You find yourself compulsively drawn to woodworking.

I usually don’t. I don’t take a bath if I’m completely covered in dirt. The actual concentration of dirt or skin in the bathwater has to be incredibly low. I take a bath to relax, not to get clean.

Why wouldn’t they be? I would assume that socks only go in the family sock basket after going through the washer/dryer.

My pop history theory is that it’s a latent cultural memory of the Biblical tradition. Remember how Eve was cursed with the pain of childbirth after giving Adam the fruit? Western culture has a history of seeing women’s pain as a result of this ancient curse. Now, I imagine few doctors today are explicitly thinking about the Garden of Eden when diagnosing patients, but the cultural memory remains, if greatly diluted and distorted.

That sounds like what I can do. Both the rumble and the clicks/ear popping.

It’s called being a realist. If you want to live in denial, fine. But I’m not going to sugarcoat things. Maybe I’m just a pessimist, but that pessimism has proven a far better predictor of future events than rose-tinted visions such as yours.

They will simply pass this bill next year. That has been the continual pattern with these laws. What was a step too far and abominable last year is normalized and acceptable this year.

Don’t copy that floppy!

I assume it’s because it’s run entirely off of a single old zip disk drive manufactured in 1998.

Do you…need a hug?

In One Hundred Years of Solitude we see generational cycles of behavior blah blah blah, which characters fit this pattern, which characters do not, and why?

Proceeds to write an essay about Goku.

I think it’s simply due to stress. Most people care about people other than themselves. They worry about the effect of their actions on others. They worry about not living up to their potential. They worry about letting people they care about down. Narcissists by contrast get to live blissfully ignorant low stress lives. Look at Trump. That bastard has not a care in the world. In his mind, he’s already perfect. Notice how the presidency tends to rapidly age people, but it didn’t seem to affect Trump? This is why.

Really? A species that was hunted to extinction after humans entered North America, and you think their ecological niche was eating humans?

Silicon Valley is full of tech bros that dropped out of college before they finished their philosophy courses. And damn does it show.

I need to build something like that, just for this purpose. Out of wood of course. Need to find some plans somewhere…

No reason to assume this happened on a work night.

The company that did this didn’t directly clone Dire Wolves. Instead, they identified several “key traits” that defined the species external morphology and then edited wolf DNA to gain those traits.

First, this obviously isn’t bringing the species back. It’s more like artificial convergent evolution than anything else. But even if you accept that bringing a species back that will fit the same ecological niche and resembles the old species is “bringing it back,” there’s a much bigger problem. We cannot know what the “key traits” for a dire wolf are.

We don’t know what key traits are actually required for dire wolves to re-inhabit their ancient ecological niche. All we have are their skeletons. We don’t know what their fur was like. We don’t know if they had any key soft tissue adaptations. We don’t know if they have any unique behaviors that were key to them surviving in their niche. Imagine trying to bring back bowerbirds if you didn’t know anything about their nest building behaviors. You could try to modify something similar from a similar species, but if all you had are their skeletons, you would have no idea that they were famous in life for making their elaborate nests.

No one alive has ever seen a dire wolf. No one has ever spoken to someone that has seen one. No one has ever read an account of what these animals looked like, behaved like, and lived like. We’re just assuming here that their behavior is identical to other wolf species, and that the only differences are the major morphological ones. We can’t know what these creatures were truly like, as they were hunted to extinction long before writing was ever invented. And there’s nothing in the oral histories either, beyond just maybe stories about great big wolves that might, by some miracle, be a distant remembrance of them.

Also, for perspective:

the two species share 99.5 per cent of their DNA

And humans and chimpanzees share 98.8% of our DNA. Imagine if we went extinct, all you had was our bones, and some space alien landed and tried to bring us back by modifying chimp DNA. If they had nothing else to go on, how close do you think they would actually manage to really bringing us back? Odds are they would end up with something more akin to various ancient hominid species than our present human race.

See stack effect.

I would open windows on the top and bottom. If using mechanical ventilation, position a fan blowing inside at the bottom of the stairs, and one blowing out at the top.

Homeward Bound: The Incredible Journey.

Ah. Makes sense.