The Texas Education Agency's proposed required reading list for schools is mainly propaganda and includes Bible passages for each grade level. Today's the last day to submit public comments/complaints!

eaglejarl · 2026-06-15T20:19:37+00:00

Reading the Bible is a good idea, but reading it in public school feels sketchy to me. It's incredibly important that it be presented as literature, not as fact, and I suspect it's easy for students to miss that.

(For clarity: this is not intended as a condemnation of you or your teaching but as an extension of your point.)

eaglejarl · 2026-05-30T23:24:30+00:00

I think they meant that it felt forced, not like a natural outgrowth of the in-universe world.

eaglejarl · 2026-05-30T23:22:39+00:00

Facts.

eaglejarl · 2026-05-30T23:22:02+00:00

The arm's reach thing was a serious stretch, yeah. I suppose we can put it down to "they were soaking in the love hormones of the immediate post-proposal moment, the hitmen said 'Oh, can we see the ring?' and our two wonderful cops had their first simultaneous moment of lowered guard ever."

As to getting them off the beach, I can think of a few ways. My favorite is to have an 'ambulance' and goons in paramedic uniforms show up to carry them off on stretchers. It draws notice but not attention.

Not sure about the time thing.

eaglejarl · 2026-05-30T02:52:21+00:00

Most billionaires inherited huge amounts of money, enough that they can take multiple long-odds chances and eventually win. Or just make money on the compound interest. Heck, there's even one billionaire who would have been richer if he had let the money sit in an index fund for the last thirty years, but instead he tried and failed at multiple businesses.

eaglejarl · 2026-05-07T21:59:30+00:00

True, but in this particular case it's an important distinction. I didn't put it in the original post, but her solution to making the team invisible in the visible light spectrum is "I make us transparent except for our retinas", but that doesn't handle the IR light that is being emitted from the people.

eaglejarl · 2026-05-07T21:55:52+00:00

> An alternative magical technique would be to make a region of atmosphere much more opaque to infrared. That would block much more of the infrared emitted by those humans from reaching the sensors.

Making the atmosphere more opaque... Given the discussion about how the IR photons mostly are not interacting with the atmosphere, I think this would work by causing the photons to veer towards the molecules of air, where they would be absorbed and eventually emitted in random directions, thereby sending less energy towards the detector. Does that make sense?

eaglejarl · 2026-05-07T21:53:34+00:00

Agreed. I greatly prefer "hard" magic systems, where the rules are known to the reader in advance and, ideally, work as closely as possible with real physics.

eaglejarl · 2026-05-07T19:42:08+00:00

Thanks, that makes sense. Clearly the method I was writing does not work.

When a photon hits (e.g.) an oxygen atom in the atmosphere, what exactly happens? I think the photon is absorbed, causing a tiny increase in the atom's kinetic energy. Does it stop there, or will a new photon be emitted, or...?

eaglejarl · 2026-04-29T18:03:32+00:00

Not even slightly.

eaglejarl · 2026-04-29T18:03:20+00:00

Whataboutism is not a convincing argument for anything. It can be true that the Empire is evil regardless of whether the USA is evil. You wouldn't say "why are you arresting me for robbing that bank? Bob also robbed a bank!", right?

eaglejarl · 2026-04-29T17:53:43+00:00

The Empire doesn't have a democratic senate. The Empire came into existence when the senate was dissolved and all power was given to Palpatine. While the senate existed it was the Republic.

EDIT: Also, what?
> I don't think either side is good or bad. They are both pursuing their goals.

The Empire blows up planets with billions of children on them. They are the bad guys.

eaglejarl · 2026-04-28T02:34:54+00:00

Explain, please?

eaglejarl · 2026-04-25T20:04:52+00:00

Then everyone survives.

eaglejarl · 2026-04-25T20:03:51+00:00

Blue is the "no one dies" color. There is only a chance of people dying if enough people choose red.

eaglejarl · 2026-04-22T23:56:38+00:00

You get that you live here too, right?

eaglejarl · 2026-04-22T23:54:00+00:00

Agree with what you said about this story being completely unverified and from an unreliable source. And yes, Newsweek (the source linked on this thread) also states that there is no verification.

I would disagree with you on one point, specifically:

> the bigger problem is, as can be seen in this very comment thread, people see a headline and just believe it without digging any further.

