I think most people here are missing the point of the meme. Interpreting it as “you too can write a culture-defining fantasy novel at 45!” is naive at best and intellectually dishonest at worst.

The message here is that you shouldn’t feel bad about yourself if you haven’t started on your plans yet. I can say this from experience because I didn’t finish high school until my 30s and then finished university just when I hit 40. I’m starting my first job post-graduation this Monday after a year and a half of searching for a job.

I still have so much I want to get done. None of these things involve fame or fortune. These are basic things like learning how to mix a drink, learning how to make a great hot sauce from home grown peppers, learning aquascaping and how to keep a Walstad aquarium, learning how to play a musical instrument, learning how to repair vintage electronics (especially vintage computers and game consoles), learning how to use a telescope to make deliberate observations, learning how to cook Chinese food…

On and on and on it goes. No one should feel bad for taking as long as they need to accomplish their goals. No one should feel bad for having modest goals. Whether you’re 15 or 45 or 65, you shouldn’t feel like it’s too late to do the things you want to do!

But what if you grind the head into sausage? How do they deal with that? I guess the sausage grows into a new head without memories?

They never die! That’s the absurdity of “death isn’t a thing but otherwise nothing else changes.”

Their face is still burned! You’d have to reduce them down to a brain in a vat. But then all they have is the memory of that searing pain.

The claim is no death. That means if you burn someone at the stake their body turns into a charred husk but they’re still alive and now they’re trapped in this state of unimaginable agony forever, unable to die but also totally helpless and in constant searing pain.

Burying someone alive. Or trapping their feet in cement shoes and throwing them into the ocean.

Integration: just think about driving somewhere in your car. How long it takes you to get there depends on how fast you’re going as well as the total distance you need to travel. This is easy to figure out if you’re going exactly one constant speed for the entire trip.

But what if you’re driving in the city and you’re speeding up and slowing down all the time? Maybe sometimes you even need to go in reverse which takes you further away from the destination! So the problem you have is that your speed is changing throughout the trip (sometimes even going negative when you’re driving in reverse) and you still want to somehow figure out how long it takes.

Perhaps you might have thought of a straightforward (albeit tedious) way of getting the answer: record your current speed and the current time in a notebook every so often and then multiply each speed by the time interval to get all these small slices of distance travelled, then add them all up at the end. Congratulations, that’s the idea behind integration!

There’s one problem though: your speed might be changing throughout each time interval so the answer you get has all these mistakes that just add up to give you an inaccurate result! Solution: make all the time intervals smaller! This way each time interval includes a more accurate speed, so there will be less errors when we add them all up. Thus the theory of integration is that we can make the intervals arbitrarily small (as small as we want) to get an answer as accurate as we want all the way down to infinite intervals of infinitesimal length which ought to give us the exact answer (and it does)!

Differentiation (calculation of derivatives): the opposite of integration. This takes an entire trip in the car and gives us the ability to calculate our exact speed at any instant in time. Unlike how we might calculate an average speed by looking at the total distance travelled over a time interval and dividing it by that length of time, a derivative gives us the exact speed at a moment in time!

Anyway I hope those two rough explanations help illuminate things a bit for you. Integration and differentiation (calculus) are actually way more useful than just for calculating speeds and distances. For example, the same ideas can be used to calculate the area of an irregular shape (divide it up into squares and add them all up, making the squares smaller helps reduce the errors around the edges) or the volume of an irregular container! Or the slope of a hill at any point on its surface! Or perhaps the lowest point of a valley (using a technique called gradient descent).

That last one is actually very commonly used in artificial intelligence as a training technique. There you’re trying to find the minimum point in some higher dimensional data, according to some rules you have. With gradient descent you use differentiation to find the slope and then you take a small step along the slope towards that minimum point, then repeat!

Love integration! Much more fun than derivatives!

Yes, in order to talk to his closest ally, the United States!

Shamelessly stolen from a Simpsons meme group I frequent.

It’s self-consciousness (less charitably called hack writing or selling out). These are game developers trying to chase market trends rather than following their hearts.

Some are honestly trying to make games that they themselves would love. But it does have a bit of the feel of “I love ice cream and I love dill pickles, so why not dill pickle ice cream?!”

