Hot take. But put it in the context of the year it was aired, not today. Star Trek (and sci fi in general) was suffering from being perceived as "blue babes and laser guns".

This episode was thoughtful if taken as standalone. And TNG really was about taking the episodes more or less independently. The season long story arcs and such didn't exist. People weren't binge watching. So the world building was less important than the specific hypothetical moral quandary of the week. Like, they are almost like Asimov short stories with a shared cast.

It wasn't until a few years later that serialized TV even really became a thing -- Twin Peaks probably was the first here, but Babylon 5 would have a good claim (and DS9, Buffy, and others were coming together then too). So the style of storytelling on TNG S2 is different.

Divorce the story from Star Trek and the setting and evaluate it as a sci fi ethical quandary. And in that framework, it is a remarkable episode.

Also, Brent Spiner played it well :)

I'm Canadian and cannot vote in the US election, even though it'll affect us a lot (when a sleeping elephant rolls over...)

However, it drives me nuts looking at US polls. Harris is ahead by 2.4 points on average, which translates to something like 5-6 million in popular vote. But due to the electoral college system, it's still a tossup! 538 is running monte carlo simulations based on state-specific polling and margins of error, and Harris is only winning ~54% of the time. https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2024-election-forecast/

So I say this kindly, as your northern neighbour, please please go vote :D

We will likely have our own election in 2025 complete with buffoonery.

Assuming I have time, and an audience that isn't too entrenched, I will try to respond with with something that goes like:

Science is both a method of acquiring new knowledge and a largely self-consistent model containing the already acquired knowledge. As we acquire new knowledge, we must update the model.

If our sum of all knowledge was perfect, then we'd never update the model. But, over time, the model tends towards "better than before".

As it is physically impossible to be an expert in all things, at some point you have to trust that the people that have been updating or refining the model where it relates to their specific expertise are largely doing so in good faith and in accordance with the scientific method.

This is not the same as faith. The model can be wrong in places and will get updated over time. This is a process. If you understand the process, then you understand science.

(I sometimes will use different phrasing -- the word "model" throws some people, so instead I'll use "the whole body of knowledge" or something like that.)

NSFW, but the next obvious thing to do is...

https://www.xnxx.com/search/Josephine+Jackson

Somehow they included Great Salt Lake. It is a "great" "lake" ;)

But they left out Great Slave Lake, and Great Bear Lake because they don't know Canadian geography. ;)

I remember it and was there, on the KDE side of it. Summarized half-remembered version.

Corel WordPerfect had been ported to linux late in the 90s and they got this notion that people only bought Windows to use MS Office. So if they made their own OS, people would buy it just to use WordPerfect. They had grand plans to take KDE and linux and package it as a consumer grade OS. The closest other competitor doing that at the time was Caldera, and they were seeing some success, so why not eh?

They hired two people to "fix" KDE. But the people they hired had no idea how open source worked -- how to interact with a community that functioned more like a meritocracy than a managed hierarchy. They showed up on the mailing list and tried to make demands -- work on this, fix these bugs, adhere to our standards for this other thing, etc. When KDE didn't jump to their whimsy, they sort of got annoyed and just decided to maintain a patchset or something.

The distro flopped hard. And it started with their management. They could have instead hired a half dozen KDE developers that were already contributing, started feature or bug bounty programs (like Google Summer of Code, which was great but came later), and possibly have pulled something amazing together.

Excellent question. From first principles: mars is about 1.5 AU from the sun. Using the intensity equation (inverse square law), Mars should receive about 1/(1.5x1.5) the amount of solar radiation, or about 44% on average.

Earth gets about 1400 W/m² hitting the top of the atmosphere, but most places on earth only see about 1000 W/m² after the column of air absorbs a bunch of it. Martian air absorbs almost nothing (being very thin), so you'd expect to see about 44% of 1400W/m² -- or about 600W/m².

A quick Google search for "mars solar intensity" shows a result of 590 W/m², so that is pretty close to accurate, from first principles.

So 60% as bright, if talking pure intensity. As you say, the human eye has a pretty responsive dynamic range, and this is quite an acceptable number.

For point of comparison, this is the difference between the sun at high noon versus the sun at 4pm for most of the world. On Mars, high noon would have a solar intensity more like 4pm on earth. No where close to your darkness experience with the eclipse.

Complete tangent, but alumina, aka aluminum oxide, is usually considered the second hardest naturally occurring material. When it is found in nature, it is given the mineral name corundum and is clear. But if there are some impurities in it, you can get colours. Red corundum is called Ruby, and blue is called Sapphire. In the beauty industry, the same material (mixed with magnetite) is called emery, and lends its name to emery board, and is used in nail files. In the tech industry, it's used to make the extremely scratch resistant coating on most modern phone screens (basically nothing but diamond will scratch it).

You have subscribed to alumina facts. I'm sorry, the cat facts guy was busy.

When fascists say they're going to do something, it's probably a good idea to believe them. When they say they won't do something, they'll probably do that too.

When I was part of the KDE marketing working group, we always talked about 5% being the magic number. If we hit that, then the avalanche of ported and supported third party software starts. It's a weird chicken and egg thing. Looks like we're close!

Utility corridor. Sometimes a "Right of Way".

Depending on where you live, "hydro lines" or "transmission lines" or similar.

You have python. You import antigravity. The princess flies off into space. You monkey patch the princess so she has wings.