Remember back when the progress bar on the nyancat video was a nyancat?

So, I think the whole "well intentioned but hubristic scientist goes too far, tramples on the feet of god!" trope is pretty stupid in a lot of stories (although I still love a story about a character playing with forces they don't understand if it's executed well). But I also think you really have to consider where the "mad scientist" archetype comes from before you write it off as purely anti-intellectual:

1. To a large degree the mad scientist is an updated version of the evil wizard. Victor Frankenstein, the prototypical mad scientist, was trained in alchemy as well as chemistry and biology. Very often (such as in this very post) their laboratories are depicted as being in castles or even wizard towers.

2. Frankenstein was partly based on the sort of people who robbed graveyards. The more modern 'howie lab coat, rubber gloves, and goggles' mad scientist exploded in popularity after WWII, probably because of people like mengele and the invention of the atomic bomb.

There's other themes present in the archetype of course (I already mentioned hubris and man's vs god"s domain above, but there's all the other stuff going on in Frankenstein too), but yeah. The 'mad scientist' archetype is a little bit like taking a normal scientist and removing their humanity and morals, leaving only their intellect and ambition/ego behind. A little bit like how a warewolf is a man stripped of all morals and self control, leaving only bestial impulses behind.

It's intentionally stupid, which is why it's not a permanent change.

They just want people to talk about it, send pictures of it to their friends, etc, and be an avenue for reminding people that goldfish crackers exist.

Back then adding a word to a search query also made it more specific. You could easily narrow a search down to just a few results, or no result at all if that specific combination of words had never been written. Now adding another search term just makes the search less specific.

You can try to approximate the old behavior by wrapping every single word in quote marks but it's not the same.

This story and the Triangle Shirtwaist fire should be a reminder that almost every large business owner would kill you if it meant they could make slightly more money.

How much extra value do you think they generated in a couple of hours of making plastic pipes? That's what their lives were worth to the factory owners.

Strangely enough I feel like that crucification isn't much associated with the Romans. Even though the Romans were the ones who carried it out Judas gets almost 100% of the ire.

Even Jews are given more blame by antisemitic Christians. Like, no one is starting up a pogrom against Italians because their great great great grandpa might've been the guy who stabbed Jesus in the ribs.

While I agree that it's somewhat bad that there is no distinction between lossless and lossy jxl in the file extension, I think it's really not a big deal compared to the present situation with jpg/png.

The reason being that if you download a png file you have no idea if its been converted from jpg, if it's a screenshot of a jpg, or if it's been subjected to lossy reencoding by a tool or a website upload process.

The only thing you can really do to try and see if the file you've downloaded has suffered encoding loss is to do an image search on it and see if there are any better quality versions out there. You'd do the exact same thing with a jxl file.

The ads are subliminally manipulating the sort function of my spreadsheet that calculates the unit cost of every product in a category.

Trying to create a cheap microwave burrito that's also healthy and filling seems like a pretty noble (if difficult) goal to me. Making it vegetarian also decreases its ecological impact (though I don't know whether or not Adams cared about that).

Trying to fortify each burrito with 100% of your daily vitamins was a really stupid idea though. It was unnecessary (just take a multivitamin if you feel like you need it), it made the burrito taste worse (Adams described it as "chalky"), and it was potentially unhealthy if someone were to eat multiple burritos per day (and thus receive multiple times the recommended daily dose of... everything).

Krankenwagen

People are going to look back at single use alkaline cells like we were insane. "You mean they had batteries that would destroy themselves after a single use? And they just threw them in the trash afterwards and kept buying new ones over and over? And they did this despite the fact that the technology for reusable batteries existed????"

Even now there are single use vapes and phone chargers out there. They're going to think we're even more insane for that, and rightfully so.

For another comparison do a Google image search of "Arnold in his prime". Now imagine seeing a dude who looks like that and being told "be careful, that guy has no concept of human laws or morality, he won't go out of his way to kill you but if he did it wouldn't bother him one bit. Also he doesn't speak English.".

I think most would be pretty unlikely to just walk up and run their fingers through that dude's hair. But Arnold in his prime only weighed 240 lbs. An adult male bison can weigh anywhere from 1000 to 2200 lbs.