"India’s fertility rate has fallen substantially - from 5.7 births per woman in 1950 to the current rate of two.

Fertility rates have fallen below the replacement level of two births per woman in 17 of the 29 states and territories." - BBC

The replacement rate is 2.1 births per woman, just for accuracy. So the country’s rate of 2 per woman on average is below replacement level.

If you haven’t read The House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende, put it on your list. Please and thank you.

Speech makes the case we can save a lot of money paying the unhoused to teach us about life instead of universities. Anti-college before it was cool.

I just started a TNG rewatch last night after finishing DS9. Worf looks so weird.

From the article: “The company claims One UI 8 brings “multimodal capabilities, UX tailored to different device form factors, and personalized, proactive suggestions.” Having used the new OS for a few hours, it doesn’t seem like much has changed with Samsung’s AI implementation.”

If you are curious, the article goes into more detail about the tweaks to the AI layer. I just wanted to provide a TLDR for those keeping up with the general AI shenanigans.

Well, that’s one area you definitely don’t want dandelions growing.

“Wow, three whole openings!”

This is a total flip of the intention of the source material, but in this moment (in the film) it reads in the character’s voice. I think this is a good message buried in a questionable meme, unless I’m missing something. I’m old, so i used to be meta, but then they changed what meta was, and now what is meta is strange and scary to me.

They’re related, those incestuous, chinless WASPs. Brother takes sister to a formal dance and stops by the pharmacy to get a malt and let Dad get a whiff of sister’s corsage. Keep it in the family!

The odd sized Lodge pieces I have don’t get used much, but they’re fun and deliver the goods.

I have a tiny skillet, maybe 2.5 or 3 inches. It makes a fried egg that has brown, crispy edges and fits beautifully on a biscuit. I can only do one at a time, but it’s novel and appreciated by the family.

I have the big pan too, 15" I think. It almost takes 2 hands to lift, but it is great for paella or stir fry, any time you need surface area.

And I have the flat, circular pan with 2 handles. I think people use it for a pizza stone, which I have and it works fine. It fits perfectly on the large Big Green Egg, so I use it as a griddle for steak, salmon, veggies, etc. I haven’t regretted any Lodge purchase.

The Red Room hands out estrogen pills as yet another form of control. If you don’t behave, you don’t get your daily fix. You can tell the non-compliant girls by the lack of secondary sex characteristics. Ol Washboard Wendy over there is a rebel!

They do, and as a Canadian, they should know that fellow Canadian John Hopps invented the 1st pacemaker. He’s even considered the father of biomedical engineering. I dug through trying to find out if he coined the term “heartpacer,” no such luck. It sounds like a Dutch translation to me.

I am outside of the loop and I appreciate your break-down. I am all for paying for useful services, but I have such a backlog of media that I need to watch, I don’t benefit from Trakt. I like a paid business model, though

We should all question a “free” app that lets us spend 1 or 2 or 8 hours a day on their platform. We’ve gotten greedy, thinking that everything should be personal data or advertiser supported. It stinks that Trakt is cutting features while raising prices, all for a pretty simple service, but I think subscription services that protect your privacy are worth funding.

I feel like it’s kind of odd to show the main character shilling fake products during an Upfront, where you are courting advertisers so that they can purchase blocks of advertising time “up front.” I mean, it’s a little meta, but also potentially confusing if you are trying to put your product next to Fallout’s.

I think Gyrate is their best album, so check that out. The Pylon Reenactment Society, which is the lead singer with other band members, is playing in Atlanta on June 19th.

That’s the part of The Hulk we are all just told to ignore.

Do you know where you are commenting? And surely you mean “another Star Trek work place comedy,” because we already have DS9.

It’s a comedy, so I hope so too! I imagine the planet, being a vacation/pleasure planet, will have a lot of kinks that are taboo to the Federation and that’s where you will find the narrative tension as they apply for membership. The planet will have a constitution at odds with the Fed, full of kinks. They might welcome species that have kinks not outlined in said constitution. They might welcome federation citizens that are exploring their non-Fed kinks on this planet.

We’ve seen plenty of criticism of the Federation’s nanny-state. Lately, that criticism has come from the writers of the shows who seem to have lost the narrative that the Federation is our ideal. Sure, it has issues, but none of us should be ashamed of reaching for utopia. I hope the new show is a continuation of the SNW and Prodigy reboot of a less cynical Trek.

Love Pylon

The Grianán of Aileach is a hillfort atop the 244 metres (801 ft) high Greenan Mountain at Inishowen in County Donegal, Ireland. The main structure is a 19th-century reconstruction of a stone ringfort, thought to have been built by the Northern Uí Néill, in the sixth or seventh century CE. The wall is about 4.5 metres (15 ft) thick and 5 metres (16 ft) high. Inside it has three terraces, which are linked by steps, and two long passages within it. Originally, there would have been buildings inside the ringfort. Just outside it are the remains of a well and a tumulus.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grianan_of_Aileach