His ratings aren't appreciably different from Letterman towards the end. However, Colbert hasn't ever come remotely close to the number of viewers Letterman had during his heyday.

In general, late night talk shows have been on a long, slow decline and aren't all that relevant as part of the national conversation any more.

I'd recommend you try something like self-publishing on Amazon. You have a variety of options depending on how you want to monetize (or not) your work and you'll have a record for IP purposes. Then you can simply provide a link on Reddit (or anywhere else) so people can read it if they like.

> Was it maybe because digital presence was not as big a thing before the 90s, when everyone started having computers in their houses?

Undoubtably this was part of the reason. However, knowing the reasons doesn't change the reality - the transition of libraries to community spaces and digital media sites is within the past few decades.

> Yeah, because libraries generally use their conference spaces for their own activities lmao

Libraries didn't have those community spaces. Perhaps the easiest way to see this is to visit a major research university and compare the newer vs. the older libraries. Those older libraries - with their endless stacks, lack of conference rooms or 'open office'-style spaces - are how libraries used to look.

> What you're saying continues to be incorrect.

Again - if what you believe is true, then why aren't any of the institutions that deal with large-scale digital data hiring graduates in library science?

What you're arguing is equivalent to arguing that astrologists are essential to space travel in the face of the reality that NASA doesn't hire astrologists.

> I'd allow the 70s, but 90s is wildly recent. This is incorrect.

The change in libraries is very recent. All of that space given over to media and digital presence? That was - at the earliest - in the 90s. Prior to that, you might have had a room full of vinyl records. But no computers, visual presentation devices, etc.

Likewise, most of the 'social' functions of libraries are within the past few decades because that space was taken up by physical books. If you needed a conference room for a public event, you were far more likely to use a church or school.

> Library science programs teach the tools to organize digital archives. Aka their job.

If this were true, library science graduates would be paid lavishly by private sector organizations. They are not. They are public sector-only employees that no organization that has to organize digital data on a large scale has any interest in hiring.

I know what you want to believe about librarians and their training. But they are largely obsolete, kept around mostly by the inertia of government and nostalgia.

> So this is again, incorrect, and frankly incredibly rude and dismissive of an entire profession you very obviously know nothing about.

I actually know a very great deal about the organization of digital information - and I know that actual professionals in the field consider the idea that librarians have any meaningful expertise in it laughable.

Again, there's a reason that the serious people who do this for money (rather than simply being on the government payroll) don't recruit from library science programs.

I get it. Change is scary. You have fond memories of a world that is going away. But that world is going away and neither you nor I can stop it.

> This has always been part of the purpose of libraries, especially since the 1960s or so.

More like "since the 1990s" - and was largely a reflection of the declining utility of warehousing printed material.

Most of what you see as the modern purpose of libraries was more commonly performed by churches and other religious institutions in the past.

In any case, it doesn't really matter. If you're using a stables as a restaurant, that doesn't magically make stables relevant just because restaurants are.

> Current librarians are trained in organization of information in a DIGITAL age

Library science programs do not teach the mathematical tools for the organization of digital data. That's why you don't see organizations operating large-scale repositories of digital data hiring librarians.

> ALSO in the logistical matters that go into organizing community activities like the ones I described

Again, if this were true you'd see non-library organizations hiring library science graduates. But you don't. Whatever training they receive is not sufficient to make them experts in the tasks they're being asked to perform.

> Libraries provide community activities, summer reading programs for children, a place for the homeless to shelter (as well as serving as disaster relief shelters in some communities!), a place where people go to vote, storytime and activities for children, movie nights for families (btw, the only place you can rent movies for free in most communities is the library), game rentals, book clubs, language classes for adults, assistance with applying for jobs, a place for seniors to congregate and exist, a place for local historical archives and artifacts to be housed, digitized, and to SURVIVE....and who do you think organizes ALL of that? Couldn't be those useless librarians, could it? (I am aware that not all libraries have all of this. This is due to under-funding and under-staffing.)

