Oldmandan

Jace can't read. He just alters everyone's memories so they think he can. This is canon, and no one can change my mind. :P

Wotc can do this, sure... so long as they restrict it to BO1. In BO3, decks needing to run a couple pieces of hate/interaction in the sideboard to deal with a linear combo is good for the health if the game, if anything. (If that's still not enough, then sure, ban it globally. But BO1 and BO3 are fundementally different games.)

Yeah, post-shaving alopecia is a thing, especially in double coated breeds. (Which is part of the reason you're supposed to avoid shaving them.)

Move over spherical cow, circular cat is my new best friend

Interesting. Curious what the underlying systems are like and how it will feel to play. I know a couple old high school friends that have off and on talked about homebrewing up an FF campaign from DnD5e rules, but if this is good it would be a lot less work to get going. :P

Possibly one of my favourite series, period. The first book is objectively hard to get into. (The writing is a little rougher than the later novels, and the in media res start + Erikson's... anthropological(?) approach to world building (where history and culture are complicated, everyone disagrees about everything, anyone who can tell you something about the world with certainty either refuses, or is lying) leaves you needing to work hard to understand what's going on while not being sure if the effort is worth it.)

And then book two shares almost no characters and takes place on an entirely different continent, only tangentially connecting to the main plot. :P But if you can get over the shock of that (and get through the first book to get here to begin with) Deadhouse Gates and Memories of Ice (books two and three) are genuine works of art, and the rest of the series is of similar quality.

Realistically, this is a complicated issue. I can understand wanting to modernize older works (wanting to share something you enjoyed, but struggling because said thing has not aged well), but part of the value of those works is in the view they give of the past.

The important part if this is going to become commonplace, I think, is making sure the process is transparent and the originals preserved; EG, if a book is going to be edited, it needs to be explicit (in the new version) that it was editied, what was edited, and why it was changed. It's one thing to tweak something so that it can still be enjoyed, it's another to try to forget it was problematic in the first place.

That all said, I find I agree with Pullman, here; I doubt the publisher is motivated to do this by anything other than sales. Let new authors find their place, instead of whitewashing the works of dead men to turn a quick buck. /shurg

This would be super tempting, gear up my tanks and non-magic dps, grind out some manderville weapons, etc... but BG3 just came out. :P Maybe if I time it to get the free playtime right at the end of August. :P

I told myself I wouldn't read unrelated papers at work, but here we are. :P Yeah, as expected, the actual paper is way more informative about the structural properties, and about the limitations. (Difficulty fabricating larger samples without voids, said voids resulting in much lower strengths and much less plasticity, uncertain tensile strength, etc.) Fascinatingly though, (at least to me, not having known the details about DNA based metamaterials :P) the details of the properties should be tunable by way of changing the DNA lattice structure. Which makes it a two-part engineering problem, figuring out how to manufacture it at scale, and determining optimal lattice structures for different applications. Definitely exciting, and will be big once we figure these things out.

But that's not really what I was talking about. While I get that this is an article geared to laymen/the general public, I do think we should be holding science communication to a higher standard. What was discovered is exciting, but we don't know how it can be used yet, or if it will ever be practical to do so. Overview is fine, I'd just like some more qualifiers and less speculation. Maybe it's just me, but I feel like some more care would do a lot to improve overall scientific literacy and trust in the scientific community. /shurg

Always a little annoyed at articles like this; "strength" doesn't tell me anything. If this is 5x more resistant than steel to deformation, but then shatters catastrophically, that limits its use cases substantially. Likewise, compressive, tensile and shear strength are all different properties, only one of which is referenced at all. Still very cool, and I look forward to seeing how it develops and learning more details about its capabilities (when I have more time I'll read the paper), but vague terminology like this has a bad habit of making stuff sound way more revolutionary than it actually is. /shurg

IIRC, there is a bit more complexity than that to the Pirahã understanding of numeracy. Relative quantity is something they're just fine at understanding, (with words for single/less, plural/more and same) it's abstraction of quantities to tokenized values where they struggle. Which, I suppose, also interestingly lines up with the study results; the initial training period resulted in nodes associated with quantity, but those nodes were separate/unrelated to numeracy systems that developed with additional training.

It got more questionable the further I scrolled. /shurg Perhaps it's just marketing (thumbnails decrying feminism/diversity/etc) but bare minimum he gives off vibes like he's trying to cater to a far-right crowd.