The article’s 3rd section (“Getting a measure”) is explicitly about alternatives to self reported vividness of experience - citing use of ocular rivalry effect, measuring dilation of pupils when imagining a bright light and sweat responses to a scary scenario. I agree that it’s a difficult thing to make sure people aren’t just experiencing similar things and reporting them differently but there does seem to be effort made to design experiments around differences in how participants form descriptions.

“Sim sala bim” is one you see a bit in the Nordics, popularized by a Danish magician with the stage name Dante. Gibberish definitely does help remove the magic words from what the audience knows a bit.

According to TVTropes (Gratuitous German, AoaB examples page) it looks like they lean less on German names and more on nouns like Angriff (attack) and Leidenschaft (passion). Japan particularly seems to like choosing German as the gratuitous foreign language.

It is stated to be in response to Texas, but the amended constitution as far as I can see doesn’t use language about it being conditional on Texas’ plan happening.

In response to the congressional redistricting in Texas in 2025 (…) the single-member districts for Congress reflected in Assembly Bill 604 (…) shall temporarily be used for every congressional election for a term of office commencing on or after the date this subdivision becomes operative

It’s just that the legislature’s map shall be used for elections between the proposition’s passage and 2031’s regularly scheduled redistricting.

Even some of the good stealth games like Dishonered very rarely punish you.

I guess this is one of those things where Thief and Splinter Cell have just trained me to want that ghost playthrough and enforce it myself. I’m aware you can do pitched combat in Dishonored but I really don’t get why a player would be interested. There’s action games for that itch.
For me, stealth is pretty strongly focused on cultivating that feeling of besting a superior force through knowledge (of place, timings, toolkits etc.) and I definitely love Thief and particularly The Metal Age (my first exposure to the series) for their approaches to that.

If we’re talking generations, Galadriel is in the same one as Turgon, the founder of the city where Sting was made. Splinters and logs, eh?

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Noah is great. I Finished a Video Game also hits this sweet spot very well.

Fun fact, snakes’ adaptations to their feeding style are actually not about the way the jaw hinges. Instead, their lower jaw is two separately moving bones held together with stretchy ligament tissue so that each side of the mouth can be “walked along” the prey item separately.
So the chef could eat the burger… but would follow along its longest dimension to do it, laying it down sideways.

Not one I’ve watched yet, but there definitely is some magic to listening to someone talking about something they really care about, if you connect with them as a communicator.
Like, I don’t have any relationship to Disney’s Buzzy animatronic myself, but I’ve rewatched Jenny Nicholson ranting about it more than once because it’s fun. Captain Disillusion talking about the effects work that inspired him also feels kinda similar.

Really appreciate her work - the educational stuff is good at putting things into a context and giving laypeople some mental coathooks to hang things off of, and I like how she emphasizes the video explainer format is a provider of jumping off points more than a source of real understanding.
Her discussion of media and news is maybe not as relevant here but still pretty on point in my experience.

No Person holding any Office of Profit or Trust under [the United States], shall, without the Consent of the Congress, accept of any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince, or foreign State.
US Constitution section 9 clause 8.

I’d say that’s pretty clear an official act to the giver’s benefit is not a necessary element of the prohibited conduct. If something is offered, both houses of congress must vote to allow it or the gift must be declined.

It’s the parts of a program’s concepts, rules and behaviours that are specific to the program’s task. For instance

• Items, a shopping cart and the conversion of such a cart into an order at checkout in an e-commerce application.
• Clips of video and audio, static images etc. and the compiling of these into a single output video for a video editor.
• Vertices, triangles, textures, animation rigs etc. for a 3d editing program.
• Accounting standards and tax laws for an accounting system.

When developing software you deal both with these kinds of specifics and generically reusable concepts that are more purely computational science, so a term to distinguish them is handy.

I think this is partly about giving yourself an out for liking childish things as a near- or young-adult. Kids shows commonly do include some Parental Bonus but extending that idea specifically to dark undercurrent plots that you have to read between the lines of the text seems like a way to feel “in the know” about something adult in the work while still consuming something you feel society expects you to have grown out of.
Then with a bit more maturing than that, you can hopefully just embrace childish joys earnestly, because joys are precious.

It depends a bit on what you want to optimize for, as there’s drawbacks to all the major methods:

• Ultrasonic sprayers are decently efficient but spread any contaminants around your home, potentially still biologically active. Dissolved trace minerals will turn into fine dust, affecting cleaning needs.
• Boiling for humidification is energy intensive because of water’s heat capacity.
• Air forced wicks are by default great habitat for mold and similar, so they need regular care and replacement.

It really is a fascinating game, and as odd as the volume view is when you’re new to it, it’s extremely helpful to be able to orient yourself.

::: late game The 5D courses were a nice surprise as well. :::

“Have they no refuge or resource?” cried Scrooge.
“Are there no prisons?” said the Spirit, turning on him for the last time with his own words. “Are there no workhouses?”

Some computing problems are “easy”* to solve. We call these P.
Some problems let us easily check a proposed solution if we’re given one. We call these NP.
All problems in P are also in NP, since checking a solution proposal works is never harder than solving the problem starting from nothing.
We suspect but can’t prove that some problems in NP are not in P.

It turns out that it’s possible to translate any problem in NP into the boolean satisfiability problem (SAT) using an easy algorithm, so this problem effectively is an upper bound on how hard it could be to solve problems in NP - we could always translate them into SAT and solve that instead if that sequence is easier.
We call SAT, and any problem that it can be translated into easily in the same way, the problem class NP-hard.
NP-complete is just those NP-hard problems which are also in NP, which is many but not all of them.

*: require asymptotically polynomial running time

Bugsnax also does this a bit with creatures like the Fryder.

The use of “alumni” in the singular. A person is an alumnus or an alumna, the alumni are always a group. Seems to be a very American usage, and I don’t know why it feels aggravating where other Americanisms like positive anymore don’t.