Just a straightforward tribute! The punchline is left as an exercise.
The downside, though, is that lightbulbs are a committment now, and they're surprisingly non-standard. I have ended up with a wild range of color temperatures by accident which I should really do something about.
Good point. Jammies makes all bulb-related decisions and I'm a punk slacker who just coasts on his largesse.
Our kitchen has three identical bulbs in a row and now I can't unsee that one is more 'blue' than the other two.
We have a load of LED bulbs and yeah, getting the colour temperature consistent is annoying.
Also, in my experience, the bayonet type LED spotlights (GU10, not sure if the same name is used in the US?) have terrible lifespan compared to their advertised longevity. We've been in this apartment 10 years, and every bulb has been replaced at least twice, and some have been replaced four or five times.
I have a green lightbulb that someone gave me because it's supposed to help with migraines but I turn it on just because I enjoy how it makes the room look like it's filled with lime jello.
Oh, great. Now what am I supposed to do with all this lime jello?
People put green lights on their porch. I've never heard why. I thought it was a way to attract fewer bugs, but I could be wrong. The jello thing sounds plausible.
I was hoping the answer would be something like "I have no idea why lightbulbs last so long now nor why Jammies always seems to have receipts for lightbulbs", though I may be generalizing from my kids' apparent belief that a fairy replaces empty toilet paper rolls.
At least my kid doesn't believe that. Because he's always shouting for someone to bring him a roll.
I just wish regular light bulbs had color options between "make me look anemic" and "make me look jaundiced."
How do you feel about looking like lime jello?
Yeah, I guess (to the longer life) but the first 10 years of modern bulbs were a lesson in just how far from claimed life bulbs could be (5 years my ass 10 years my double-ass). We have all these spherical bulbs above the bathroom mirror and if you give up completely on matching the colors the randomness looks intentional. Broad spectrum lighting!
And two of those bathroom bulbs are currently dead (see 15.1)
Maybe humidity or farts hurts their longevity.
When we stayed at a state park cabin that still had old incandescents maybe 5 years after they'd fallen out of use elsewhere, what I noticed was the heat. You turned on the light over the bathroom mirror and OMG it was like walking into midday sunshine. Even hotter. A heat lamp. Those who have not burned a t-shirt hanging over a lampshade (or the lampshade itself) must have grown up in the last 25 years. As I remember it that happened all the time in my childhood.
What makes you think we only fart in the bathroom?
I wasn't. Just figured it's likely to be a smaller room than the others.
Wasn't there an issue somewhere with the switch away from incandescent leading to a need to clear snow or ice from lights where the heat used to melt it?
Those who have not burned a t-shirt hanging over a lampshade (or the lampshade itself) must have grown up in the last 25 years.
Started a fire in my bedroom when I was in 2nd grade this way. Bare lightbulb in my closet, blanket on a shelf resting on it. My mom happened to be home at the time, so I didn't burn the whole house down, but it required the fire department for sure. Still scares me to think about it.
Yeah, but you can't use a lamp to keep your baby chickens warm.
I mean, with current bulbs. Also, they had to redesign the EZ Bake oven.
It is interesting how quickly and completely LEDs took over once they reached the right price point.
Yeah. Too bad Virgra didn't replace rhinoceros horn completely enough to save them.
We had to specifically go find an old lightbulb to keep our baby chicks warm.
I lived in the same place 2011-2021 and had to replace the bulb in the overhead kitchen light exactly once. So it was a royal pain that one time.
My kitchen light started to fall down, so I had to re-attach it to the ceiling.
OP.2 betrays the sadly fallen state of the Fourth Age.
They were crafted of old by Fëanor.
33: or more likely by Ecthelion, who was after all Lord of the Fountains - and also Warden of the Gate of Gondolin, famous for headbutting a Balrog to death.
(distant Glaswegian shouts of "One of us! One of us!")
Also, in my experience, the bayonet type LED spotlights (GU10, not sure if the same name is used in the US?) have terrible lifespan compared to their advertised longevity. We've been in this apartment 10 years, and every bulb has been replaced at least twice, and some have been replaced four or five times.
Oh, God, my flat is or rather was a new build and all the sockets are SGU10 rather than GU10. There is only one manufacturer of SGU10 bulbs, and they are both expensive and shit, so I was constantly replacing CFLs at 16 quid a pop. They finally started offering LEDs a year or so ago, but they were also shit, and two of them went within six months. Luckily there's some random guy on the internet who makes and sells adapters to turn them into GU10, so I finally broke down and ordered some and I'm replacing all the SGU10s as they fail. So far the GU10 LEDs have all been fine.
36: it is so clear that this has consumed you in the way that only intensely annoying *relatively* minor things can. Not sure why, but that made me smile.
In a kind of solidarity, that is.
The most ridiculous thing is there's no technical difference between the two formats. It's just that GU10 bulbs don't fit in SGU10 sockets because of their shape, the idea presumably being you can't stick old incandescent bulbs in them and are forced to use (ostensibly) more energy efficient ones. Although they fail so often that I suspect the lifetime emissions is about the same.
