Our ancestors’ brains went from chimpanzee-sized to modern-sized (actually slightly bigger than today) between two million and one million years ago, and more importantly the language-governing areas increased in size during that stretch. So human beings a million years ago were very much like us today, just without the advanced technology.

My favorite was “a sucking chest wound is Nature’s Way of telling you you’ve been in a firefight”.

Galluspetat

I always liked how archaeologists would dig up ancient statues of big-breasted and big-butted women and call them evidence of a “cult of fertility”. I guess that sounds better than “porn”.

Fun fact: through the 1800s coal-powered steamships mostly replaced sailing vessels for the transportation of people and time-sensitive cargo around the world. But steamships were highly inefficient and required frequent re-coaling, and locally available coal was dirtier and contained less thermal energy than the good stuff that Britain (who was doing by far most of the shipping) got from Wales and other places on their island. Because steamships could not efficiently and cheaply haul the coal that they needed around the world to restock the coaling stations, this was done instead by an enormous fleet of sailing colliers. So the “steam revolution” of the 1800s was actually a steam/wind-power hybrid. It wasn’t until the advent of triple- and quadruple-expansion steam engines, turbines, and greatly improved boilers in the early 1900s that steam-powered vessels could efficiently and economically haul their own fuel. And even with that, wind-powered cargo vessels remained economically viable and operating in significant numbers right up until the start of WWII (that’s II, not I).

A great read is The Last Grain Race by Eric Newby, about his time as a sailor aboard Moshulu (a large steel sail-powered cargo ship) in 1938-1939. Moshulu went on to star in The Godfather Part II as the ship which brings young Vito Corleone to New York, and is now weirdly enough a floating restaurant in my city of Philadelphia (I’ve never eaten there but I want to).

If ya liked it then ya shoulda put ring mail on it
If ya liked it then ya shoulda put ring mail on it
If ya liked it then ya shoulda put ring mail on it
If ya liked it then ya shoulda put ring mail on it

Edit: before any nerds weigh in, I know that’s not ring mail.

while Superman himself is invulnerable, the rest of the world isn’t

Larry Niven wrote a great essay many years ago about the physical realities of being Superman. My favorite bit was about how him having sex with Lois Lane would have resulted in her head being blown off.

Star Wars where the X-Wings behave more like airplanes than spacecraft

My favorite part of Empire Strikes Back was when Luke takes his (presumably) short-range interceptor X-Wing and flies it to another star system to hang with Yoda. I dunno, maybe canon explained this one somewhere (was Yoda’s planet in the same star system as Hoth or something? are X-Wings capable of FTL travel for no reason?).

Thoo Faith

I drive a 2001 which is in that dead zone after cassettes but before aux plugs. I still had to be burning CDs a few years ago but eventually stumbled across an adapter that tricks the car stereo into thinking my phone is a 6-CD changer in the trunk.

My best friend in high school in the '80s had something on his home stereo I’ve never seen before or since: an 8-track tape recorder. We would make 8-track mix tapes and take them to parties … which we promptly got kicked out of because they were tapes of stuff like Yes, King Crimson, Laurie Anderson, Tangerine Dream and Vangelis, and didn’t nobody want to listen to that kind of shit back then.

Would you think those guys would know to do something about a dude on a roof with a rifle?

Should’ve put “John” above the “Holmes” logo and made fun of your boss’ small-dick energy when he complained.

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people mistakenly associate Trick of the Tail and Wind & Wuthering with Gabriel despite being voiced by Phil Collins

Just saw an interview with Peter Gabriel where he said people come up to him almost daily and tell him how they much they loved Trick of the Tail. He just had this defeated look on his face when he said he had to keep telling them that was Phil and not him.

However, you may be overestimating the impact of Hackett’s departure on their shift to pop. Genesis the band was deeply in debt by that point and they really had to make the shift to more accessible pop in order to become profitable. Additionally, this was a time when all of the prog rockers (except Robert Fripp) were selling out: Asia (supergroup formed from Yes, King Crimson and ELP), ELP themselves (with their hilariously awful Love Beach album) and later Yes with 90125.

Elon Musk’s vertical is horizontal.

I heard the older folks say that I would wake up and be old one day and it would feel like barely any time has passed.

I’m almost 60 and I feel more like I should be 100 or so. I’ve had many different careers and technology has changed so much that I feel I’ve lived through multiple lifetimes. I think people who do basically the same thing every day (and night) over and over again, with the same people, tend to perceive life as flying by because there’s no real difference between one day and the next.

At my last company, they usually gave end-of-the-year bonuses instead of raises. They were pretty generous, usually amounting to about half of our annual salaries, but it of course prevented us from being guaranteed that level of compensation the following year. That’s why I always describe bonuses as raises followed by pay cuts.

I once quit my job at a software company I really hated. They were desperate to keep me around for the projects I was leading so they asked if I would work hourly for a while. I quoted them a go-fuck-yourselves hourly rate which they immediately agreed to, which made me even more angry about my prior years of poor compensation. I worked under this agreement for about half a year and further improved my effective hourly rate by not working very hard.

It’s funny how people who get their news exclusively from their Facebook feeds have never heard of Cambridge Analytica. I can’t imagine how that could happen.