The least metal word is particularly, followed by indicated, secretary, committee, and university.

NyMag

In case you'd like some non-political lunacy in your day...

We live in a yin-yang world of duality where everything and its opposite exist together in perfect proportions like male/female, good/evil, hot/cold, knowledge/ignorance, inhale/exhale, dark/light, day/night and of course, sun and moon. Half our lives (the daytime) are ruled by the sun and half our lives (the nighttime) are ruled by the moon. When you look up at the sun and the moon they are in perfect proportion to one another as exemplified during an eclipse. But thanks to a total eclipse of the mind these nihilistic cosmologists have indoctrinated world-wide generations of people to believe Earth itself and all the planets revolve around the sun. That the sun is much larger and farther away, the moon is much smaller and closer, and it's simply our coincidental perspective here on Earth that makes them appear the same size. They have convinced us that the very Earth on which we stand is spinning beneath our feet. So next time you're wondering why it's so difficult to awaken your friends and family to the Atlantean conspiratorial matrix, consider how deep the establishment indoctrination really is, and how easy it is to convince people that up is down and down is up.

There are hundreds of comments below it, where dozens of amateur and professional physicists pop in to point out how geocentrism was thoroughly discredited hundreds of years ago. Each one is dismissed with the same stack of conspiracy theories and pseudoscience - Fake moon landing! Coriolis effect has never been proved! It's the aether! Copernican propaganda!

Good times.

I find the safety obsession with self-driving cars to be amusing. Safety is the easy part. I'm sure they'll be able to make cars which drive themselves on highways and have as good or better safety records as humans in similar driving conditions. Programming them to not hit things and to avoid being hit by things is, I would guess, the simplest challenge right now.

I disagree.

Here's the scenario that convinces me otherwise:

You're driving on a residential street. It just happens that there's a birthday party in one of the houses ahead on the right. You can see a "HAPPY BIRTHDAY" banner in the front window. Cars are parked along the street, on both sides, in front of the house. Kids are playing with a ball in the front lawn.

Most human drivers will see the kids playing in the yard and will, at least a little, raise their guard. Kids, ball, street - balls have a tendency to go into streets. Maybe you slow down a bit, maybe not. But you're probably going to start paying close attention.

You keep driving. And now you're in front of the house driving between two rows of parked cars, slowed down a bit because it's narrow, plus, kids.

Suddenly, a ball appears from between two cars immediately ahead on your right, bounces once, then exits between two cars on the left. What do you do? You slow way down, or even stop, because you already know that:

1. there are kids playing in front of that house
2. with a ball
3. that ball just bounced across the street in front of you
4. kids follow balls

At 30mph, you need 45 feet to stop (not counting human reaction time, which adds another 45 feet). 45 feet is about three car lengths. I hope you had already slowed down a bit. If you didn't, you will never be able to stop in time.

In this scenario, knowing about kids and balls is what gets you to slow down enough to be able to stop in time. It's not enough to react when the ball appears. You have to actually understand the situation and prepare yourself for the worst. Dumb sensors can't do that. It takes some amount of intelligence. Would the computer in a self-driving car know how to identify "kids playing with a ball on a lawn"? Not today. In ten years? Maybe. With matter-of-life-or-death reliably? I wouldn't bet my life on it. Maybe in twenty years? But until they can, self-driving cars will have to be limited to driving impractically slow except on restricted-access highways.

Love songs have always dominated the pop charts, and the current era is no exception. But today, the singer’s object of affection is very often that stunning someone they see in the mirror.

A new study reports self-regard, self-promotion, and plain old bragging are far more prominent in pop music than they were a quarter-century ago.

It's as if the GOP is in the business of promoting fear of ghosts that only the GOP can exorcise.

See also: the gun manufacturers + the NRA.

The symbol comes from right-wing blog the Right Stuff, whose podcast The Daily Shoah featured a segment called "Merchant Minute" that gave Jewish names a cartoonish "echo" sound effect when uttered. The "parenthesis meme," as Right Stuff editors call it, is a visual pun.

In Right Stuff propaganda, you'll often read that Jewish names "echo." According to the blog's lexicon page, "all Jewish surnames echo throughout history." In other words, the supposed damage caused by Jewish people reverberates from decade to decade.

In an email, the editors of the Right Stuff said it is also intended as a critique of "Jewish power." They explained further:

"The inner parenthesis represent the Jews' subversion of the home [and] destruction of the family through mass-media degeneracy. The next [parenthesis] represents the destruction of the nation through mass immigration, and the outer [parenthesis] represents international Jewry and world Zionism."

Exposed: The Secret Symbol Neo-Nazis Use to Target Jews Online

sigh

This Pokemon Go thing sounds like something the South Park guys made up so they could make fun of people who play video games and people who think corporations rule our lives.

Putting wine bottles in paper bags will not prevent them from breaking in your car's trunk, should you take a corner too fast.

Also: cleaning red wine out of a car is nearly impossible once it finds the gaps and crevices in the sheet metal.

Today I'm closing my business. It's been making software for 23 years and has officially been a corporation for 18 (IIRC). But, the cost of simply filing the periodic paperwork to keep on the good side of the State finally exceeded what sales brought in. So, that's that.

Alas.

On a bright note:
When I decided to close it, about a month ago, I did my first ever mass-email to all the customers of one of my products. This product was a toolkit used by other programmers to do image processing tasks (read a JPG, resize it, rotate it, etc.); we made the source code for the toolkit available for purchase as well because that allows programmers to find and fix any problems they might encounter, which provides insurance against things like my biz going out of biz. I told them, in the email, that the biz was closing and that they had until today to purchase the source code. In the first week after that, there were more sales than the past two years combined. Even today, people are doing source code purchases.

Hate to say it, but unsolicited email works.

Here's what your protest vote gets ya, snowflake:

"One voter told the BBC that he didn't think his vote to leave the EU would matter.

I'm a bit shocked to be honest," the voter, identified as Adam from Manchester, England, told the broadcaster. "I'm shocked about both. I'm shocked that we actually voted to leave. I didn't think that was going to happen. My vote, I didn't think, was going to matter too much because I thought we were just going to remain."

He also didn't expect Cameron to resign: "The David Cameron resignation has blown me away to be honest. I think it's been- the period of uncertainty that we're going to have for the next couple of months, I think that's just been magnified now. So, yeah, quite worried."

La di da. Pissin away me vote.

(LGM's take.)