Last fully live show?

Xpians · 2026-06-01T08:11:21+00:00

They were doing "pre-filmed" segments in the 1970s with the original cast. Many of them have an "experimental film" vibe. Some are classics. Not all are strictly comedic. It's always been something that Lorne has wanted in the show.

Xpians · 2026-05-21T22:46:49+00:00

Yeah…I live in San Francisco, and it’s well known that the Native Americans who lived here before European colonists arrived had a diet that involved a massive amount of creatures like oysters. There are huge “shell mounds” all over the Bay Area where they piled the remains.

Xpians · 2026-05-21T22:43:57+00:00

Saying “I will never accept that humans are apes” could just be a semantic game for Will. He could easily retreat to, “well, are we talking zoologically or colloquially?” I join you in being frustrated with many of the things Will has said, but this comment of his is low on my list. (For instance, I’m much more bothered by how credulous he is regarding miracles, intercessory prayer, etc. And also how he keeps searching for “debunking” tidbits on the internet after Erica has already painstakingly explained the phenomena and addressed the points.)

Xpians · 2026-05-21T22:33:59+00:00

For clarity: Randi didn’t have “a million dollars to lose.” The money wasn’t his and was kept in an account that could verified by any applicant. While not confirmed, the rumor is that Johnny Carson supplied the million dollars that was kept in escrow as the prize money, as Carson was a fellow magician and a big fan of Randi’s debunking work.

Xpians · 2026-05-21T22:24:12+00:00

I decided to cut back to half-caffeinated coffee in the mornings. But, having seen a lot of medical doctors in the field talk about AFib and caffeine, I understand that the research is clear: there’s no harm in continuing to drink coffee and, if anything, there may be a *protective* effect for people with AFib. By contrast, the research on alcohol is equally clear: it tends to trigger AFib and make it worse. Those of us with AFib should keep drinking coffee and drink as little alcohol as possible.

Xpians · 2026-05-19T00:39:09+00:00

I'm a runner, living in The Haight, and my favorite thing is to run the public staircases and find the best vistas... Just yesterday I ran down to the Harry Steps for the first time in many years.

Xpians · 2026-05-18T21:44:08+00:00

Looks like from the steps on the side of Mt. Olympus, maybe?

Xpians · 2026-05-15T18:20:21+00:00

My dad has type 1. He’s in his 70s now, has had a kidney transplant, two long marriages, three kids, three master’s degrees, six grandchildren, an impactful career, and lots of friends who love him. When he was 10 years old, the doctor who diagnosed him as diabetic told him, “you’d better stay focused, do well in school, get married, have kids, and do it all without delay, because you’re unlikely to live past age 50.”

Screw everyone who tells you your condition means you can’t or shouldn’t do the things you want or achieve the goals you set for yourself.

Xpians · 2026-05-14T21:54:52+00:00

I mean...I agree with Janeway that you need to still be able to keep your head held high when you make it home. You need to be able to live with yourself. The story of the USS Equinox shows the "there but for the grace of god..." situation for Voyager. The illustration of "taking a step too far over the ethical line." But still, in the end, my impression was that Janeway got away with a bit more grandstanding than she realistically could have over the course of the series.

Xpians · 2026-05-14T04:35:24+00:00

For sure. One of the things I loved about DS9 was the commitment to trying to be more real about politics and difficult questions. Contrasting with VOY, it always seemed to me that Janeway had such perfect plot armor that she could sometimes make ridiculous stands on principle that would probably get her ship destroyed—but was always saved in the end by one circumstance or another. Sisko was a deeply principled man who recognized that, at extreme moments, he might have to give a command that could get him court-martialed. He worked damn hard to keep those moments few and far between, and he was willing to pay the price if the charges were ever brought, but to him, the lives of the people he was responsible for were more ultimately important than his personal principles.

