The original usage was to carry out (a command). In that original sense it was the sentence, rather than the prisoner, who was executed; but the meaning got transferred over time.

Unionized mitochondria.

Secretary of Health.

Not a movie yet (AFAIK), but Octavia Butler’s novel Parable of the Sower is downright uncanny.

Wikipedia’s current events portal covers current events and conflicts with links to plenty of background info.

Montreal is just a subspace of Montcomplex.

Probably the same way Putin feels about Dobby.

Sign language isn’t just another way of expressing English that can be picked up like learning a different alphabet or a secret code. It’s a full, independent language with its own complete vocabulary, syntax, inflectional system, etc. that takes as long to learn as any other natural language.

It would be great if more people knew it for the sake of communicating with the deaf, but as a means of foiling surveillance, there are many other approaches that would be more effective for less time investment. (Hell, you might as well learn a really obscure spoken language that would be less likely to be recognized or deciphered than ASL.)

I had a really good pizza topped with stinging nettle once. (It doesn’t sting after cooking.)

Assuming that

• human phenotypic traits that correlate more closely with mouse traits have more-predictable outcomes with mouse-tested medicine, and

• more-predictable medical outcomes correlate with higher survival and reproductive rates,

can’t you plug that straight into the Price equation?

deleted by creator

In the long run, using mice to test human medicines will result in selection pressure for humans whose physiology more and more closely resembles mice.

What I’ve got in my pocket.

I’d say devices like metaphor and synecdoche are compression tools for meaning, and devices like rhyme and meter are checksums for error correction.

To paraphrase Keynes—in the long run no one survives.

But the difference in life expectancy based on income will continue to widen.

It’s like a double negative: a cool dog is the opposite of a hot dog, but a cool cat is the opposite of a cool dog, so you end up back where you started.

Tang-era Sogdian dance music.

Yeah—ideally, fares only need to cover the marginal/fluctuating costs, not the fixed cost of the whole system.

For private transportation, fares need to pay for both, and generate a profit on top of that.

Being good and being cheap are both indications that public transit is being properly funded. When funding is short, they have to raise fares and cut services.

Time zones were originally mandated for the sake of railroads: before trains each town used its own local time, and each locality refused to change their clocks to match anyone else’s. So time zones were set by the federal government because there was little chance that every town in the country would reach a consensus otherwise.

When DST was introduced much later, time zones were already an accepted thing—so the federal government gave states the discretion to adopt DST or not. But they have to take it or leave it: they can’t make it year-round because that would effectively move them to a different time zone, which is still the prerogative of the federal government.