1. That SMBC was excellent.
2. I wasn’t really casting aspersions, just noting that physics types would have a particular interest in seeing what happened when JJ Thomson’s family finally regressed to the mean.

Interesting reading:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice_Thomson

Wait until you get to the personal life section, Physics dorks…

Doesn’t seem like anyone necessarily asked at all. He just volunteered it. I doubt it’s true, for the record, but it is a very Utah answer.

I can’t pull anything coherent out of this, of course, but there’s some fun bits and pieces floating in the brain stew there.

• The Hiawatha Crater is a 31km wide impact basin under a glacier in Greenland, but the meteor that caused it is estimated to have fallen almost 60mya, so “only” a few million years after the Dinosaurs took their big hit.

• There are often cross cultural commonalities in legends and other folklore, enough to merit a classification system, Aarne–Thompson–Uther, that while problematic in how it treats elements found in stories not common in cultures well-studied by western academics, is still very much in use in academia. Of course, most of this comes down to “humans being humans” and few scholars think its worthwhile to go on wild goose chases trying to find actual events inspiring specific tropes, to say nothing of this… erm… theory(?).

• As far as I can tell, there is no meteor in the Kaaba, but set into a corner is the “Black Stone,” a cemented aggregation of pieces of a large, likely igneous stone. As an object of veneration, it appears to pre-date Islam, as does the basic notion of the Kaaba itself, which was already a holy site for local religion when Muhammed came along. There is a broader tradition in the eastern Mediterranean and Middle East of including large stones (“baetyls”) in temples as representations of gods. The Roman Emperor Elagabalus was born and raised in Syria, and when he became emperor he (among other much weirder shit) brought along the “god” Elagabalus, the local temple stone, and tried to insist it be worshipped in Rome as a deity superior to Jupiter. If there is one thing Romans of that era did not like, it was being told that other gods were better than than their own, or even anything other quaint provincial re-namings of the Roman gods. They didn’t necessarily need you to believe their religion (orthodoxy), but you sure as shit needed to to observe it (orthopraxy), and fucking around with the practice of the state religion is a very good excuse for your Praetorian Guard to finally stab the bejeezus out of you (and your mom).

• Finally, Pixie and Brutus is a pretty cute comic, if maybe a bit overexposed and SEO’d.

I LOVE MY KIDS AND I TAKE CARE OF MY KIDS BUT DON’T Y’ALL UNDERSTAND?!?!?!? THAT STUPID BITCH WHO WAS ALWAYS CALLING THE COPS ON ME WANTS TO LIVE IN THE SAME HOUSE AS THEM THAT MY MONEY WOULD BE PAYING FOR!!!111!!1! CAN YOU BELIEVE THAT SHIT!?!

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THEY’RE PROBABLY NOT MINE ANYWAY.

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YOU KNOW WHAT? FUCK IT. THEY CAN FEND FOR THEMSELVES. UNGRATEFUL SHITS.

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“Facilitated open computing initiatives and exercised independent judgment and mastery of social engineering techniques and forum software.”

Fair; I guess I should have run some data. I just used gasbuddy.com to run a similar track for what would have been my rather lengthy commute if my employer had asked us to return to office (and kept the lease on that building). Apart from a couple of outliers just outside the Dallas-Fort Worth airport, I’m only getting an 8% variance (about USD 0.23/gallon, versus your 25% and AUD 0.55/litre – is that right?).

That said, Iwill admit that $0.10/gallon suboptimal average price is probably more likely than I thought, though with a less intense driving situation one would still be well under the $260/year “convenience premium.” Outside the US and other oil-subsidizing countries, the numbers clearly work out very differently.

People are weird about gasoline. They’ll drive around looking for the cheapest option, to save 2 cents/gallon. Even with a huge tank, that’s less than 50 cents of total savings.

Bless 'em for keeping the price pressure on, but this is so very true. Once I ran a couple of mental hypotheticals, I stopped giving a shit, beyond avoiding places right by airports that jack it up a dollar or more (Las Vegas and especially Orlando, with lots of tourists in rentals, are the worst offenders I’ve seen).

For a pretty extreme example consider, as you say, a large 25-gal tank, and filling up from dry twice a week, at an average of $0.10/gal non-optimal price: you pay an annual premium of $260 bucks not to drive yourself batty hunting for pennies, and burning at least a tiny bit more fuel to do it. Most people will pay far less. It’s just this weird thing that stuck in people’s brains long past the point where a cent increase was any significant percentage of the fuel purchase.