Don Edwards

Does steam help?

And that trope is a bit more credible for kids age 16+ than it is for, say, Linus Van Pelt.

Speculation: Heka has immediate as-if-from-memory access to all written records. However, he doesn't have infinite ability to pay attention to all that stuff. And can't with 100% reliability instantly collect all relevant facts about a situation... kind of like real people's memories. So basically, anything that he realizes he needs to know, he knows (if it is, or ever was, written down, on anything from clay tally-ledgers to computer screens) - but if he doesn't realize he needs to know it, and doesn't go after it through random curiosity, he doesn't know it.

Straighten your tie.

We have no info on how much control the uryuom have over their genetic mixing, beyond the fact of choosing whose/what's DNA to insert in the egg.

A webcomic with a major character named Rain. A webcomic with a major character named Raine. And a novel with a major character named Rayne.

My suspicion is that there are always a few... but most of them are never in a situation to notice that they are seers.

And of course there can be a huge difference between formal dress uniforms and what they wear in combat.

Well, some people (not me) will be going WTF...

I didn't study the whole program, so I have no idea why this more-than-50-page program had two badly-written pages of electrical-engineering calculation in the middle of it. Just that it did, and that the person trying to maintain the program was pretty sure there was a bug somewhere in them. And that when I deciphered what those two pages were doing and wrote it as a formula, it looked just a little... off... and it turned out I was right. I prefer replacing unreadable code over patching it. At the very worst, I gave back readable code, so if it still wasn't correct then the assigned person could fix it.

And if you aren't actually trying to write unreadable code (and aren't writing in APL or Lisp) there are few things worse than to have some electrical-engineering calculations written in Cobol by a Fortran programmer and then patched into a Cobol program by a person who understands neither electrical engineering nor Fortran (and isn't all that great at Cobol either). Now add in that there's a suspected bug somewhere in that mess, and the person assigned to fix (not one of its creators) it is an immigrant whose skills as a Cobol programmer are sound but is unfortunately lacking skills in English. (She begged me for help. It took me all afternoon to figure out what those two pages of code were doing, then all the next morning to be confident I had deciphered it correctly. And even though I know almost nothing of electrical engineering, it looked wrong. So I sent my explanation of what it was doing to the clients, asking if it was correct. The next day I got a response back - the code was wrong and they provided the correct formula - and spent an hour writing a third of a page of straight Cobol to do the same calculation. I delivered that to the lady assigned, and she actually could understand it.) That was, oh, probably somewhere around 1995. Anyone just starting out in programming, take away this message: the MOST IMPORTANT audience for any given piece of code is NOT the compiler. It's the programmer who has to fix or alter that piece of code. You or someone else, in a few hours or in a few years. That person has to be able to read the code. If the code is readable, it can evaluated for correctness and can be fixed as needed. If it's unreadable, it can't be fixed and nobody can be confident that it's correct.

But Dan never implied that Zeus is not a real god. He simply stated that there are (in his fictional universe) beings who go by that name but are not real gods. You won't offend Moslems by pointing out that there are beings named Mohammed who are not prophets...

They probably are hoping you'll go find a job with more stable hours... ignoring the likelihood that this slowdown is temporary and at the end of it you'll be fine. (Most likely, you getting a new job at half the pay looks better on their statistics than you resuming your existing job.)