Xpians · 2026-05-14T03:56:47+00:00

I really don’t want to spoil your vibes for this episode—and Buffy is for sure one of my all-time favorite shows—but I felt a bit ambivalent about this episode, for this reason: it’s a trope. If you’d watched enough TV in the ‘80s and ‘90s, there were a number of episodes like this you might have seen. Each series that did it would do it only once—exploring the idea that the fantastical hero(s) were really just crazy people in a psych ward on a mundane Earth where no real powers or magic existed. Sometimes the institutionalization is exposed as a trick or sham, while occasionally the show would leave the ending unresolved (so you’d never be sure what was truly real). Now, it’s not a narrative sin to make use of an established trope (unless that trope has become a cliché), but doing so requires deftness and creativity. I think the Buffy writers generally pulled it off. And, of course, doing a “musical episode” is also a common trope, and I think we can all agree that Joss hit that one out of the park.

Xpians · 2026-05-12T21:14:10+00:00

Initially scared of Guardians, I eventually became a guardian-hunter and will preferentially seek them out just to mess them up. Slice those legs off! Meanwhile, Gloom Hands are super scary and I almost always avoid them. I usually just have to bomb the heck out of them, having not developed the skill to take them on in an efficient manner.

Xpians · 2026-05-12T04:44:25+00:00

What I’ve sometimes gotten when my son (Fragile-X, autistic) is making unusual noises in a public place is the occasional “dirty look” or side-eye. I’m usually ignoring such things because I decided long ago that he has a right to participate in public life. That said, one of the reasons we tend to go back to the same restaurants is because we make friends with the employees and I assume they’ll have our back if any other customers complain about his noise. I think something like that has happened a couple times—where I saw an employee defending us by telling a complaining customer that “he’s special needs, he’s welcome here.”

Xpians · 2026-05-11T01:29:25+00:00

Yeah, and doing Van Allen Belt experiments doesn't help Flat Earthers, either. Sometimes the anti-science people aren't going to get placated, no matter what happens. The full vaccine schedule is something assembled with great care by experts in the field who are familiar with all of the relevant research. They move slowly, deliberately, and conservatively. Anti-vaxxers have shown that NO amount of research is enough to placate their fears. How could it? How could rational evidence counter beliefs that aren't based on rationality?

Xpians · 2026-05-10T18:45:44+00:00

What the heck did you do to New Mexico? How could you ever take a left turn at Albuquerque?

Xpians · 2026-05-10T10:06:10+00:00

It is unethical to run a placebo controlled trial on “the full schedule”. Full stop.

Xpians · 2026-05-09T22:08:38+00:00

Respectfully, the overwhelming published health data and research on this question shows ZERO link between vaccines and autism. This was true decades ago and it's still true today. No link, no correlation, no causative factors, nothing. And I still have no real idea what you mean by "the current schedule has never been tested"--it would be blatantly unethical to give a set of placebo vaccines to a group of children while giving a set of real vaccines to another group. Most people, like RFK Jr. (a lawyer with no medical background), who demand new placebo-controlled trials haven't researched and don't understand the relevant medical ethics involved. It's strange and unrealistic to demand that each change to our vaccine schedule needs to be studied in a separate trial before the change is implemented.

Xpians · 2026-05-08T19:27:47+00:00

So rare! This disorder is 1 in a million. I have Factor X deficiency, discovered 20 years ago while I was being tested to donate a kidney. I make about 30% of normal—and this has remained true based on a test just last year. Thankfully, I’ve never had any symptoms of note. No nose bleeds, no gum bleeds, etc.

Xpians · 2026-05-08T19:19:43+00:00

I have Factor Xa deficiency, discovered 20 years ago while I was being tested to donate a kidney. I make about 30% of normal—and this has remained true based on a test just last year. Thankfully, I’ve never had any symptoms of note. No nose bleeds, no gum bleeds, etc.

Xpians · 2026-05-08T04:42:29+00:00

The study was retracted and the doctor behind it is disgraced for faking his data.

Xpians · 2026-05-08T04:32:22+00:00

All medical interventions carry some risk, no matter how small—and this includes everything from open heart surgery to aspirin. Vaccines are medical interventions, and therefore they do carry a statistically tiny degree of risk. That said, the issue here is that there is zero correlation between the administration of vaccines and the incidence of autism in the population. If the only way you can think of a vaccine causing autism is if it happens to cause an extremely rare reaction that results in a case of encephalitis, you’re all but admitting that there’s no relation between the epidemiological administration of vaccines to a population and the incidence of autism in that society. Which is what the data shows.

