If you’re looking for guesses about the etymology, I’m guessing it shares an origin with “rascal”.

No, it’s from Middle English “engin”, which at the time meant a device or trick.

From the New Oxford American Dictionary:

gin up
(gin something up, gin up something) US English generate or increase something, especially by dubious or dishonest means: the trade press has ginned up a controversy | critics say the program is just a way for big drug companies to gin up demand for their psychiatric drugs.
origin: Middle English (in the sense ‘a tool or device, a trick’): from Old French engin (see engine).

So it’s not an offensive slur (nor a reference to drunkenness), but it is an accusation of dishonesty that people would reasonably take offense at.

We can always say “back in the second millennium”.

Pam: “They’re the same job.”

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The most interesting theory of dreams I’ve read is that they provide your brain with “out of training” data so it doesn’t over-fit to your lived experiences. So your brain stays open to the possibility that completely unexpected things could happen.

Neurodivergent people have always been subject to misunderstanding and preemptory judgement—maybe “cancel culture” is the current framework within which that issue appears to manifest itself, but it’s not the cause.

I try to see it from the POV of someone else reading the thread: if I think they’d care about the edit (e.g., if it affects the context of a reply), I’ll call attention to it; otherwise I’ll avoid adding the distraction.

Adware is a DDOS attack on your attention.

Correlation doesn’t equal causation—but then again, nothing else does either.

Causality is an emergent property, like entropy: it’s not in the physical world, it’s in our mental model of it. And that model is built on correlations.

I’m liking it so far, but it’s unlike most of his other stuff (at least at first)—it reads as straight literary/historical fiction, following the life of a single mother in 1970s London. My understanding is that the “weird” elements don’t enter until well into the story.

China Miéville’s new novel, The Rouse.

Wait til the crows and seagulls learn they can follow the drones for free food.

an empire is a state where the core ruling population exercises control and extracts resources from a periphery which is composed of people other than the core group (linguistically/culturally/ethnically/religiously distinct)

I don’t think this is quite general enough—he later brings up the example of the Athenian Empire, which wasn’t based on linguistic, ethnic, etc. distinctions. And the Roman Empire changed every aspect of its “core group” multiple times over its existence.

I’d define an empire instead as a state where a stratum of alien institutions has been imposed on top of a substratum of local institutions with which it didn’t coevolve and therefore has no organic relationship.

All of your farts are the farts of millions of your gut bacteria.

If you can run multiple applications, you can run multiple servers—a server is just an application with a network interface.

There Is No Antimemetics Division.

For one thing, it maximizes the amount of information the census contains: if you’re splitting a group into bins, the splitting with the lowest entropy is the one with equal-sized bins. If the bin sizes fluctuate with time (as a proportion of the overall population), the amount of information the census captures will vary as well. If your definition of lower-income includes 100% (or 0%) of the population, then assigning someone to a category tells you nothing about them you didn’t already know.

The original paper gives the temperatures in Celsius:

For decades after their discovery, no eukaryote was shown to replicate above 60°C. We isolated a geothermal amoeba, Incendiamoeba cascadensis, that divides at 63°C and is motile up to 64°C. […] The minimum growth temperature is 42°C, with no growth at 40°C or lower; optimal growth is at 55°C–57°C (Figure 2A; Table S6), and maximum growth is at 63°C, with no growth at 64°C or higher.