Recent Comments

1. 12 days ago on Zack Hill

   Sometimes you need to do division without having a built in division operation. Binary long division is easy enough to implement.

2. 20 days ago on Grand Avenue

   Depends what the goal is. If it’s to write or be literate, no. If it’s to teach, yes. Apparently learning cursive is less about writing and more about learning – the studies have shown that writing in cursive allows one to retain knowledge better since more of the brain is active during the process of note taking.

3. 26 days ago on Betty

   “Swag” stuff is stupidly cheap. Having pens printed up with a name on them costs around 50 cents each – including the pen. (Cheap ballpoint pens). A notepad can be had for around a quarter. Source: I had a swag catalog where they offered it up. Their key product of the year was a VR viewer using your phone, all yours for about a couple of bucks printed with whatever you wanted. And charities do this so you’d open their mail and not just junk it unread.

4. about 1 month ago on Monty

   The problem is deregulation. Now that power producers and powerlines are separate entities, things happen. Power producers do NOT want to produce more power – the less power to go around, the higher the electricity cost. Thus, there is no incentive to build out a new power plant – instead, the incentive is to keep the old plant going as much as possible so the rate goes as high as possible. Add a power plant, and suddenly the added supply forces the rate to go down, that’s not good. Thus, the grid ends up fragile – someone needs to take the power plant offline for maintenance, everyone else takes up the load, but they can’t, so the rate jumps even higher. There’s no incentive to make a robust power grid! There’s all incentive to make it as starved as possible to keep prices high.

5. about 1 month ago on Dog Eat Doug

   Happened both ways, unlike cats. Likely some wolves were not as scared of humans as other wolves typically are, and they started hanging around humans (because they tossed out bones with lots of meat still on them, so wolves got a free meal). Then they started hanging around the humans and helping them catch prey which would give them lots more meat to eat. This symbiotic relationship evolved with humans feeding the wolves except they quit helping us forage for food. As a consequence we’ve also started dressing them up in costumes and other things. FYI, wolves are huge – even compared to “mostly wolf-like dogs” like huskies and eveb wolf-dog hybrids, a wolf is nearly twice the size.

6. 2 months ago on The Other Coast

   I leave all spiders alone. Inside spiders stay inside, outside spiders get put outside. Spiders eat insects, including annoying ones like mosquitoes and flies. Thus, the only deal I have with them is they can put their webs up, as long as it’s not in my way. One year, I found an empty wasp nest, and I seem to remember there being a lot more spiders hanging around the trees. I guess I knew what happened to the wasps.

7. 2 months ago on Garfield

   Or you just call some firefighters. That is apparently one of the most common calls they get.

8. 4 months ago on The Other Coast

   Spiders also eat mosquitoes.

9. 4 months ago on Rubes

   There are plenty of news articles on it. And yes, people have tried to sue, but it’s hard to win when you’re clearly trespassing on someone else’s property to willfully damage property. That generally negates any damages claimed because they intentionally tried to run their car through a snowman on your property. Lawsuits are plentiful – there are people who knock over mailboxes suing people who build a reinforced post for their mailbox post, likewise people who run over a rock on your property, etc. Courts look down at people trespassing to damage property and then suing for damages.Plus, lawsuits are public information. Not quite sure if you really want to make yourself personally identifiable as the one who damages property on purpose.

10. 4 months ago on Pearls Before Swine

    The newspaper I read never publishes the Sunday comic. Today’s strip makes way more sense once you read the Sunday comic.