I'm getting so tired of all these articles with slop images front and center. It's lazy, a huge red flag, and I refuse to read the article out of sheer disgust.

I really like my friend's justification in his fantasy worldbuilding, which explains it to my satisfaction:

When attempting to seal things of mundane power, mundane objects are sufficient, such as handcuffs and chains. When you try to seal something magically, that extra power needed to seal such a powerful entity has tradeoffs: the more magically unbreakable and irresistible you want the seal to be, the more fragile the conditions holding it must also be. Want to seal all the evils of the world, even for a short time? Well, looks like you're going to need to store them in a top-heavy, ceramic jar with a tiny bottom, like Pandora's Pithos. Trapping a genie? It'll be much easier if you lay the trap with conditions for release, like someone rubbing it three times. Want to bind a violent spirit? Bind it to a fragile mirror, and make it so that she is freed if anyone stares into the mirror and says her name thrice, or if the mirror shatters.

This explains a lot of the folkloric sealing rituals in mythology.

But that doesn't stop the thing from getting out when the seal corrodes away...

That's only effective until the saltwater eats away at all of the seals, at which point it's free again. Ancient vaults containing artifacts of fell power and their incumbent curses comprise one of the most popular adventure story archetypes. The point is, it's only gone until someone stumbles across it, and now it's _un_gone, and worse, the hapless stumbler has no idea what's going on.

Elsevier was literally founded by the father of Ghislaine Maxwell. He clearly passed on his moral framework to his daughter.

What in the botfucked hell is with that YouTube ad instead of text?

I wouldn't say "a lot". I've seen one person do it consistently: This dude.

And the S part of STEM is pretty important for actually understanding the issues facing voters (and our world)

And the T part of STEM is pretty important for actually functioning in the modern world of computing.

Yeah, they put up LEDs to make a "rainbow road" for pride month as a performative gesture.

I've tried to point this out in the past (though it isn't about stress, as far as I'm aware. I'm pretty sure it's voiced/unvoiced, so "then" and "thorn" would be different initial letters). Didn't help.

For the uninitiated: this is the current most-efficient method found of packing 17 unit squares inside another square. You may not like it, but this is what peak efficiency looks like.

(Of course, 16 squares has a packing coefficient of 4, compared to this arrangement's 4.675, so this is just what peak efficiency looks like for 17 squares)

Edit: For the record, since this blew up, a tiny nitpick in my own explanation above: a smaller value of the packing coefficient is not actually what makes it more efficient (as it is simply the ratio of the larger square's side to the sides of the smaller squares). The optimal efficiency (zero interstitial space) is achieved when the packing coefficient is precisely equal to the square root of the number of smaller squares. Hence why the case of n=25, with a packing coefficient of 5, is actually more efficient than this packing of n=17, with a packing coefficient of 4.675. Since sqrt(25)=5, that case is a perfectly efficient packing, equal to the case of n=16 with coefficient of 4. Since sqrt(17)=4.123, this packing above is not perfectly efficient, leaving interstices. Obviously. This also means that we may yet find a packing for n=17 with a packing coefficient closer to sqrt(17), which would be an interesting breakthrough, but more important are the questions "is it possible to prove that a given packing is the most efficient possible packing for that value of n" and "does there exist a general rule which produces the most efficient possible packing for any given value of n unit squares?"

If this were real, one of the kids who admits they have no idea what they're doing would have already, quite confidently, stolen a pair of scissors from god knows where, cut out every single square, then arranged them in numerical order. Only THEN would they admit to not knowing wtf they're doing.

Also, D even gets the entire bay of Naples, in addition to the cuisines of 3-4 billion people. Anyone who wants anything from A can get anything from there in Oceania.

D is so OP, I cannot imagine anyone picking anything else unless they are basing their choice on where they live.

Technically, the legal term is Exile, IIRC. But doing that without the backing of legality is also what you said.

This belongs in uplifting news

c is a measurable constant, not some unit that is arbitrarily defined. Like Boltzmann's Constant, or the ground state hyperfine transition frequency of the Cesium-133 atom... it just... Is.

Therefore, it is a useful tool to define units. You claim it is a tautology because we write it in units of meters per second, while the meter is defined based on c. This is easily disproven, as you can represent the speed of light in any unit of velocity. It is a fundamental constant, derivable through experiment without any units a priori.

You can always trust SatansMaggotyCumFart to chime in with the wholesome memes.

Precisely. That's why I wrote the parenthetical about the greater efficiency of 16 as a perfect square. As the other commenter pointed out, this is a meme. This is only the most efficient packing method for 17 squares. It's the packing efficiency equivalent of the spinal tap "this one goes to 11" quote.

"Wish granted. Electrons, being a human construct, have now always been defined slightly differently. Just as Franklin got the polarity wrong and you still use his labeling system, J.J. Thompson will now have fundamentally misunderstood the nature of the electron, leading to a cascading assumption by later scientists that the number of electrons in a neutral atom is one greater than the number of protons. Even though this completely breaks the math of quantum mechanics, everyone is just used to subtracting one at this point. This is a minutely worse world, but as a bonus, every physicist who sees you will now be preternaturally certain that you are personally to blame. You're welcome."

Well, since the only myths we are given are not from her perspective, but her enemies', we can't say for sure, but consider:

You are a faithful priestess of Athena on a remote island. One day, the literal God of the Sea and Tempestuous Rage decides to walk into Athena's Temple and brutally rape you. Athena, the goddess you have so faithfully served, but who refused to protect her own priestess in her own temple from her own uncle, takes some serious offense at the sacrilege of her priestess being raped in her temple, and the Goddess of Wisdom decides that the only appropriate action is to punish the priestess by cursing you to never be able to be in the company of anyone ever again, and to add insult to injury and betrayal, you've been turned into a monster. Now, you have just been raped, cursed and transformed, and so you run away to an island. Now, when random men start coming to your island to "slay the vile monster", what do YOU do? The last time a man came to your island, he raped you and literally ended your existence as a human being, and the clear and stated intention of these men is to kill you. So yeah, you probably don't feel too bad about some dick-waving "heroes" getting turned to stone.

And when that one guy inevitably comes along with the help of Athena and chops off your head? Turns out that not only were you pregnant the whole time from the rape, but your children are born from the gushing wound from your beheading and are a flying horse and a giant.

Oh yeah, your head? Athena was so proud of herself for all of this shit that she made your severed, tortured death mask her personal symbol and stuck it to her fucking armor to intimidate her enemies.