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Cake day: July 6th, 2023

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  • That’s not always the case. If a house has a well and later gets water from a utility, they will often keep exterior taps running well water because it’s a lot cheaper than abandoning the well. So, technically, you could have water that’s safe to drink inside the house but still have unsafe water outside.

    Also, if the house has filters or other water treatment that generally isn’t used for the exterior (though that’s typically more about taste and mineral content, rather than anything hazardous).


  • And it’s even more complicated by the fact that Talia was already the replacement for Lyta. And that the revelation about her being a sleeper was never meant to happen unless she left. Oddly enough, that exit was actually recycling the plan for Takashima had she made it past the pilot, only she got replaced… by Susan.

    Plus there’s Garibaldi. His interest in Talia mirrors Zach’s interest in Lyta. Garibaldi’s interest is never resolved because of Talia’s exit. That they tried to reestablish that idea with Zach and Lyta implies there was a plan. Given where things go with Garibaldi and telepaths (including Lyta) that might have been very interesting.

    Instead, Zach’s interest gets folded into the Byron plot. But Byron is also a late addition caused by the whole cancelation and uncancelation around season 5. If they hadn’t lost multiple cast members and rushed key plotlines to fit them into season 4, things would have probably been very different.


  • Babylon 5 has two women start a relationship… sort of.

    They set up a frienship that was supposed to turn into a romantic relationship, but one of them left the show, cutting that subplot short. They still try to work it in, as the last couple episodes before the character exit heavily imply they are romantically/sexually involved, but nothing is explicitly confirmed until the next season when the remaining character briefly opens up about having loved the now absent character.

    It’s not much, but it’s still pretty big for the early to mid 90s.


  • If God is talking to bronze age goat herders, what kind of knowledge is going to be useful to them? What will they manage to pass down to future generations without mangling it horribly? If they were to be given information about scientific concepts so advanced that only God (or aliens or time travelers) could have given it to them, they wouldn’t have the foundation of knowledge to grasp it, the vocabulary to explain it, or the technical means to exploit it. Anything they can actually understand and act on is necessarily going to be something that is not beyond their means, and therefore we are right back where we started with stuff they could have figured out on their own.

    Suppose God did explain something far beyond human understanding, and they wrote it down as best they could. Even if it wasn’t completely incomprehensible to the guy writing it down, it’s still going to be totally lost on future generations if it isn’t anchored in a more comprehensive understanding of how things work. Without context, it will lose all meaning and will be reinterpreted by later scholars who will try and find a meaning that they can understand. It would become a part of mythology and folklore, and would be unrecognizable by the time science catches up to the original ideas. You might have people point out similarities, but they’d probably be taken as seriously as the ancient aliens guys.


  • The lower trust in their own media might have something to do with how blatantly dishonest those sources are. But it also likely means that their viewers have lowered any standards they might have ever had. They aren’t going to be shocked if they see the lies exposed, they can just shrug and say that everyone lies but the other side lies more.

    Obvious falsehoods are dismissed as hyperbole, close enough to the truth that it doesn’t matter if it’s not entirely accurate. Omissions are just distractions cooked up by the other side to keep us from talking about the real issues. There’s no expectation that reporting should be factual and follow journalistic standards, the only measure of the quality of the news source is how much they agree with it. They’ve been inoculated against reality.