcane reasons.

1. The Colour of Magic
2. The Light Fantastic
3. Everything else

You need to read more Terry Pratchett.

Of course, everyone does.