And this is why human-to-human transfer of rabies is very rare. Even confused, aggressive, delirious humans don't generally tend to bite as their main attack.

They "temporarily" did it as part of the Coronavirus rule changes. But they just made it temporary.

And yeah, MLB sees all the excitement around Ohtani and their immediate response is "obviously no pitchers should hit."

My kids and I were all "this had better not result in a walk, this either has to be a strikeout or a homerun." Was glad not to be disappointed, even though we were rooting for Team USA.

This is the answer. The Allied leadership - and respecially FDR - felt very clearly that WWII came out of not really beating Germany to the ground in WWI. There was a very conscious desire on the part of American leadership at least to get an absolutely unconditional surrender from both Germany and Japan in order to restructure those countries in ways intended to prevent WWIII from just inevitably coming along twenty more years later.

That series are absolutely my favorite of Stephenson's and I wish he'd do more challenging works like that, again.

Just to be clear though, you should definitely read Cryptonomicon first.

Welp. Yeah there's something we don't understand going on here, but I think if I were you I'd grab my drill.

I just want to add my voice to the idea that you've got drain cover with a captive screw. It doesn't come out of the drain cover, but you've unscrewed it. Use a flathead screwdriver and lever the drain cover up and see if it just pops out.

So...how do you do that, exactly?

The worst part seems to be that their leadership is reading their own press releases.

It's the same thing that happened in the Soviet Union. You are given an aggressive target for your five-year-plan. You don't make it, but you fudge the numbers a little to make it look like you did.

Next five-year-plan, they give you an aggressive target from your new baseline (that you didn't actually achieve). There's no way you're making that without fudging, so you fudge away.

Never five-year-plan, they give you an aggressive target from your new baseline - which would itself be an aggressive target for you to achieve in five years.

Repeat this enough and the official numbers become completely unmoored from reality and literally no one knows what's going on.

They might have started simply as self-replicating sets of chemicals in the early ocean. At this point though we've only been able to speculate about their (and life's) ultimate direct origin.