DarthFreyr

I think that mental model only works if you imagine the parabolas as reaching to infinity in a finite space so that both ends are parallel, ie having identical vertical slopes of +/- infinity. At that point, easier just to call it "half an ellipse". To me, it's much easier to imagine a parabola as the end of an infinitely long ellipse.

Your intuition and the KSP example are correct though. If you imagine the plane and cone for a parabola, you wouldn't notice any significant change to the shape (at a finite distance) if you tipped the plane ever so slightly into forming an ellipse (or a hyperbola, for that matter) since it's all smooth changes.

Anyway, the size of the elliptical (I think hyperbolic would have a different sort of energy state) arc that'd be formed by a thrown object would be so large relative to human scale as to basically be infinite, equivalent to a parabola. I imagine the difference might become significant once you are launching something a decent way around the Earth, but with that much energy in play I don't think it makes much difference where exactly the projectile "lands".

"Till" is completely valid synonym of until. "'Til" is an informal contraction (and was probably meant to be the actual word "till"). If you're gonna be aggressively prescriptive, at least pick an actual battlefield instead of attacking innocent folks.

I'd be more concerned about those huge floating white blobs than a clicking noise. When those fall down, they're liable to hurt someone. Or maybe it needs to be interpreted as part of the medium? What sound effect label would you attach to attempting to fire a safed pistol anyway?

I suppose he could have gone with empty instead of safety on, but that would arguably be a less funny/absurd sequence of events and I don't think it's unreasonable to say that absolute realism was likely a lower priority than the actual point of the comic.

First sentence of the second paragraph literally says "What We Know: [woman's name] was arrested and charged ..."

Na: He's clearly referring to Niobium. I'm not sure what that has to do with the relationship between a Heads Up Display and this "Department of Housing and Urban Development" thing.

Re post text: For context, Washington state is mail-only voting, so that number would (I assume) be for all votes, not just specifically requested mail-ins. I didn't see it in the article, but I wonder if that is predominantly "centralized" or "distributed" in nature; i.e. are technically-valid ballots from all voters being incorrectly rejected by the county elections facilities office at different rates across racial lines, or are there other factors like targeted disinformation, education, local infrastructure, or socioeconomics that disproportionately affect Black (or other types of minority) voters that would make them more likely to produce a technically-invalid ballot?

Those might get the same statistic, but would seem to indicate very different sorts of problems and approaches.

To be fair, proper ISO 8601 specifies hyphens as the separator between date elements, and I don't think I've ever seen a XXXX-XX-XX (with hyphens) be used for YYYY-DD-MM. Just XX-XX could perhaps be ambiguous, but fortunately that's not allowed by the standard, and anyone using just year-day for XXXX-XX is absolutely trolling. YYYY-DDD could have a use, though should really use a separate separator to not sort together IMO. A year-week designation could possibly look like XXXX-XX, but that seems unlikely to just be dropped in that format without context, at least to my western US sensibilities.

Are you perhaps saying that trying to teach an understanding of a concept like place value or carrying is more complicated than just getting the answer to an arithmetic problem? I have no idea why that should be the case, where would you get such an idea anyway?

I'm really not seeing the flow from claiming that basically "selective breeding [some sense of eugenics] could result in biological changes in humans as it does in other animals" to being a proponent for eugenics in either a moral or policy sense. There was an naked counterclaim that it wouldn't work, but honestly that's immaterial to my first sentence, and I don't know that I believe it either. Could you create an overall biologically "better" human? Dubious, if you could define such a thing in the first place. Could you create a human with superior moral or intrinsic value? Definitely not.

It's certainly a completely bonkers statement to drop out of nowhere. There's no context given in that article nor in a few others I found, but I don't think it's unfair to assume there was some sort of context or trigger.

There was a apparently another statement about abortion and Down's that IMO just reads like an amateurish attempt at using absolute utilitarianism to make a profound, off-the-cuff observation based on a pretty ignorant set of assumptions. Yes, it's a stupid statement that makes a pretty generic argument for eugenics with other assumptions, but the core claim of "an action that causes net negative happiness in the world is immoral" is, strictly speaking, not morally indefensible. There is a correcting of facts required, but essentially the same logic is used for the fairly non-controversial (as any abortion, at least) termination of a pregnancy that would only result in suffering and a dead baby. Correcting facts is, I think, much less substantial than correcting thinking.

Is there anything else substantial I didn't see? To use just this as a basis for a declaration of "open eugenicist", to me, just dilutes very powerful terminology that I'm sure many people definitely fit.

Also, as a side note, some of the takes in some counter-articles were absolutely wild. If your position is that (even if you don't recognize it yourself) "Gee honey, I don't think we're in a financial position to try for another baby" is eugenics, it's hard to believe there is actual meaning behind any string of words you manage to get out.