palordrolap

Cockles are literally heart shaped when viewed side on. The cardioid in mathematics gets its name from the same thing and that’s bulbous by comparison.

Wiktionary also suggests that “cockles” may be a corruption of cochlea(e) which is one of at least a couple of names for the heart’s ventricles.

Fun fact: In one episode, they talk about how a leap has to be completed in a certain amount of time in order to guarantee the ability to leap home. They say that the amount of time that each leap must be completed within falls by a certain percentage each time. I did the calculation once. Sam was still within the threshold even after all the many seasons. He should have leaped home.

And it would have been to the alt-timeline where Al and Ziggy were replaced by St.John and Alpha, the one which showed up when Sam previously leapt into Al and temporarily changed history.

All the pieces were there.

(If this feels familiar, I have posted this online before.)

IMO, that mindset pretty much died the day the towers fell. There was and has been a little “it’s the 21st century” or “it’s <year>” but they’re generally not marked by as much optimism (or subversion of the same) as it was in the '90s.

It’s / This is the '90s [then a statement about how things are better / different / more enlightened]

In my book, that puts Bean Bunny in the role of Darko, just so there’s a reversal of the “Why are you wearing that stupid bunny suit?” jibe and counter-jibe.

I mean, Muppet Christmas Carol kept Fozzie out of the rest of the movie just so they could make a Fezziwig/Fozziwig pun, so such a massive cast decision for the sake of one gag isn’t out of the question.

Now, there are other rabbits in the Muppet cast, but I think Bean is the best known, and probably has the most range to go from cute to creepy without it being too obvious from his appearance.

The firing of Bean’s voice actor (Steve Whitmire) makes this somewhat less likely, but I think they could recast Bean’s voice more easily than for Rizzo “ain’t comin’ back until Steve does” Rat or Kermit, and they weren’t all that picky about Kermit.

As others have said, if a patient has next of kin or emergency contact details listed somewhere accessible to the hospital, they may call if the contact can provide information that the patient can’t, especially if the patient is unconscious or delirious.

Of course, if the patient is otherwise aware and apparently of sound mind, then the patient can literally say “please do not contact my family / next of kin”. The hospital might say they weren’t going to, but no harm in asking. And if they do so anyway once they’ve been told not to, that’d be risking a lawsuit.

Anecdotally, I’ve always carried a next-of-kin card in my wallet, and it has come to my aid at least once.

The person or people on such a card don’t have to be parents either. A trusted friend or sibling might be preferable for people who don’t get along with, or no longer have, their parents.

Try to take deep breaths. If it’s low blood oxygen as others say, that could help.

Alternative if your brain/body won’t allow it: Try holding your breath. You might have control over that. The aim is to hold long enough trigger a gasp reflex which will, hopefully, shake you awake.

The hard part is finding the presence of mind to remember things to try when you’re in an altered state of consciousness.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t hate Fozzie, in fact I think I kind of want to give the guy a hug.

The man (or rather, bear) just wants to be loved after all. He wants to make people laugh and have them be happy. He’s the clown with a touch of melancholy, and might even be in my top 10. He’s just not top of the list.

This. A terrible surgeon by all accounts, but laid-back and entirely competent as a musician.

Fozzie also proved to be a competent pianist, but his personality, or at least his “on” stage persona, well, that leaves something to be desired.

Deaf people will almost unavoidably copy the mouth shapes they’ve seen when other people have spoken. This means that how they sound will be at least somewhat informed by any hearing people they observe as well as indirectly through other deaf people who have also learned from hearing folks.

So yes, aspects of voice accent do carry over to deaf people.

There’s also the concept of “accent” within sign language too. How people move between signs, carry themselves and act when expressing an emotion, which is usually exaggerated for the sake of clear communication, can vary from community to community, even if the base sign language is the same.

If I’m going out, I change from cosy indoor clothing to tidier clothing so that I don’t look like I’m wandering around in public in my pyjamas, so I guess I’m fitting to a societal expectation, and thus dressing for other people in that regard.

That said, I wouldn’t want to sully my indoor clothing with the outdoors anyway, and I don’t like going out as a rule, so I think I prefer to be dressed for myself.

Their best strategy would be to poison the content with bot accounts, spam, and morally tasteless voices

You mean, make the Fediverse even more like Reddit?

Xbox was an indication of what Microsoft have always really wanted to do, what Apple have always done, and what Microsoft have tried to do with the Win 11 roll out:

A narrowing of the technical specification and focus in order to minimise support and required testing. That costs money.

Cost bad. CEO mad.

Each Xbox release has been a release of a bunch of clones. Yes, they are based on PC hardware, but it’s one set of identical hardware to support across tens of thousands of instances, as opposed to hundreds of thousands of actual PCs, barely any two alike.