There's going to be a generation of mercury poisoned kids just like there was a lead poisoned generation, isn't there?
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Okay, I want a reality check from anyone with Wall Street/investment banking connections. A close relative (who may or may not be one of my nutty brothers, who can say) maintains that you can never take Christmas week off due to Q4 mania.
It seems ridiculous to me that wealthy sectors of the economy haven't figured out a way to have their cake and eat it too. Are they being absurd or are they for real?
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I haven't worked Christmas week since 1998.
I guess that's why I'm not wealthy.
42: sounds entirely plausible.
Going off vague memories, it isn't so much the impending end of Q4, as not all US companies use the calendar year as their fiscal year - and in any case you presumably do a lot of the work on your full-year accounts after the end of the year, because otherwise you won't know what's happened! - but other compliance requirements that do have a pretty hard stop on 31 December.
I think Dodd-Frank requires some pretty stringent reporting to be completed by end calendar year and was therefore jokingly known as the Grinch Act because it ruined Christmas for everyone, but I might be thinking of the wrong law.
It's Jesus' fault for being born a week before new year's.
I think it depends on what sort of investment banking you're doing. In the part of the market I cover, the public markets are basically shut by early/mid-December and don't usually start to get busy again until mid-/late January, so eg the syndicate desks can probably take that week off fine, along with certain origination and structuring bankers. But in the private market, absolutely loads of deals close on 31 December, or in the handful of days before, so anyone on those might even be working on Christmas Day.
FINE. Fine. I'll have to come up with some other reason to feel slighted by my loved ones.
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Weekend threadjack (reddit links): 23andme is fucked. Probably. This is on top of the recent instant notoriety of the hacker leaking a bunch of Jewish profile data.
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So, should I text my cousin that did 23 & me? She's gentile, if that matters.
I sent a message to family members who had done the test so they can make an informed decision. I'm now kind of regretting bothering them, but I suspect they will go ahead and delete their accounts. I'm on the fence about deleting mine, but I probably should, given the odds that any company that screws up this badly will reform itself completely going forward. I'm assuming that the hacker is bluffing somewhat, that the leak was worse than they're letting on, AND that security is still compromised in some way, given that they didn't publicly announce any fix of any kind except making people change their passwords.
My timing sucked: they were literally processing my sample while the hack was occurring, I think, so I probably just barely got in under the wire to be pwned.
I'll probably wait to see how bad the hack is before I mention it to her.
She's got a union, so she probably doesn't need to worry about a leak affecting her insurance.
I didn't do the 23 & me thing because I figured if one of my cousins killed a guy, they probably had a good reason. I wouldn't want them to get caught on my account.
what "greatly compensates for the mediocrity of this park, is the astonishing number of people who, towards evening, in fine weather, resort here; our finest walks are never so full even in the midst of summer. The exquisite pleasure of mixing freely with such a concourse of people, who are for the most part well dressed and handsome, I have experienced this evening for the first time."
My sister did it, and she's got a lot of the same DNA as me.
So no consideration at all for any murders you got away with.
49 Finally read that. I did a 23&Me test; I changed my password on Friday, but the horse seems pretty well out of the barn. I'm not sure what someone who buys my data is going to think they're getting. Where my grandparents were born? That more than 3/4ths my ancestors came from the British Isles?* Raw data that might or might not show some kind of disease-relevant anomaly? That some particular guy is my sixth cousin? That 1,000 people are related enough to me -- mostly quite distantly -- to show up?
I only did a 23 test because I knew certain close relatives had done so. I wish they'd tested elsewhere, but that's just because I primarily use Ancestry as my genealogy info storage platform, and even then, I'd wish they'd uploaded to a site that has the chromosome mapping function that Ancestry refuses (for privacy reasons) to implement. For some reason, no one descended from other children of my paternal line great grandfather or his father-in-law tested at Ancestry. If I only had Ancestry, I'd wonder if the lack of matches from these folks meant that there was an error of some kind -- like maybe my grandfather (or his mom) was actually the child of someone else. Consumer testing has revealed a huge number of situations like that -- high six figures, I think, if not into seven -- and there's no reason to presume I'd be any different. But no, 23 showed matches to my great grandfather's other kid, and uploading to MyHeritage brought in matches to descendants of my great grandfather's father-in-law.
* Both of my mom's parents were predominantly descended from the British Isles, but both have a few 17th century Dutch immigrants to Nieuw Amsterdam and a few 18th century German immigrants (Lancaster Co Penn of the one side, Germanna colony in Virginia on the other) in their ancestry. I think it probably is scientifically possible to find specific portions of my own DNA that come from these people, but it's a pretty big job, and maybe not all the data is readily available just yet. How much would this information be worth on the open market? Maybe 0? My dad was 1/4 French Canadian. A large and disproportionate percentage of my matches on Ancestry correspond to this 1/8th of my heritage.
55 Most likely, enough of your second cousins have tested that leaving DNA at a crime scene is probably a really bad idea.
