The two that immediately come to mind are Clarence Darrow and Cicero.

I think it’s a reaction to another institutional tendency, which is to treat the best known theories as if they were incontrovertible facts.

Science and history are largely the search for closer and closer approximations to truth, but those approximations are always flawed and incomplete. And if they’re presented as already-attained truths, a critic can point out the flaws as evidence of deliberate deception—and then present any alternative they like without its being subjected to the same scrutiny.

The current version of Affinity is great and will continue to work forever—there’s no need to switch to an alternative if you’re already using it. I just don’t have much hope for its future development.

Just over a year ago.

I guess technically, Raspbian.

The Affinity Suite is great, but I’m suspicious of its acquisition by Canva—I’m afraid their solution to “bringing the suite to Linux” will be turning it into a web service.

Carrier pigeon.

They’re NFPA 704 signs.

So “Tim Apple” is CEO of Apple, and Tim Pool is on the White House press pool.

Does Trump just believe in some kind of obligate nominative determinism? If I change my name to “Tim General”, can I sit on the National Security Council?

Everyone’s citing Christianity, but that’s not completely accurate—monogamy isn’t really promoted by the New Testament outside of the letters of the apostles, who were trying to appeal to a Roman audience. The Christian church enforced monogamy through the Middle Ages, but it was originally adopted from the Romans.

As for why the Romans practiced it, there are several theories—one is that Roman women had relatively higher status compared to women in most Middle Eastern cultures; another is that the prospect of marriage for more men made Roman armies more effective.

Crow and octopus. Both are moderately devious without being prohibitively dangerous.

Ok… but if someone told you they found their wife and neighbor boffing, would you assume that meant they were doing scientific research?

Most hated is “boffin” for scientist—“boff” is American slang for sex, so it sounds like calling them “fuckers” (which generally doesn’t seem to be the intended connotation).

It’s an emergent phenomenon—institutions will naturally behave in ways that increase their power, without that necessarily being the conscious intention of any given member.

The older the average pope, the shorter the average term, and the more papal elections in a given span of time.

One of the main powers of cardinals is electing the pope, so more papal elections means more power for the college of cardinals.

Looks like a Roman-style lozenge-shaped plate fibula.

A steelman argument (the opposite of a strawman).

A Mid-Atlantic accent?

Any accent of English, including more recent ones, perceived as a mixture of American and British English, and often perceived as incorporating the prestige speech of one or both countries

One metric you might want to add is the network effect: how much of a difference does it make to the user experience to join a large instance (or the same instance most of your friends are on) compared to a small or self-hosted one? (Or in other words—does the nature of the platform software potentially incentivize consolidation?)

This Is How You Lose the Time War