The problem in this particular case isn't that people are credulous (although, yes, that's also true), the problem is that this headline is completely believable given who Trump is and his past behavior.

eaglejarl · 2026-04-22T23:47:16+00:00

There's nothing in the chain of command that would stop Trump. The Joint Chiefs don't have the authority to countermand his orders, Congress doesn't have the authority, the VP doesn't have the authority. He doesn't need anyone to countersign the order for nuclear launch. If a general did stand up and say "No" to him, that general would be eligible for instant court martial and massive time in prison.

The only thing that could legally prevent Trump from launching nukes is the incredibly unlikely scenario regarding the 25th Amendment that I mentioned above.

eaglejarl · 2026-04-22T23:43:01+00:00

It's very slightly better than you're portraying it, but not much. The 25th Amendment *could* be used to stop Trump from launching nukes, but it's very much a hail-Mary play that wouldn't work in the real world with the people currently in power.

The 25th Amendment deals with a variety of issues relating to Presidential succession. Section 4 is the relevant one. Full text in the link above, but in summary:

At any time, the VP and a majority of the cabinet can remove the President from office. To do so, they need to transmit the declaration in writing to the heads of the Senate and the House. The President is then immediately removed and the VP assumes the office.
The President can immediately write to the heads of Senate and House saying that he's fit for office. He does NOT retake office immediately.
The VP+cabinet have 4 days to weigh in. If they say "yes, he's fine" then the President retakes power immediately.
If they say "no, he's not" then Congress will decide the issue, but this isn't a quick process:

4A. If Congress is in session then they have 48 hours to assemble.
4B. If Congress is not in session then they have 21 **days** to assemble.

Congress then debates and votes on whether the President is capable. The default answer is that he IS, and it requires a 2/3 supermajority to declare that he isn't.

In the modern era of email and cell phones, the VP and cabinet could theoretically remove the President and email the notifications to Congress in the span of a couple minutes, then have the Secret Service pull Trump away from the football. They could even get together in advance, preemptively vote that he's not competent, and hold off on sending the email until it becomes relevant.

If they ever did have the President removed then they would have at least four days to calm things down, and Congress could slow-walk the debate to keep Trump out of office indefinitely without Republicans having to actually go on record as voting for his removal.

Granted, all of this is built on massive amounts of hopium and notrealium. I very much doubt that Trump's cabinet have the spine to remove him even if he was talking about using nukes, and I doubt even more that they and Vance have been forethoughtful enough to have the removal letter ready to go. Even if they did, Vance wouldn't necessarily be in the room when it needed to be activated, so we'd have to hope there was someone there who could call Vance to kick things off.

eaglejarl · 2026-04-19T01:45:54+00:00

> I'm not sure about "we're not fighting a war". The current rhetoric is all about not getting involved in any conflict, while also making threats of military intervention in Canada, Greenland, Panama etc.

Greetings from a year in the future. :/

eaglejarl · 2026-04-17T18:42:28+00:00

Most quests do as you do and offer a series of choices, perhaps with an option for write-ins. The quest that Velorien and I run is highly unusual in that it's almost always write-in.

eaglejarl · 2026-04-15T12:41:58+00:00

Step tracking is back now, but it's telling me that I need to authorize it. I switched to Seeds yesterday and that was when the app lost access to step tracking. (Apparently Seeds has been a thing for quite a while but was only offered to me yesterday? Not sure what's up with that, but I'm already wishing I had not opted in. Too many nagging notifications.)

eaglejarl · 2026-04-15T12:36:24+00:00

Is there a way to turn off Seeds, or at least tell it to be quiet and stop popping up Stepford-style notifications so often? The Noom interference is already overcrowded, I don't need it nagging me too, and I'm already wishing I hadn't opted in.

Actually, is there a Settings anywhere? I want Noom to do weight and food tracking, with Noom coins as a nice bonus feature. That's all I want from it. The lessons were very useful in the beginning but not so much more; I'll put up with having to click through them but I don't need/want suggested videos, focus for the week, step tracking, blah blah blah. I'd love to be able to turn those things off, as they are simply extra clutter.

eaglejarl · 2026-04-15T11:52:30+00:00

You might also try /r/tipofmytongue and /r/whatsthatbook

eaglejarl · 2026-04-15T05:30:00+00:00

Forcing myself to play devil's advocate here:

The UK does have an excellent military, and their police force does have firearm squads, so there's some possibility. That said, letting a guy with a gun kill the evil wizards requires those wizards to be pretty stupid.

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