rob mahurin

I can't really fathom what this person might be thinking.

Nor am I particularly interested.

Second: I have probably visited at least 150 churches during my life, between performances, travel, weddings, funerals, community events, and the like. At least two have later been the sites of mass murders: the Unitarian church in Knoxville in 2008, and the Covenant church in Nashville in 2023.

First, and most plainly: I'm a professional. It's a workplace. This person is not part of the professional security associated with the church. Just a customer, about whom I know nothing, who seems to use the back of his waistband instead of a holster, sitting near me for a ninety-minute service.

I quit a church-music job this weekend because a parishioner, who also sits in the balcony where the choir sings, has a habit of openly carrying a handgun during services.

For many scenarios which could be summed up as "nuclear explosion on Earth," your banana statement is also correct.

But what if all of the pajamas I can buy are too small? That would put me in a Jim-jam jam-jam slim-Jim jam. I would have to jimmy my way out of that.

Today is his birthday. I'm trying to find a set of men's pajamas patterned with fruit or with jelly jars. They would be his Jim-jam jam-jams.

I made my father, named James, hold the fruit preserves during breakfast yesterday. That's because we wanted to have Jim jams.

#lunchpun

(Honestly the most rewarding part of this joke was the look of abject disappointment on his face.)

YouTube video by acapellascience William Rowan Hamilton (Science YouTuber Collab) | A Capella Science

No, no, the OTHER Hamilton.

youtu.be/SZXHoWwBcDc

It's still in the papers as a zombie ("Classic Peanuts"). I knew it had run for fifty years, but I hadn't realized the reruns had been going half as long.

"What's this porridge made of?"

"Oh, it's bulgar."

"Vulgar? Are you eating fuckwheat?"

#lunchpun

This ambiguity confuses LOTS of people. There was serious concern about actual vote-tampering, which did not survive scrutiny. There was also serious concern about social-media trolling and influencing and misinformation, which was absolutely justified.

before it occurred to me that Jim Henson did the Okefenokee scenes from some kind of a submarine chamber.

There's a bunch of stuff like this in the Muppet Movie that I thought was weird as a kid but now I recognize as the limitations of practical effects. The champagne glasses that Steve Martin brings have a weird shape (so the puppets can disappear the liquid. Also, I was well into adulthood

I love that Junie B. Jones is on a mutual first name basis with her teacher, Mrs.

I didn't get this as a small person because I didn't know whether twelve dollars was a reasonable price for a car or not.

Well, this was a wild ride.

A facetious comparison of different temperature scales. A bar labeled "Fahrenheit" has a 0⁰ end labeled "really cold outside" and a 100⁰ end labeled "really hot outside." A bar labeled "Celsius" has a 0⁰ end labeled "fairly cold outside" and a 100⁰ end labeled "dead." A bar labeled "Kelvin" has a zero end labeled "dead" and a 100 K end also labeled "dead."

Nuclear power really stagnated as a commercial concern after the 1980s, and until just recently there really weren't private companies doing satellite launches. The public natures of these enterprises probably make writing histories easier.

Computing histories are also more likely to focus on commercial concerns — think of all the biographies of Steve Jobs and Bill Gates. Commercial histories are skewed by ego and spin in a way that science histories are not. The biggest "pure physics" commercial applications are satellites and power.

The atomic bomb definitely changed subatomic physics from esoterica to practical relevance in an instant. Computing snuck up on people. The transition from calculators to tabulators to game machines to Pets Dot Com to social media was gradual, and "thinking is arithmetic" is subtler than "E=mc²."

YouTube video by minutephysics The Physics Of Dissonance

Music nerds, music-physics nerds, perfect pitchers, and ethnomusicologists: I am interested in your take on the delightful half-hour linked below.

youtu.be/tCsl6ZcY9ag

This is a statement which would benefit from more clearly specified units. I, an American, saw this and thought Svalbard or McMurdo.

Metric system chauvinists are reminded that SI temperatures are measured in kelvin (with ⁰C as an "acceptable alternative"). Not even Pluto would serve in that case.

I taught my dog to go unsupervised to the corner market and buy all the things on a handwritten grocery list. But he always brings back the wrong change! Dumb dog.

In the medium term of twenty to thirty years, climate change is primarily a security threat. As currently-productive land becomes useless and other land opens up, people will relocate. In human history, no mass migration of desperate people has ever been peaceful.

"Yes, we've been piling kindling against the side of our wooden house here in the middle of Wildfire Forest — but our property values have been increasing."

Three hundred watts is a lot of solar panels.

See also: tails in great apes, digits six through eight in land tetrepods, sight in cave lineages, et cetera.

"If a woman and a man had a baby" is a delightfully confusing way to describe someone's androgynous appearance.

If you're a physics educator and you don't yet have @phyphox.org's excellent sensor tool on some device of yours, you are missing out. ⚛️