Most likely, but not certain. Everyone I know who has done it is on the same side of the family. That's the side that is more likely to murder someone, but I suspect the other side is more likely to murder someone and have been undetected for decades.
Germanna colony
The name implies a level of optimism/unpreparedness to farm that would put the Pilgrims to shame...
I laughed at the guy who said "what are they going to do, tell the world I fart when I drink milk?" -- but I think the issue with any huge dataset is that people will find ways to combine and correlate it with other information, and this is one that gives names plus unique information about biological relationships, demographics, etc. I'm not super sanguine about having it float around the dark web. Assuming my data has already been leaked, though, idk.
I got a couple of unique insights from the chromosome mapping tool (a first cousin of my great-grandmother had miraculously lived long enough to take a DNA test), and that was cool, but I think diminishing returns and epic wasting of time would lie ahead if I kept messing with it. Confirming negatives just doesn't give you the same thrill.
I've always kind of wondered why the Wampanoag, if they had to put fish in the ground to grow corn, didn't just say "You know, fish is fine for dinner." Anyway, I can see why the Pilgrims didn't get that part.
We're talking alewives, not cod here, right?
I wouldn't eat people instead of corn, but I wouldn't cut them up for fertilizer either.
59: Our daughter this year asked for her birthday (coming up in November) that we both do a 23 & me test for her genealogical work. We've done Ancestry but I believe she wanted 23 and me for some of the potential matches and more detailed tools? We have not discussed with her since the breach.
Too bad, as via my daughter we have been able to solve one knotty problem in my tree*, and discover some moderately close unknown relations. Including two just recently discovered descendants of Holocaust survivors in somewhat unexpected places in Europe--Sweden and Ukraine itself (though now temporarily (hopefully) in Germany)--the latter "unexpected" despite most of my wife's ancestors being from what is now western Ukraine. They have resulted in a number of mutually informative correspondences.
*My one great-grandfather's father disappeared immediately after his birth and the very sketchy handed-down "facts" led to the most likely candidate (to me and my daughter at least) being discounted by others in the family. DNA results showed that we were fucking right (he had subsequently had another family in another part of the state). The matches were quite strong; in fact way *too* strong which is a whole other fucking inferred thing which we kind of wanted to unlearn after we figured it out.
for some of the potential matches and more detailed tools?
There are particular use cases where having both the chromosome browser and finer-grained ethnicity maps are very helpful, yeah. If you're 100% Japanese, then ethnicity data as such is useless; but if your background is more mixed and you're wondering if your only Chinese ancestry comes from grandparent 1 or grandparent 2, then having specific Chinese-associated regions beginning at point A and ending at point B, and being able to triangulate those regions with certain relatives' results, can settle things. There is unfortunately no single service for this stuff that provides everything-- Ancestry.com is without any serious competition the best for correlating genetics and documents, 23andme has the best chromosome visualizers that I've seen but almost no genealogical documentation, other sites do better at one thing at the expense of others. But it's also true that being able to match with one or two very specific people is worth more than the next 10,000 possible matches, and if you know those people used a different service, and then like they DIED and this is all you'll ever get... it can start to seem appealing to shell out $70 to, in practice, a bunch of hackers. I'm not annoyed.
I'm sorry the discoveries got unpleasant for you, Stormcrow. I feel actually lucky that that hasn't happened yet for me, considering how many virtual graves I've dug up so far. The worst stuff is probably still a) things my parents experienced that I have known all my life and b) historical atrocities.
(To be clear, a) is not at all on the same level as b).)
67: The one in my footnote was just a sad little realization that took us a bit to see despite being clear in the genetic data plus having some non-genetic circumstantial supporting evidence.
The Holocaust stuff has been a slow accumulation of a number of stressful and often intricate survivor narratives. Plus of course "and no one on my mother's side made it out" and the like.
The most recently discovered (2nd cousin once removed to my wife) included parents both using assumed names one of whom seems to have taken the identity of someone in Ander's Army* while in Tashkent.
*I had been somewhat aware of Ander's Army but relevant to recent discussion of Jewish settlement of Palestine not how a significant percentage of the Jewish members of the army stayed in Palestine when they passed after coming under British control. I believe Menachem Begin was one
"one of whom seems to have taken the identity of someone in Ander's Army"
The genetic evidence is that Stormcrow is 1/16th bear.
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"famously proposes a detailed 'interpretation' of the topography of central Paris according to which the geographical and architectural layout of the Île de la Cité, and the bend of the Seine where it is situated, are seen to make up the body of a recumbent woman whose vagina is located in the place Dauphine, 'with its triangular, slightly curvilinear form bisected by a slit separating two wooded spaces.'"|>
Wojtech the Bear fans should also know that there's a statue of him in the centre of Edinburgh and an excellent strategy boardgame (Scythe) featuring him in a cameo role.
75 putting it on my list of statues I must visit along with the Columbo statue in Budapest and the Tony Soprano statue in Vilnius.
I think the only oddly located celebrity statue I've intentionally sought out was Woody Allen in Oviedo.
Is the Bruce Lee statue in Belgrade or is it in a different former Yugoslav republic?