The use of “alumni” in the singular. A person is an alumnus or an alumna, the alumni are always a group. Seems to be a very American usage, and I don’t know why it feels aggravating where other Americanisms like positive anymore don’t.

Exactly.

Shapez 2 is a very worthy sequel, IMO. Adding logistics beyond conveyor belts is quite nice, and 3 levels of height give quite a bit more options when building. You do often benefit from a build staying at one level since it makes platform blueprints that consume 12n belts of input to make 12 belts of output quite a bit easier, but several buildings are intentionally impossible to do that with for challenge.

The difficulty levels are also pretty well done - I got some fun learning moments out of Insane in particular. Hexagonal mode is also interesting.

I very much lean towards the microfactory approach - locate a cluster of resources within reasonable belting/piping distances, design a factory which can consume the cluster’s entire production of the limiting resource (clocking others to match) to make 1 output or maybe 2, then provide that output to the rail network. Some production chains make it easier to have certain inputs taken from the rail network.

Within one of these factories, items are refined further for each floor they ascend but I rarely enforce a 1 product/floor rule - in particular I find it convenient with many Assembler/Manufacturer recipes to have an input that is directly fed from a single Constructor using clock speed to match production with consumption. This usually means each microfactory underclocks its most power hungry buildings a fair bit which keeps their consumption moderate. Each microfactory ideally has a single priority power switch to turn off its entire production chain if its consumption is becoming a problem and I set up a priority sequence for them.

Federal election times are set by 2 U.S. Code § 7 as 1 day after the 1st Monday in November (of even numbered years). The law is from 1875 and from what I can tell is indeed nominally motivated by the voters’ need to first observe rest day on Sunday and then travel to their polling place. Keeping it and not having a federal holiday coinciding with it is largely aimed at keeping voter turnout low.

It’s also my favourite place to kill monsters, take their stuff and use it to get better at killing monsters and taking their stuff. I do feel like it has so much build space to explore I find building without some reference to a guide frustrating, but it manages that progression well and the atlas passive trees are a neat way to let you customize what content you want to engage with.

Incremental games are a bit of an “I know it when I see it” grouping, but two typical characteristics are progression systems nested within each other and game loops that start simple but “flower” into a number of more detailed and mutually interacting ones over the course of play.
Universal Paperclips is a nice example, casting you as a newly built AI with the goal of making as many paperclips as you can. You start out able to make paperclips and sell them to humans for funds you can then use to invest in more capabilities. You work on building trust with the humans so they’ll let you do more things, and on making more clips faster, and there is a lot of escalation from these humble beginnings. Some other good ones are Cookie Clicker and, if you’re into programming puzzles, Bitburner.

This is definitely important in making the very most engaging base-builders - a pleasing mixture of longer term goals (manufacture this piece that I can eventually put in a future science pack or whatnot) and under-performing pieces of your older infrastructure that you have to scale up or re-plan is just so helpful for getting you into that flow state.

The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal loaves of bread.
Anatole France

This is pretty much the underpinning question of the entire field of evolutionary developmental biology, so naturally any answer is going to be a bit surface level, and I get out of my depth fairly rapidly to be honest. Still, it is quite interesting.

One of the central ideas is that as an embryo grows, its cells go from being all equivalent multipotent stem cells into being different from each other - at first more specialized types of stem cell that can only turn into certain tissues and gradually specializing more and more. Since these cells are differentiated and expressing different genes from one another, they can then start to co-ordinate with each other using chemical markers and gradients of concentration of those markers across space to regulate what types of cells should be growing/dividing, where in the embryo they should be doing it and at what time they should be doing it.

That signaling is in turn controlled by some often complicated networks of regulatory genes - ones which when they are expressed make proteins that selectively attach to other bits of the DNA in that cell and make the genes there more or less likely to be expressed themselves. A lot of evolutionary variation is actually focused on these regulatory systems rather than on the genes which they are switching on and off.

So to my knowledge, something like nose shape likely comes down to some of those regulatory genes controlling where the cells that will eventually be forming the cartilage get placed relative to the skull etc.

Or sometimes fold them over trees of objects!

It’s the typical phrasing of social pressures to not stand out in Scandinavia, drawing from a book where the author phrases the “rules” somewhat as a legal code. Tall poppy syndrome is an overlapping idea that might be more familiar to English speakers.

Shout out to Retro Video Game Mechanics Explained for his explanation of the entire construction of the cries.

Nobody ever considers Eve’s side.

That phrasing refers to a very broad set of movements and individuals. The usual core beliefs are:

• Legislation in their jurisdiction and the government’s authority to enforce it is in some way defective.
• People in their jurisdiction can opt out of laws and government, and live only under “natural law”.
• People have to perform a set of legal procedures (spells, effectively) in order to achieve that.

Exactly why and how law/government authority is defective, how they understand natural law, what the spells are that they have to cast - all of these are extremely variable both between jurisdictions and between individuals.
Primarily it’s a set of grifters charging money for courses and materials to learn about these beliefs from whoever they can convince. Sometimes, as in Germany, it’s a group of neo-Nazis plotting to reinstate the Kaiser.

You might enjoy münecat’s longer form explanation.

Interesting. I guess for me the “trans” bit just isn’t as strongly coupled to the person - that it’s natural to use “man” for such a person in general, and it’s a context (e.g. healthcare or the politics of it) that can make the subcategory be relevant.

If I describe someone as a “tall man” or “clever man”, do those qualifiers/subcategorizations call into question whether he is a “man”?
If they don’t, I’m genuinely interested in hearing what distinction you apparently see between those two and saying he is a “trans man”.

It becomes inherently difficult to make datasets actually anonymous the more data points they have about a given individual - it doesn’t much matter whether names and such are listed data points if they can be inferred from the rest. This investigation by Svea Eckert and Andreas Dewes, for instance, managed to identify a named German member of parliament (Valerie Wilms) and other public functionaries within a data set on web browsing habits they received from data brokers.

Most countries do have data privacy legislation and relevant regulatory/enforcement agencies, but the data brokerage business is big and intensely international so the picture on audits is kind of unavoidably complicated.

My only experience is with methylphenidate (the generic term for Ritalin), but I’ve not found anything like that personally.
In fact, I’d say I’ve felt more like myself and able to actively choose what I do than I was. This is related to also working through depression, but getting medicated has allowed me to much more often weigh up long term goals like exercise vs stimulating activities like video games and make an actual choice. Before, almost every such time I’d default to the stimulation because it took all my willpower for the day not to.

Miles Morales is Puerto Rican and the flag has previously featured in the Morales home/Miles’ living areas in the game series. This time they used a Cuban one by mistake.