Your litany of reasons for having libraries has essentially nothing to do with libraries. You're not arguing for libraries - you're arguing for public spaces. And, for that matter, why would you hire a librarian to oversee it? Their training isn't in the logistical matters necessary for the tasks you describe but rather in the organization of information in a pre-digital age.

> School libraries serve so many other roles: meeting spaces, learning commons, exploration/maker spaces, and just a safe space for students.

This is really the point I'm making. Those 'other roles' are not inherently linked to the 'library' function. It's just that as libraries themselves declined in utility, the space was re-purposed to fill those roles. But there is no reason you can't fulfill those functions without the 'library' part - and, indeed, this is increasingly what you see on college campuses.

Classically, libraries were necessary because printed text was the only reasonable way to disseminate information. The fact that Harvard had some information in its library didn't help me much if I lived in Grand Forks, so we needed a public library. The fact that downtown Grand Forks had a public library didn't help me much if I lived 10 miles outside of town and needed to do a school paper for tomorrow. And so forth.

But this does not describe the modern day. The last time I entered a library for a book was almost a decade ago - and the only reason I did so was because it was sufficiently obscure that it didn't exist in digital format. Despite the fact that I use the written word far more than most in my professional life, it's almost entirely digital at this point. I don't need a library down the road because I can read directly from the largest compilations of the written word in the world from the comfort of my own living room.

This is the reality that most school children are growing up in. While we old fogies can wax poetic about the joys of a physical book, this is little different than the folks who love vinyl rather than mp3s - it's their particular hobby rather than the core element of civilization it once was.

Nor are librarians particularly useful these days. Google does a better job of cataloguing and indexing information than the best librarian ever did.

Indeed, if you actually visit a library you'll recognize that relatively few of the patrons are there for the books. Modern libraries are primarily a public 'third space' - they're more about giving the homeless a place out of the rain, parents a place to dump their children for a few hours or local community groups a place to hold their meeting than they are about the materials they're nominally intended to warehouse.

I get it. No one likes to see the world they liked so much as a child change. But if you're concerned about books, you shouldn't be concerned about libraries - the vagaries of IP law are more important than some building you probably loved as a child and now never get around to visiting.

The qualification criteria are normally decided upon by the law enforcement bureaucracy under the authority of the executive at the municipal/state/federal level. While legislators can theoretically pass laws that outline specific qualifications, they're unlikely to do so because the subject is complex enough to exceed their expertise.

You might also consider that the qualifications are likely the wrong place to address any problems you have. Individual law enforcement officers have no more say over the policies of law enforcement than the cashier at Walmart can help you if you have a problem with how Walmart does business. It's just that as the most visible representative, both the LEO and the cashier bear the brunt of your rage rather than the appropriate targets.

It's not about becoming an engineer. It's about not wasting four years of your life on studies that don't get you anywhere.

Engineering degrees are fantastic for getting your foot in the door on a decent career track. You don't need family connections or to be the smooth-talker of the century to land a decent job. Degrees in fields like Humanities? More often than not, you end up in a 'lost decade' of underemployment because you don't bring anything an employer actually needs.

But just because you got a degree in Engineering (or any other STEM subject) doesn't mean you need to stay there. One of the virtues of being in a career track job that requires a college-level education is that you spend your time around other such people and build the connections necessary for a career.

I have the benefit of being able to look back at my college friends in terms of decades of career development. The non-STEM folks? They eventually got there. They're doing pretty well now. But they spent a lot of years struggling where the STEM folks didn't.

In an age of widespread student loans, this is especially important. That first decade out of college when that interest is piling up and you're trying to pay it off with some low end job? That's a huge amount of money you're leaving on the table.

So about 9.5e-15 rpm?

> only within the last 300,000 approx.

Pale skin emerged in a similar time frame. However, going that far back you're talking mostly about pre-human species. More importantly, you're talking about pre-human species that didn't live outside of temperate zones.

