Don Edwards

But we don't know if her fairies can summon stuff...

Unless Pandora is totally beside herself, my record of incorrect predictions remains intact.

I'm thinking Pandora... But then I have a perfect record on predictions like that, so far unmarred by any taint of accuracy.

The TV show "Untold Stories of the ER" had a great one of these. Patient shows up in the ER complaining of pain, doctor gives her a tiny bit of morphine and proceeds to spend a couple hours running all sorts of tests on her... concludes that she's a junkie looking for a free fix. Tells her she won't get any more pain meds that day at that hospital. She leaves. A bit later, Doc calls his brother. Different ER. Brother looks up at the whiteboard showing current status of patients in the ER, says "yes, she's here, she just came in." Shortly thereafter, doc walks in to talk to the patient, holding printouts of all the test results from the other hospital - sent by his identical-twin brother - and says "Now, ma'am, I told you, we aren't going to give you any more pain medicine." She gets a panicky look on her face, grabs her coat, and leaves.

Before I start reading the thread: Grace changes outfits The customer changes MtF Tensaided loses about seven sides The color pattern of the comics on the counter inverts The posters above the racks on the far wall get rearranged One of these times Dan's going to do something with the counter itself. I missed Grace's hair being longer. I don't think it's clearly wavier; Grace's head is in a different position and that could easily be more than sufficient to explain the slight change.

Get on a website that does price comparisons on drugs. Such as this one: https://www.goodrx.com/?c=gemini I did that the other day and we're switching pharmacies. My lady's monthly prescription cost is going to drop from over $700 to under $200. edit: oops, it looks like you can't save any money on that particular drug... in fact, apparently you have insurance that will still be paying over $150 for your prescription. However, still go check, maybe you can save a bundle on *other* prescriptions.

And for intelligent monsters that have cultures, assume their culture is influenced by intelligent beings (such as themselves). Let's consider, for example, werewolves. Ones that retain human-level intelligence in all their forms. Do they openly rule over the humans in their world? Then they may regard the humans as inferior-but-still-people, or as their cattle. In either case they won't appreciate the werewolf who goes on a bloodthirsty rampage, slaughtering some random human every night. Do they live in secrecy, fearing the humans' greater numbers? Then they will regard that bloodthirsty werewolf as a serious threat - if he's discovered, the humans might go looking for OTHER werewolves. Do they have some other dynamic of coexistence? Then they'll worry that the bloodthirsty werewolf will upset the stability of that dynamic. Are they so numerous that non-werewolf humans are the subject of myth? Then the bloodthirsty werewolf's victims are, they will assume, other werewolves; this is clearly murder. In other words, werewolves hate - and will hunt down and dispose of - the slavering slaughtering bloodthirsty werewolf. Quite possibly even more eagerly than the humans will.

It's what supercomputers are nowadays (albeit one could argue a bit about "normal" - the individual processing engines do tend to be rather high-powered). According to top500, the ten fastest supercomputers (as of last November) range from 200,000 to over 10 million processing cores. I don't think they put those on one chip. For that matter, it's what the biggest computers have been for quite a while. I went to college in the late 1970s, and the college's main computer system was a pair of CDC 6500's and a CDC 6600 - all picked up as surplus, so they were a bit old THEN - which collectively had (if I remember correctly) four central processors plus 32 peripheral processors which did all the I/O and actually ran the OS. (The CPUs were slave computing engines.) I don't recall there being a mechanism to specify which machine my programs would run on; it frankly didn't matter. In the last decade of my career as a professional programmer I was watching two apparently-contradictory trends converge. One was to cluster multiple off-the-shelf computers and storage devices together into a single massive virtual machine. The other was to divide a single computer into several dedicated virtual machines. Why would these trends converge? Because you could do BOTH - gaining you the advantage of an extremely fault-tolerant system (if the massive machine assembly was done right) and also the advantage of independent, single-purpose machines (so a failure of one process cannot crash other processes simply because they are running on the same machine). And you can reconfigure the system for different requirements just by stopping a few virtual machines and starting a few others, e.g. cut from six clustered web servers to two and start four clustered machines that do your overnight batch processing, with no extra hardware cost.