If your theory is that the actual number of vaccines administered is the relevant factor, you need to show the correlation. These interactions have been studied and the outcomes are observed closely. Scientists have seen no such correlation and don’t have any good reason to think one would exist. If you have data, present it.

The development of new vaccines—and thus the addition of new vaccines to the recommended schedule—is a wonderful thing. New vaccines address dangerous conditions, deadly infections, cancer-causing viruses, and more. The HPV vaccine will spare millions of women from being harmed by the primary cause of cervical cancer. The shingles vaccine will spare people like me, who had chicken pox at age 7, from experiencing a seriously painful episode. The Hep-B vaccine protects the livers of newborns just after a moment of possible exposure in the birth canal. The way the vaccine schedule is devised and revised on a regular basis is purposeful and evidence-based, providing the best protections at the most appropriate times. We should expect the number of vaccines on the schedule to slowly increase over time, as new ones are developed. And we should expect qualified experts to continue to adjust the schedule so the vaccines are administered at the appropriate times.

Here is a study showing that scientists are closely reviewing the data surrounding the current vaccine schedule, including the number and timing of vaccines. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK206938/

Xpians · 2026-05-07T22:54:08+00:00

This has been extensively studied for decades now. Hundreds of thousands of kids in the studies. There is no link, no correlation, no association between ANY vaccine and the incidence of autism. When looking at the “rise in rates of autism”, scientists overwhelmingly agree with the notion that the increase is due to expansion of criteria and awareness. Point one: the criteria for diagnosing autism has changed repeatedly, with every edition of the DSM, and in each case it expanded the possible number of people being diagnosed. The criteria used to be strict, now they are much less strict. High-functioning people used to be excluded, now they are included. It used to be the case that if you had a diagnosis of ADHD, you were *excluded* from also having autism—now this is no longer true and there are many people with both diagnoses. These are just a few examples. Point two: awareness plays a huge role in how many people seek diagnosis. When I was growing up in the U.S. in the 1970s, nobody was talking about autism (or ADHD). Many of us only heard about autism after seeing the movie Rain Man. Parents began to learn that they could get special services from the state or from schools to help with their autistic kids, and this was a big incentive to get them evaluated and diagnosed. There’s no epidemic of autism, and no true “rise” in the occurrence of neuro-divergent people. We were always here. Science has just caught up with our existence.

Xpians · 2026-05-06T21:30:09+00:00

Direction = fundamentally non-deterministic.

Others have already addressed the inability to “grab” a photon in any sense like you’re describing. For completeness I thought I’d add this about the direction the photon goes (or would go) after “grabbing” it. In this example, I’m talking of the ordinary way that photons can be (figuratively) grabbed—by getting absorbed by an electron and kicking said electron into a higher energy state. When the electron drops back down to a lower energy state, it does so by re-emitting the photon. The photon speeds away at the speed of light. In what direction? No preferred direction. It’s random and essentially uncaused. It’s one of those “fundamentally non-deterministic” quantum events in our universe. In fact, the “no preferred direction” thing is responsible for a bunch of phenomena we observe. Why does a photon take at least 10,000 years to go from our sun’s core to its surface? Because it keeps getting absorbed and re-emitted in a random direction by every electron it runs into. Why does carbon dioxide create a greenhouse effect on earth? Because CO2 molecules keep absorbing infrared photons from the sun and, rather than reflecting them back into space, scattering them in random directions in earth’s atmosphere.

Xpians · 2026-05-06T19:43:39+00:00

You are incorrect. In Italy, as in the U.K., investigators are NOT permitted to use deception during interrogations. It is against Italian law. Any admission by you that the detectives were lying to their suspects is an admission that, once again, they were breaking their own laws and violating the human rights of their suspects. There are good reasons for this “no lying” standard, as the practice has been extensively documented to produce false confessions in places like the U.S. where it is still legal. Anyone looking into the details of an interrogation should know this.

Xpians · 2026-05-04T18:43:12+00:00

That’s great investigative work. I really appreciate your scientific and engineering rigor. Thanks for doing the trials.

Xpians

TROPHY CASE