Yeah. My city put in bike lanes literally everywhere and I never see anyone on them. They still have to cross traffic all over the place so they’re really not much safer.

On the other hand, there are some bike paths that were put in next to the old railroad. These rarely cross traffic and they have people riding them all the time.

Oh yes, the 32X was one of the things that killed Sega. It wasn’t the only thing.

The Sega Saturn, as beloved a console it is with fans now, was deeply flawed. Because Sega couldn’t make up their minds whether to stay with 2D sprite hardware or to go all-in on 3D (as the PlayStation and N64 did), they ended up doing the worst compromise and including hardware for both.

The result, a dual-CPU and 8 processor architecture, was complex and difficult for developers to take full advantage of. It was also very expensive at $399 US, a full $100 more than the $299 PSX.

A big issue with the Saturn’s development was that Sega of America president Tom Kalinske wanted to make a deal with Silicon Graphics but Sega of Japan refused. As we all know, Nintendo made that deal and the Nintendo 64’s powerful hardware was the result.

Sega Saturn’s failure wasn’t just a major financial setback for Sega, it really damaged Sega’s brand in the consumer eye. They went from extremely cool with the Genesis / Mega Drive to out of touch and irrelevant with the Saturn.

The fact that the Dreamcast later fixed all of the Saturn’s issues made it an awesome console, but it was too little too late!

The 32X was one of the things that killed Sega. Making add-ons or expansions for existing consoles has proven to be a failed business model.

The problem? It fragments the player base. Game developers want the largest number of people to be able to buy their games. If your console has 3 different add-ons and only a fraction of the players have each one then game developers are going to ignore that add-ons to focus on developing for the base console which they know everyone will have.

So you end up spending a lot of time and money developing add-ons that developers are all but guaranteed to ignore and so players will ignore the add-ons because they don’t have enough games available for them. You’re far, far better off taking the time and money you would have put into an add-on and instead put it into the next generation console.

Yes, for the same reason (fragmented player base) it’s also hard to convince developers to move to your new next gen console. However, you have a few advantages with a new console that the add-on doesn’t have. For one, you can sell the new console to customers who never bought your previous console. For another, you’re not restricted by the hardware requirements or limitations of the old console in any way. This makes the new console easier to develop and easier to distinguish (graphics wise), making it a much more attractive buy for customers. The ease of development of the new, clean-slate console means it can often be a lot cheaper but also with better graphics and sound, more capabilities etc. because it doesn’t rely on the old technology (electronics wise) of the previous console.

Lastly, and this is a big one, you can convince game developers that the next gen console is the future and you are going all-in on it by stopping sales of the old console. You can’t do that with an add-on for obvious reasons!

James Dean. Credited in only 3 films (appeared in a few more as an extra):

• East of Eden
• Rebel Without a Cause
• Giant

All 3 are above average on IMDb (> 7).

Plan 9 from Outer Space!

Dubbed the worst film ever made. To be fair to Bela Lugosi, he had no choice in the matter as he appeared in the film posthumously.

But then what would they call rugby which is also played with a prolate spheroid called a “ball” which can be carried in the hand or kicked?

Canadian and American football are descendants of rugby.

Yes, of course. Health care generates revenue for health care providers, not the state. For the state it’s just another expense on the balance sheet.

The problem with universal health care is that 70% of expenses go to treat 10% of the population. These are often very sick people near the ends of their lives. Frequently the money doesn’t appreciably improve their health or well-being, it merely provides many expensive (and often painful) treatments that extend their lives.

This is the really ugly side of health care that we don’t like to think about because it involves difficult discussions about quality of life and death. We would much rather not think about these things and instead throw more money at the problem. Unfortunately, medical technology has advanced a lot in these areas and so there is an ever-growing array of treatment options to extend life without restoring quality of life.

Remove the need to exercise, like an anaconda. The ability to just lay around doing nothing and still be ripped to the max. That would be cool!

I’ve never been to NYC. In general I would say I’m not a fan of big cities. I guess I’m biased though.

I will say Toronto has some very nice areas where I wouldn’t mind living. They’re extremely expensive though!