I come from Poland and yes, totally. When I started school, and missed lessons because I was sick or whatever, I could just take the phone book and find the surname of the classmate I wanted to get notes or homework from. If there were a few surnames on the list and I didn’t know their father (it was always the man of the house who was listed) first name, I could just go by who appeared to live closest to the school. Or just start calling all the numbers until I got the right one.

You can pretreat flour to make it safe but obviously the question is, did the cookie maker bothered. And raw eggs can be a concern, apparently 1 in 20,000 eggs contains salmonella (inside, not on the shell).

If you travel a lot, Toilet finder.

Edit: and not an app, but a website: Pairdrop - really useful for cross-platform file sharing, especially when you just need to email to colleagues something you snapped with your personal phone, but yoe have overly tight IT systems in place at work that stop you from connecting your personal phone to your email or OneDrive.

As a kid, it was a cartoon - The Little Mermaid. As an adult… It is a cartoon - Spiderman: Across the Spiderverse.

2009? It will expire in 5 years and we’ll be inundated with devices that require you to get up from your seat and yell out the name of the brand to end an ad ☹️

I’ve just asked Gemini about cheese that slides off pizza, it didn’t recommend glue.

Yeah. I took my second-hand car to an authorised dealer and they offered to extend my warranty from 3 to 10 years. For money of course but it wasn’t ridiculously expensive, and had no excess.

New cars. After a car has been owned by one owner, for however short a period of time, it dramatically reduces its price. At least in the UK.

“be” is an irregular verb in all languages, so it’s not unique to English. Bonus fun fact: Russian doesn’t have the verb “to be”.

A vowel is the core of a syllable. Y is not always that, as in “yes” - it works as a consonant in that word.

Question to lawyers: if you impeach a federal judge - who runs the trial? And if found guilty - who sentences them?

I still think your promoting the view of “this is obvious to me so it should be obvious to everyone”. Even your explanation would be confusing for someone who’s not an IT guy - what does it mean “end my user session?” People rarely go to the start menu to deal with their computers’ “on-ness”, they just press the hardware button that has an incomplete circle with a line on top or often no marking or label at all. Or they close the lid and that makes them think of their laptop as “off”.

Honestly, even though I use computers for work all the time, I don’t think I ever talk about logging in or out or switching it off or restarting, other than when I’m getting some help from IT.

Chances are you were clothes with aglets a lot, and aglets keep the integrity of your clothes, but there is also a good chance that you don’t know what aglets are because the average person doesn’t talk about them until they lodge somewhere in their washing machine.

I can’t really sympathise with you here. You’re clearly an IT guy, so the difference between log out, restart and shut down is as natural to you as breathing. For the average person is not that intuitive. For many people the computer is “on” when they press the power button and enter their username and password. And the blurring of the distinction is increased by most people having a smartphone where just lifting it up to your face wakes it up and logs you in (technically) at the same time.

I know you’re explaining it to them, but if that’s not something that they live and breathe, they’re just going to forget the explanation. I’m a molecular biologist, so to me the differences between genome, transcriptome and proteome are bleeding obvious, but I have a colleague who’s not a scientist but needs to become familiar with these terms. I explained them to her last week in an meeting that lasted an hour, but this week I had to do that again. She’s not stupid, it’s just all very abstract to her.

Whenever my colleague at the neighbouring desk left her laptop unlocked, I would go in, and create a new Word document saying ALWAYS LOCK YOUR LAPTOP in huge red font. She vowed she would eventually get back at me.

I once took a screenshot of some random text in a Word document with “CONFIDENTIAL” as the background watermark and then I used that screenshot as my lock screen wallpaper. When I locked my laptop and left my desk, she clocked the content of my screen and thought it was finally her moment to get back at me, but… it wasn’t.

I wonder if Biden’s stepping down was partly influenced by the assassination attempt. If he hadn’t, the most prominent symbol of this election would still be that image of Trump screaming “fight” while pumping his fist against the background of the American flag. But if someone from a deserted island opened a news website today for the first time, they wouldn’t even know there was an assassination attempt.

Remember that there are biases at play here. There’s the negativity bias (we worry more about bad things happening, than we are uplifted about geed things happening), and media bias to report the worst. As Pinker wrote:

News is about things that happen, not things that don’t happen. We never see a journalist saying to the camera, “I’m reporting live from a country where a war has not broken out”. (…) As long as bad things have not vanished from the face of the earth, there will always be enough incidents to fill the news, especially when billion of smartphones turn most of the world’s population into crime reporters and war correspondents.

Combine the two, and you will naturally have all media preferentially report (and often blow out of proportion for the views and clicks) bad news over good news.

What is your 6 year old laptop’s make?

Well, you do also have what you could call atheist extrimists. Richard Dawkins is pretty well known for his lack of tolerance towards religion that in my opinion isn’t much different in its intensity from religious extrimists’ opposition to non-their religion. Don’t get me wrong, I’m an atheist myself, I’m just saying that I don’t think that the complete lack of tolerance to the opposing world view is a problem confined to the religious right.

Should that be really called “smooth jet ski ride” or “amazing image stabilisation”?