Then note that many people don’t want to use a computer at home. Computers remind them of work. They want to play games and goof off in their spare time. A games console is ideal.

And if that console happens to be based on PC hardware, the games can eventually be ported to the myriad actual PC options. But they can get the game out and running quickly on that one well-supported platform and cash in quick.

I might have mixed some things up in the 20+ years since I saw that episode. For example, I could have also sworn it was Sam who made the wormhole comparison and was told “No.” I do remember it being awkward though, like the question was embarrassingly naïve.

For practicality: Whatever it is that The Nox do in the Stargate TV show. It’s not well explained because, well, no other race is advanced enough to understand it. Something about briefly causing two distant points in space to touch. Instantaneous travel to anywhere.

For impracticality: #1 The ring network in one of Stephen Baxter’s novels. Kind of like the eponymous rings in the better known Stargate franchise, but the ring source and destination are fixed and transport time between rings is light speed, so you arrive years after you enter. And IIRC, you come out as an approximation of what you were when you went in. A very good approximation, but still an approximation. The advantage is that the journey seems instantaneous to the traveller.

#2 Whichever story has it that travel in hyperspace / subspace turns out to be slower than travel in real space. This may have been a throwaway Internet joke, but it still amuses me.

#3 Stephen King’s Jaunt.

Depends on what frame of mind I’m in. In a sufficiently devil-may-care mood, I might try and create a Moriarty. Or better, role play as one.

Or figure out how deeply it’s possible to nest holodeck simulations before things get funky.

I could be a Q without any collateral damage. Torment Picard and Janeway. Get punched by Sisko. Roll it all back. Q’s done the same.

Be a (male) Mary Sue in any TV show universe I’ve ever watched and not be judged for poor writing… Although O’Brien did appear to think he could discern sarcasm from the Enterprise computer from time to time.

And of course there’s the thing that Riker, Barclay and LaForge, if not a good many of the rest of the crew almost certainly got up to in there… I’d be stupid to think I’d not try that at least once.

When I got rid of mine, I made a list of all the media I still wanted a copy of and then, over time, found second-hand or new old stock DVD versions online. That was ten years ago and I’ve still not broken the cling wrap on some of the replacements I bought. Just goes to show how much I really needed them!

That said, my collection was far less than 100, so your collection might be an expensive endeavour to replace.

Tapes with crud recorded from TV and computers went to landfill. All the commercial ones went in a consignment I had a charity organisation collect along with a lot of other things I was clearing out at the same time. In 2025, I’m not sure charities will accept them any more.

I did manage to digitise some of the stuff from the TV / computer ones with an old VCR and a TV card in the computer, but that must be coming up on 20 years ago now. That’s all on a DVD around here somewhere. In one of those multi-disc wallets. Remember those?

They can still be had online if you feel like paring down the space your DVDs take up. People used to use them for burned DVDs, of course, but there’s nothing stopping you from putting legit DVDs in one. Make a separate binder for the DVD covers if you really want to, and send the cases to landfill or recycling.

If you want to go really nuts, do the same with Blu-rays.

I do regret getting rid of a few things during that clear-out, but maybe only one tape had some sentimental value. And yet, if I’d kept it, I’m think I’d be equally disturbed that I didn’t get rid of it with the rest of them.

Transphobic arguments tend to either be in bad faith or poorly-informed, and are often bolstered by Brandolini’s Law. i.e. the one that says “The amount of energy needed to refute bullsh-t is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it”.

The especially clever ones claim that peer-reviewed journals say things they don’t.

If Reddit are against transphobia it might be one of the few things that’s still going right over there… and I wouldn’t expect it to last.

Humanity - civilised Greeks or not - didn’t have the metallurgical knowledge to be able to build locomotives and rails out of strong enough materials yet. Ancient Greece basically coincides with the Bronze age.

You’d have to not only bring (knowledge of) steam locomotive tech, but also every single bit of iron tech required to build one. You could skip the requirement for rails by opting for a steam traction engine, not a full locomotive, but those are far closer together in technological ability.

None of this factors in the propensity for steam boilers to explode, which you may or may not consider important.

There’s a reason we were still using beasts of burden (horses, oxen, etc.) for traction until the 19th century.

Like the concept of predeterminism (is the future already written?), the concept that this might all be a simulation has exactly the same “solution”: Don’t get too hung up on it. We might as well act like it isn’t.

We have as much control over things whether this is all real or not.

Do what you can to get by with as little harm as possible to yourself and others until, well, you know: Game over.

If you have the strength and maybe resources, you might even be able to make this existence more pleasant for others, but if not, try not to worry about it.

As for brain chemistry, I’ve been in the same head space that brought about your question, and undoubtedly will be again at some point in the not too distant future.

It’s probably only because I’ve taken a bath today and put on fresh clothes that I’m relatively chilled out and philosophical right now. Also the Sun is out, which is probably helping too.