What is up with random Brits being so articulate? Sure, I'm seeing the best clips, but these are just from the past couple of weeks, and I'm not sure I've ever, in my five million years on the internet, seen an American give an impromptu answer like these. If they stopped a soccer hooligan hooliganning, he'd start talking about social disorganization and relative deprivation.

Not all heroes wear capes 👇🏿pic.twitter.com/q4KFij8JtS

— David Lammy (@DavidLammy) October 20, 2019

.@BorisJohnson visited a hospital in Cambridgeshire today -
💥 staff weren't told about the visit.
💥 doctors weren't allowed to ask questions.
Watch this student doctor tell the truth about the Tory war on our health👇 pic.twitter.com/lGmBjwkTyX

— Michael Walker (@michaeljswalker) November 1, 2019

Bobby Knight is still alive.

If you're not of a certain age and never followed basketball, it's hard to understand how big a presence he was, and this hateful moment in our history seems so perfect for him, but he's nowhere to be found. One of my rare demonstrations of youthful good judgment was always* hating the fuck out of The General, and all the adulation he received. That whole generation of emotionally stunted ragefaces made the world shittier in ways great and small.

*Except this truly excellent put-down of a journalist: "All of us learn to write in the second grade. Most of us go on to greater things."

1. Fires in California - everyone okay?

2. I'm optimistic that having impeachment testimony move out in the open will really cause the kind of media circus needed to cement public attention. And I think Pelosi played it right by getting the Republicans to "force" her to make a big public spectacle of things.

Well this sounds miserable:

Nick Hess, 39, said his auto-brewery syndrome makes him oscillate each day between intoxication and a hangover. He said he had to drop out of college because of his symptoms and is appealing a DUI conviction. He suffers from vomiting, headaches and other symptoms every day.

Hess, of Columbus, Ohio, said his wife didn't believe that he hadn't been drinking when he started exhibiting symptoms. At one point, he said, she started recording him to ensure he wasn't sneaking alcohol. What she saw, Hess said, was just him playing video games all day.

"She would watch me wake up and sit on that couch from the moment I woke up to the moment I went to sleep and progressively get more and more drunk," he said.

What percent of auto-brewers are just plain closet alcoholics, would you guess?

Mosstly Chartly writes: No doubt old hat to you crazy kids, but news to me. In short, Britain just happened to have one physicist smart enough to invent the Teller-Ulam design independently, thus persuading the US to treat it as an equal nuclear partner and share a whole bunch of Armageddon goodness.

President de Gaulle first vetoed the British application to join the European Community on 14 January 1963, less than a month after the Nassau agreement on Polaris: as he himself said, that agreement played a prominent part in his decision. Again in his discussions in June 1967 with Harold Wilson at the time of Britain's second application to join, he asked very pointedly about Anglo-French co-operation in nuclear matters. No information could be forthcoming while the Polaris programme was under way and the second application duly lapsed. In retrospect it seems that de Gaulle was right: while Britain was (and is) so bound to the US in military matters, it could not (and cannot) pursue a common European nuclear defence policy with any conviction. As it is, the thermonuclear bluff achieved its purpose: it helped Britain to delay acknowledging its loss of power and to resist the European logic of the post-war settlement by clinging onto the skirts of its transatlantic protector for another forty years.

Heebie's take: That appears to be the same Ulam as Borsuk-Ulam, if you were wondering. The Borsuk-Ulam theorem states that if you crumple up a map of the United States and drop it on another map of the United States, some geographical point will land on itself. So I'm pretty sure this British guy was able to extend that result for maps of England as well.

I'm kind of surprised I didn't hear about this already: in both 2016 and 2018, Millenials plus Gen Xers had a higher voting turnout than Boomers plus Greatest Generation.

In this link, it's striking to me how much smaller Gen X is than both Boomers and Millenials. (Even though I knew this from visuals of those population pyramids). I knew that Gen Xers were a trough, and yet and I hadn't quite thought of that in terms of voting share.

(Although there are several moments in my life where I got lucky in timing, and mostly it's just sheer luck, but being the tail end of the population trough also contributed: applying to grad school in 1999, and then the tech bubble burst and grad schools were flooded with applications circa 2001. Graduating in 2006, and then a year or two later, the recession hit and higher ed had a giant hiring freeze. I bet that in college, if I'd been a year or two younger, there would have been more stronger math students and I might have been edged out at that stage.)

Our kids are in another trough. In higher ed, people are already panicking about the shrinking number of students who will be applying to college when recession-born kids turn 18. I understand that unease, but also recognize that my own kids stand to benefit the way I did, possibly.

I got to reading this link on machine grading of essays (which works exactly as well as you think it does) and got distracted by this text generator, which burbles out prose based on a sample that you get to supply.

First I fed it the paragraph above, and it completed it as thus:

I got to reading this link on machine grading of essays (which works exactly as well as you think it does) and got distracted by this text generator, which burbles out prose based on a sample that you get to supply. http://www.google.com/webhp?hl=en&sourceid=chrome&espv=2.0&ie=UTF-8&rls=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwju-H_RfX7HlEw9zDk-t4H9DvQg&sourceid=chrome&sll=47.114049,-116.03796&ssp=0&biw=1904&bih=978#v=onepage&q=textgenerator In any event, the generator seems to work flawlessly (though I haven't tried it myself so I can't say for sure). Anyway, the text generator lets you input a word or phrase (a whole paragraph in this case) and the program will "randomize" a word or phrase to get some kind of result. http://www.

The link gobbledygook is part of what it spat out.

Then I fed it the first sentence of the following passage, in bold, and it generated this:

Once upon a time there was a little girl named alice, who didn't like other kids, or you. It's a big world out there!

So the little girl had a crush on everyone's little brother, which lead to a lot of mischiefs, lots and lots of mischiefs.

Alice's mother had died one day and her husband's mother was a bad woman. To pay for her widowhood, the young woman took alice and her sister down to the sea and sold them as servants so she could keep her son. And alice fell in love with the boy, and she got drunk and passed out, and the boy fell overboard, and his mother saved him, and alice became his wife and had the children. The little man got angry when Alice's sons never came to the wedding, so he bought them a boat and made them fishermen, and they sailed off to find their father. They searched for him for seven years before they found him. When they found him, he took them into his home and taught them all they could know and he made them a happy family. But there was lots of grief. One day he got

I will say that the stylistic tone of the first completion is distinct from that of the latter.