There is also such a thing as convergent evolution. Dolphins (the aquatic mammals) are not closely related to swallows (the birds) but have pretty much the same overall head-and-body shape. Hyenas are quite wolf-like (in both appearance and behavior) to the average non-specialist person but are more closely related to cats; fruit bats and carnivorous (mostly insectivorous) bats look quite similar but the former are almost-primates while the latter are almost-rodents; ferrets and mongooses look quite similar, but ferrets are related to dogs while mongooses are related to cats; the basic form and lifestyle of the mole (a common underground lawn pest) has apparently evolved at least three times, once in marsupials and twice - one is extinct - in mammals. It's a reasonable bet that most non-sedentary water-breathing life in the oceans of another world will bear a strong resemblance to SOME sort of non-sedentary water-breathing life that exists, or used to exist, on earth, even if there is precisely zero common ancestry all the way back to the level of the stray interstellar-wandering amino-acid-bearing speck of dust. (And if they happen to resemble fish, human colonists will call them fish.) (Of course, a good case can be made that we shouldn't colonize worlds with life on them.) (The second half of that link reflects on a question asked on the previous comic page.)

Not necessarily. I was thinking of something like a Beowulf cluster. It can be built on, well, pretty much anything, although it's helpful if the instruction set is reasonably consistent across processors. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flash_mob_computing A typical Fry's Electronics store probably has in excess of 100 laptops, desktops, and bare motherboards on display (including the motherboards in boxes on the shelves below the motherboard display wall). And of course they have more of the display-model assembled systems in the back room.

There's also "rare" versus "common but expensive". I'm sure there's a store in or near Moperville where Tedd could buy everything he needs to assemble a hundred-processor supercomputer... quite possibly they have it all in stock at that store... and he knows which store it is... but it would cost quite a lot of cash, well beyond the means of the large majority of high-school students.

Please make sure she sticks to the script! I've seen her ad-lib... it's bad.

For me, it's a trilogy of movies. Which for some stupid reason are sometimes numbered 4, 5, and 6.

That's the best time to buy lots of things. For a service, you'll still have to pay at least the cost of providing it. But for any sort of goods, from solar-powered dancing hula girls (featured today at a local dollar store) up to and including real estate, you may find a seller who is desperate to (get some cash | get rid of stuff | make room for other stuff) and will thus sell it at a loss.

A witch's broom is, of course, a thinly-disguised magical staff.

Also, as I've suggested, it could be partially true... i.e. first-generation elves can't have children with humans but if two "sterile" elves get it on, things can happen, and what their children are capable of is not necessarily the same. Between elves being rare, and elves not being told about the exception... (If first-generation elves could have children with humans, keeping that a secret from the first-generation elves would be more than a bit difficult.)

Grace's sleeves might be slightly longer. Not much. Could be random artistic variation rather than deliberate.

Basic clothing, probably would be a bad idea for the stated reasons. A sweater, heavy coat, and umbrella/raincoat, on the other hand, would make sense.

Link Justin changed shirt during the second panel, and the wall behind Grace got repainted during the 3rd panel. Oh, and I think maybe there's something about Grace's hair that's different.

Given a person X, and a few thousand years, and in any given population that can be considered isolated either everyone is descended from X, or [/i]nobody[/i] is. Of course, if you're looking backward, maybe you know everyone is descended from X but you can't determine precisely who X is. 35% of Mongolian men have a Y chromosome passed down from a single ancestor who lived at about the right time that MAYBE it was Genghis Khan. Or it could have been a close relative. Technically it could have been pretty much any man alive in that area at that time, but it's known that Genghis and his family kept their reproductive organs rather busy. Even if we were to find GK's remains and do a DNA test which determined that yes he did have the distinctive mutations in the Y chromosome, that still wouldn't prove it was him... we'd have to examine at least his father's remains as well.

Odd speculation: 1st-generation elves can only have children with each other (and, nowadays, they are rare - and have only been told that they can't have children, so they don't seek each other out for the purpose). But when a pair of elves have a child, there is some chance that the child will be able to have children with pure-humans. Odd speculation #2: it used to be that elves could crossbreed freely with humans, but that was taken away in some previous magic reset. Because things were getting to the point that magic use was commonplace. Those with "too much" fairy ancestry became sterile - but some small amount was allowed, so there would be apparently-human magic-users.

I have a simple rule for seasoning blends: if salt is one of the first two ingredients, it stays on the shelf.

The Pharoah should be an expert on old cloth...

Or perhaps avoiding insulting it.

Might want to double-check the date in the thread name... I think it's about a month off.