Are you saying neanderthal didn’t exist, or was just homo sapiens? Or did you mean in the context of mitochondrial Eve?

All of these things, actually. The measured, physiological differences between “homo sapiens” and “neanderthal” (the air quotes here meaning “so-called”) fossils are much smaller than the differences found among contemporary humans, so the premise that “neanderthals” represent(ed) a separate species - in the sense of a reproductively isolated gene pool since gone extinct - is unsupported by fossil evidence. Of course nobody actually makes that claim anymore, since it’s now commonly reported that contemporary humans possess x% of neanderthal DNA (and thus cannot be said to be “extinct”). Of course nobody originally (when Mitochondrial Eve was first mooted) made any claims whatsoever about neanderthals: the term “neanderthal” was imported into the debate over the age and location of the last common mtDNA ancestor years later, after it was noticed that the age estimates of neanderthal remains happened to roughly match the age estimates of the genetic last common ancestor. And this was also after the term “neanderthal” had previously gone into the same general category in Anthropology as “Piltdown Man”.

Most ironically, articles on the subject today now claim a correspondence between the fossil and genetic evidence, despite the fact that the very first articles (out of Allan Wilson’s lab and published in Nature and Science in the mid-1980s) drew their entire impact and notoriety from the fact that the genetic evidence (which supposedly gave 100,000 years ago and then 200,000 years ago as the age of the last common ancestor) completely contradicted the fossil evidence (which shows upright bipedal hominids spreading out of Africa more than a million and half years ago). To me, the weirdest thing is that academic articles on the subject now almost never cite these two seminal articles at all, and most authors seem genuinely unaware of them.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_massacres_in_the_United_States

Huh, I used to make a joke about how there’s never been a “Bloody Monday” in history. I learn something new every day …

One of my academic areas of expertise way back in the day (late '80s and early '90s) were the so-called “Mitochondrial Eve” and “Out of Africa” hypotheses. The absolute mangling of this shit by journalists even at the time was migraine-inducing and it’s gotten much worse in the decades since then. It hasn’t helped that subsequent generations of scholars have mangled the whole deal even worse. The only advice I can offer people is that if the article (scholastic or popular) contains the word “Neanderthal” anywhere, just toss it.

My bus is 35’ long so it fits in (most) parks AFAIK. It’s fine for BLM of course, but I don’t really want to live that isolated.

I used to dream of living on a sailboat. Then a friend of mine who owned one took me out for a ride and I was so seasick I had to jump into the water and be towed back to the dock. So much for that shit.

It’s probably a bit easier to live in a boat, since it’s common (and I guess legal) for marinas to allow people to live in their boats while docked there. I own a skoolie (used school bus converted into a motorhome) and it is nearly fucking impossible to find anywhere that I could legally live in it - especially anywhere near big cities. Ironically, I’ve even tried contacting marinas to see if I could live there in my skoolie and they’re all like “hell no you fucking hippie”. I wonder if I could buy a barge, park the bus on it, and then live in a marina.

I have the same experience driving around the Philly suburbs (mostly west and southwest of the city proper). Like, what the fuck do all these people do that they can afford these places?

My mom grew up in the '40s and '50s and she told me many times about the surplus PT boat her dad had bought at the end of WWII which the family would take out for boating trips. I was like holy shit a PT (Patrol Torpedo) boat! These things had three Packard engines and could make 45 knots. Later on as an adult I discovered that it was actually just a pontoon boat, one of the things the army would use to make temporary bridges over rivers and that could only go about 3 mph. My mom had just thought “PT” stood for “Pon Toon” so that’s what she called it. It turns out she had always wondered what the hell John F. Kennedy had been doing in the Pacific fighting the Japanese in a pontoon boat.

Later on, I then learned that my mom’s uncle had actually bought a surplus Air/Sea Rescue boat after the war. This boat was basically a PT boat, just with two of the Packard engines instead of three; since it was 15 feet longer than a PT boat it could also do 45 knots. So it turns out my mom did have this childhood experience of rocketing around the ocean at unbelievable speeds. Her uncle ended up selling the boat after the engine room caught fire for the third time (something these engines were notorious for) and we have no idea what happened to it after that. These boats cost about $190K new and he had somehow acquired it for $10K - I expect there was some shady dealing going on there.

I have literally 30 years of Visual Basic 3 experience. Somehow, nobody is impressed.

I think the clear worst example is when joe rogan said “this guy saved us” about musk. Not even “this guy will save us” - straight up imagining that musk has already done something heroic.

Guy worth $400 billion buys Twitter for $40 billion (and not even all his own money) and watches its value drop to $20 billion while turning this major information outlet into a right-wing propaganda megaphone and helping to get trump reelected. “Ha ha look at what an idiot Elon Musk is!”

I only recently learned that Budapest was originally two separate cities on opposite sides of a river named Buda and Pest.

As long as you’re not talking about Italy lol

I’m pretty certain he went on to become a staunch supporter of Hitler

The exact opposite is true.

I was riding on a two-lane road a couple of years ago. I heard a car approaching from behind, and he went really wide into the opposite lane to pass me. This was thoughtful of him except that there was a white van coming the opposite way which had to get almost all the way over to their curb to avoid hitting the car passing me head on. The driver of the white van stuck his head out of his window and yelled at me “YOU’RE GONNA GET SOMEBODY KILLED!”

arcing in the walls

Yeah, when I rebuilt the kitchen/living room wall, I found the stud that had held one of the original outlets and it was scorched black where the box had been. Kind of amazing the house was still standing.

I did reuse the scorched stud. 2x4s are fucking expensive and these ones from the 1940s were perfectly straight and completely knot-free.

Like, I actually had emails from the bosses talking about this shit. I really should have saved them for blackmail - no worse ethically than what I did do.

I bought a fridge from Lowe’s and one of the delivery guys asked to use my bathroom. When I went in there later, he had basically managed to pee on the floor instead of in the toilet. I’m a bit of a “tinkler sprinkler” myself but this was next level.

I bought a house last year and one of the switch boxes was filled with caulk to hold the switches in place. I’ve seen a lot of caulk abuse over the years but never anything like that.

Speaking as a 57yo, I sure wish there was some sport where age wasn’t a disadvantage. Is getting your knees to make weird noises when you stand up a “sport”?