T156

While kbin.social's site mentioned that they were migrating to a new provider, and as a result, the site might be experiencing some issues, kbin.social has been serving up a similar HTTP 50x errors, and that migration message for well over a month, if not more.

What happened?

While ordering a crew cut is easy, since it's on the menu, what about other kinds?

Can you just go "I'd like a men/women's haircut" and leave it at that, or do you need something more specific, like saying you want a Charlestone done by a No. 3 to the sides, and a 4 up top?

In our world, the police going to a spirit medium for the DL-6 case, and being ridiculed might be logical, since spirit channelling isn't a real thing, but in the world of Ace Attorney, it is.

Not only is it a known and established practice, with detectable physical effects, but the monarchy of at least one country is specifically sought out for their spirit-channelling powers by other governments, so that they can commune with the dead, and receive advice that way.

However, it also seems to be disbelieved, and ridiculed as a pseudoscience, despite that.

I've been using "mechanoid" as a classification (similar to humanoid, etc), but a friend pointed out that it's both too generic, and that said inorganics might just consider it biology, with organics being the weird outlier.

You wouldn't start off an e-mail with "My Dear X", or "Dearest X", since that would be too personal for a professional email, so "To X" being more impersonal seems like it would make the letter more professional-sounding, compared to "Dear X".

Doctor Who zips all the way up and down through time, popping in at any time and place. If you don't have a time machine to follow them around with, it should be impossible to keep track of which incarnation was where. And yet, the Doctor's enemies somehow manage to do just that, with the Daleks being accurate enough to determine he was on his last regeneration on Trenzalore.

One of the options for students enrolling into Hogwarts, if they come from a wizarding family, is that they have the option of using a hand-me-down wand. But short of wands being damaged beyond repair, we don't see many people replacing them, even though it happens enough that hand-me-downs are a valid option for new students.

So how long does one last? Does a wizard normally use one wand in their lifetime, or is it the kind of thing where an old, worn-out wand is fine for schoolwork, but you'd need something newer/better for adult life?

What caused the shift from calling things like rheostats and condensers to resistors and capacitors, or the move from cycles to Hertz?

It seemed to just pop up out of nowhere, seeing as the previous terms seemed fine, and are in use for some things today (like rheostat brakes, or condenser microphones).

You often see people in fitness mention going through a cut/bulk cycle, or mention one, with plans to follow up with the other. Why is it that cutting and bulking so often happen in cycles, rather than said person just doing both at once, until they hit their desired weight?

While we hear of the TARDIS having engines that are implicitly essential to it working, we've also see a TARDIS work without the rest of the machine.

"The Doctor's Wife" and "Inferno" show that a TARDIS is capable of operating as just the console, which would seem to imply that they're just a power source to allow the console to do its thing and move the whole ship around, or to allow for the pilot to do silly things like tow an entire planet one second out of phase.

One of the recent laws in Trek that gets looked at a bit, is the genetic engineering ban within the Federation. It appears to have been passed as a direct result of Earth's Eugenics Wars, to prevent a repeat, and seems to have been grandfathered into Federation law, owing to the hand Earth had in its creation.

But we also see that doing so came with major downsides. The pre-24th century version of the law applied a complete ban on any genetic modification of any kind, and a good faith attempt to keep to that resulted in the complete extinction of the Illyrians.

In Enterprise, Phlox specifically attributes the whole issue with the Eugenics Wars to humans going overboard with the idea of genetic engineering, as they are wont to do, trying to improve/perfect the human species, rather than using it for the more sensible goal of eliminating/curing genetic diseases.

Strange New Worlds raises the question of whether it was right for Earth to enshrine their own disasters with genetic engineering in Federation law like that, particularly given that a fair few aliens didn't have a problematic history with genetic engineering, and some, like the Illyrians, and the Denobulans, used it rather liberally, to no ill-effects.

At the same time, people being augmented with vast powers in Trek seems to inevitably go poorly. Gary Mitchell, Khan Noonien-Singh, and Charlie X all became megalomaniacs because of the vast amount of power that they were able to access, although both Gary and Charlie received their powers through external intervention, and it is unclear whether Khan was the exception to the rule, having been born with that power, and knowing how to use it properly. Similarly, the Klingon attempt at replicating the human augment programme was infamous, resulting in the loss of their famous forehead ridges, and threatening the species with extinction.

Was the Federation right to implement Earth's ban on genetic engineering, or is it an issue that seems mostly human/earth-centric, and them impressing the results of their mistakes on the Federation itself?

One of the ways that you can find out whether a child has magic or not, is to see whether they are able to use it subconsciously, such as by defenestrating them, and seeing if they stop themselves from being killed. But once they get their wands, that use of subconscious magic seems to stop entirely.

Logically, you would expect students to fire off similar magic when their lives were at risk, or their emotions ran particularly high. Is it a function of having the wand that stops it, or is it just a matter of that only happening for really young mages, and that they learn to control themselves as they enter childhood?