Howard Tayler

Now, I don't have the means to independently test this, and for obvious (if slightly paranoid) reasons the various materials specifications sites don't list cocaine, so my figure of 1.2g/cm³ could be completely wrong.

See, one cubic centimeter of of stuff can displace at most one cubic centimeter of water. If 1cm³ of stuff masses more than 1cm³ of water, it will displace 1cm³ of water as it sinks.

So... the boat was not afloat because of buoyant bricks of cocaine, since bricks of cocaine are not buoyant.

Screenshot from CNN.com: "Ultimately, Bradley told lawmakers, he ordered a second strike to destroy the remains of the vessel, killing the two survivors, on the grounds that it appeared that part of the vessel remained afloat because it still held cocaine, according to one of the sources. The survivors could hypothetically have floated to safety, been rescued, and carried on with trafficking the drugs, the logic went."

Absent an official source for the volume of 1 kilo of cocaine, I did find one reference (now unsupported because link-rot) saying that pure cocaine, pressed for transportation, has a mass/volume of 1.2g/cm³.

Seawater comes in at 1.03g/cm³

Archimedes says cocaine sinks.

... because if there were no drugs, nor any evidence of drugs, then the whole affair was just straight-up murder—a murder with two witnesses. So, y'know, if you're gonna do murders anyway, murder everyone.

(NOTE: I am both broadly and specifically opposed to the doing of murders.)

For *decades* In tabletop RPG terminology we have the "pre-gen," a character with stats, back-story, and maybe even artwork, that can be used to accelerate the beginning of the game. This "adoptables" thing is parallel evolution, I guess, or they'd have used the same term.

I found a Reddit post asking what character adoptables were, and the post is SEVEN YEARS OLD. I don't know how I remained shielded from this.

Well, thanks for showing me THAT rabbit-hole.

I don't feel like I provided any answers. All I did was ask more questions. But if I said something useful, I shall take credit for having intended that. :-)

tl;dr - I am a taxonomy nerd.

Like, a toddler can go from "clutter goblin" to "chaos goblin" just by learning to walk. But I know kids who, by the age of ten, stepped things up to calamity, and only avoided apocalypse with the help of smoke alarms and vigilant siblings.

I don't know what the sliding scale of "chaos" is. If we're talking order→disorder it's difficult to accomplish this without adding modifiers, like "lesser chaos troll" or "magnum chaos brownie" or some such.

Or maybe: clutter, chaos, calamity, apocalypse.

I suppose the question here is whether the leveling up is a matter of stature or a matter of attributes.

Attribute: Chaos
Stature: Goblin

So, yeah: Chaos brownie, chaos kobold, chaos goblin, chaos troll, chaos grendel, chaos kaiju... that's just stature.

Sandra and the at-homes have gone to the Hypernode Warehouse to pack and ship copies of STRUCTURING LIFE TO SUPPORT CREATIVITY, so I'm currently unsupervised.

I'll be fine, but the CATS have figured out that I'm the only available human, and they don't like me much so they're yelling.

Ignorance is not actually bliss, but it can be momentarily peaceful, and I'll take that.

(I'll put my tracker back on later.)

My health tracker tells me I'm way off-balance today, giving me a 2 on a scale of 1 to 5.

So I took it off and parked it on its charger, because I need to do things without being told not to do things.

And cathartic.

And pre-emptively blocking people who piss in other people's Cheerios? Keeps my timeline nice and tidy.

Checked the profile, realized that yeah, this *should* be part of the tribe, but that kind of crap in the mentions gets them booted off my island.

Blocked.

Damn I wish all my mutuals would leave Substack and Spotify. I know it's a hassle to shift over to a new platform, but I promise it's worth your time in these cases!

*stares indigenously*

Been doing 'em here for 250 years. Been doing 'em since before "pogrom" was a word.

Oh, and no discussion of #scicomm cartooning would be complete without a long look at @xkcd.com.

I know a LOT of cartoonists. I can't think of any who are NOT clever, fast, and perpetually hungry. If you throw "I need some #scicomm help" at the cartoonist community you'll find what you need.

A couple of examples. @ethankocak.com, who has already done lots of stuff in the #scicomm space, and the inimitable @davekellett.bsky.social whose books about dogs stand as an outstanding proof of concept for cartooning as science communication.

And if "hire an artist" sounds expensive or complicated, if you worry about trying to become an art director, consider saying "hire a cartoonist" instead.

Cartoonists are artists whose entire skill set is focused on shorthand illustrations that quickly communicate an idea. They can #scicomm, oh yes

It'll be a while before the Elongated Muskrat comes for [$n], so I'm using that until he does.

Scientists if you’re like “man I wish more people knew about X” then I humbly suggest hiring an artist to make a thing that communicates X and then put it into the world because it’s so fun, extremely “hell yeah” inducing, you gotta try it.

It didn't affect me personally because the consumer PC lines didn't have the defective components, but at that moment I knew I couldn't trust Dell machines anymore.

Maybe they have repented of that policy. Maybe not. Too late for me, I'm gone and not looking back.

I don't recall the details now, but I was intimately familiar with them then. Summary: Dell had decided to unequivocally put profits ahead of customer service, knowing that they'd sold tens, perhaps HUNDREDS of thousands of defective machines to their biggest customers.

ASIDE: Two quick Michael Dell notes.

1) Respect of this statement: "Sometimes it is better to change than to be right." Ponderous words, there. Hip-pocket. Useful memetic payload.

2) Early 00's, decided to push biz clients into an endless support loop to wait out warranties on faulty chips.

Weird, I know.

Michael Dell's smile? It seems genuine. He's a billionaire for lots of reasons, and one of them is that he's charismatic.

But I cannot understand why someone with his extensive expertise and deep image-management pockets would let this photograph be the one that goes with the press kit.