GPS: IMHO if the GPS satellites were taken out and putting up new ones were not feasible, at least for navigation in populated areas it wouldn't be a big deal. They'd just put scaled-down GPS "satellites" on existing cell towers... which would spur the more-rapid deployment of suitable towers to remote locations that currently have little-to-no cell service. That would be a lot more practical than putting up a completely-different replacement system AND replacing all the GPS-using devices. There would have to be some tweaking because of earthquakes and such moving towers around, but not much... with the current system, the GPS satellites' opinions on their precise orbital characteristics need to be corrected based on ground observation every month (iirc), because of orbital perturbations caused by pretty much everything in this solar system and maybe the next one over, and are corrected every week (so if something goes wrong on the ground causing a correction or two to be skipped, it isn't a big deal). Religion: The way Dan has used names from mythology, he has never made or implied anything about the truth of any part of that mythology. Pandora, in particular, is explicitly an ordinary human in the mythology - not an immortal being of any sort. And it's pretty plain that some immortals take the names of deities from mythology because those names are of deities from mythology - their mythological origin predates the immortals borrowing them. If you want a webcomic that touches a bit more firmly on mythology, try Gunnerkrigg Court. A number of mythological figures from several different mythologies have appeared there... one of them from the mythology most commonly known as Sesame Street (but not in the same role at all). So far, I think only one being that is explicitly a god has appeared, and one other has been referred to. Or I'd recommend Brat-halla if it were still going... the way it ended, it really looks like the artists just got tired of it and could be bothered less and less (the last several pages are as seen by a blind character, and then it just stops without anything resembling an ending). But that was after a run of more than a decade, and was a lot of fun for most of that run. It quite explicitly gets into religion and mythology, particularly Norse but also touching on several others on occasion. Wapsi Square doesn't directly get into religion or the standard mythology, but sort of crafts its own. Major characters include a guy who fought in the Trojan War, a part-phoenix, a couple of sphinxes... and then if you get into the fanfictions in the forum, there you'll find more religious stuff including an appearance by Hades and a few scenes where Jesus has a speaking part.

I wrote this one management report (in Cobol 68)... they printed three copies of it, and that took between 90% and 110% of a box of fanfold paper. One copy got distributed. First few pages went to the head of the company. Next several sets of a few pages went to managers who reported directly to the head. Next sets of a few pages went to managers who reported to them. And so on down the line. I don't think there was anyone who got as many as 10 pages unless they were temporarily handling two positions. Another copy got filed in Accounting. And the third got filed in Information Systems. Accounting and Information Systems really loved one thing I did on that report... I figured out how to easily put page footers on it (in addition to page headers) so they could look at the bottom of a page and see where they were in the stack, rather than having to open the binder wide enough to read the page headers. I also did a really good job of guessing what should be in the page footers. Since I kept the code for the page handling separate, and could easily plug it into other programs, I got assigned to write a lot of reports after that.

But it turns out that the Library of Alexandria was just an annex/entrance to the real Library, which exists in its own pocket universe accessible from Wapsi Square.

Or elder sign? The dishwasher wants to help? (Or was yours the refrigerator?)

A weapon is a tool. A hole punch and a cannon have the same basic function: to make holes. They make holes of different sizes at different ranges and are used in different circumstances, but still, they both make holes. So do a shovel and a drill, among other things. And the only dangerous weapon is one that can't be trusted to not do its thing spontaneously. (Old dynamite is an example of this.) But in the hands of a dangerous person, anything is a weapon.

Suppose that the large majority of earth-like planets have complex life forms and some degree of technological sophistication is not particularly unusual. Then every colonization force needs to either (a) be a follow-on to a scouting mission - the scouts get word back BEFORE the colony launches, with the resulting communications and time-delay problems, or (b) be an invasion force.

When we go to a potluck party, sometimes we'll take two trays of deviled eggs. In one, the yolks are mixed with mayo and mustard and some mild spices. In the other, the same except without the "mild".

I once spent some time thinking about how many plausible military targets there are in the Puget Sound area of the state of Washington. This is a piece of land basically about 200 miles north-south and less than 100 miles east-west at its widest point. I don't remember all of them, but I found at least three inside Seattle city limits. And at least a dozen more elsewhere in the specified area. I didn't run out; I just decided that any additional ones would have approximately no impact on the survival rate.

Whoever is responsible for deciding that autocorrect should be turned on by default in any given device/OS, should be sentenced to one year of punishment wherein they MUST say everything by means of that device/OS with autocorrect turned on and not allowed to ever reject or amend autocorrect's changes. And if they ever start turning on grammar-autocorrect by default, make it five years.

Sounds like time to take all the pills out of the organizer, sort them into their respective bottles, and then reload the organizer (or at least that part of it up to the next time you would normally reload it).

Would her name be changed to "Ella"?

And the chance that you will coincidentally happen to have a natural resistance to the rare alien bacterium that coincidentally happens to be able to find a place to live in your body... pretty low.