If cold = pale skin, then how did pale skin emerge hundreds of thousands of years before settlement of cold regions?

> Bergman’s rule and Allen’s rule are the two guiding rule for my statements.

I believe you're misusing them. They're intended for discussions of speciation, not minor variations within a single species.

> Climatic adaptation and hominid evolution: the thermoregulation imperative.

Your original point was about modern human beings and the variations we see, not about pre-human species that evolved into humans.

> Body shape

Due to the impact of nutrition it's tough to get a good data set for this. However, the tallest people in the world are generally Northern Europeans or those descended primarily from Northern Europe (cold weather climates). The shortest people in the world are from warm climates in South and Southeast Asia. Africans are about in the middle.

> body hair distribution is larger in colder climates compared to populations in hot climates.

Body hair on human beings does not play any meaningful role in temperature regulation so there wouldn't be any evolutionary pressure. I don't care how glorious your chest hair is, you're not walking across the Northwest Territories naked in winter.

This also doesn't pass even the most cursory examination. Amongst Caucasians, the hairiest tend to be Mediterranean and Semitic peoples from temperate climates while the least hairy tend to be Northern Europeans from cold ones. Indians (from the scorching sub-continent) are notoriously hairy while Koreans (from the freezing Korean Peninsula) are amongst the least hairy people on the planet.

> skin melanin content

This is a common explanation, but the same sort of mechanism/evidence problems emerge.

UV protection does not seem to have any meaningful purpose here. Diseases such as melanoma that strike people with pale skin more often do not generally emerge until well after childbearing years. Sunburns, while unpleasant, can be easily avoided through the use of clothing and shelter. Moreover, it's fairly easy to get a sunburn even in deep winter if you spend a great deal of time outdoors without any protection.

Vitamin D is more likely to be the culprit. However, the main input to Vitamin D production is not climate but the amount of time spent indoors. The relatively minor variation in sunlight due to the angle of the sunlight is dwarfed by the massive variation in lifestyle of primarily indoors groups vs. primarily outdoors ones. At best you could argue that people in cold climates are more likely to spend their days indoors.

Skin color also correlates poorly with temperature. While we tend to have a simplistic "Sweden cold, Africa hot" notion, if skin color was meaningfully correlated with cold weather we'd expect tribes of pale-skinned people at high elevations in Africa. We'd also find it unusual that cold weather Koreans were considerably lighter than warm weather Indians.

I'm curious if there's really any scientific foundation for your points - it seems like the sort of assumptions the eugenicists used to make about race.

It's... ok.

I think the biggest problem is that they decided to go with a featureless 'Big Bad'. It's hard to sustain a compelling villain when you never develop that villain as a character. So what we end up with a series of low stakes battles we don't really care about.

The episodic nature of the show also doesn't help. Supernatural predated the era of prestige television, so people were happy with disconnected monster-of-the-week storytelling. But going back to it in the modern day feels... bloated.

> Shows like Gilmore Girls have come under scrutiny in recent years for some of the character's actions that were previously deemed okay.

I think this is more a judgment on certain members of the audience than it is the show. In Gilmore Girls, all of the various characters make errors but they still remain protagonists. Nor does the show flinch from showing the negative consequences of their actions.

So when you hear people who are re-evaluating the characters, they're not really making statements about the show so much as their own failure to understand it on first viewing. Even worse, they're re-evaluating on the naive and simplistic premise that good people can't also be flawed people.

True Romance, Natural Born Killers and From Dusk to Dawn are all non-Tarantino Tarantino films - and they're all awesome, eminently rewatchable films. In contrast, I find most actual Tarantino films to be merely watchable.

My suspicion is that the script-in-development-hell idea might be true. While the whole notion of a "magical academy" is fairly common (there have been multiple such series in recent memory), the series tends to break with the Addams Family mythos with an explicitly magical world rather than an implicitly magical world.

That is, in previous incarnations of the Addams Family, they're weird and they're like these various horror/magic archetypes, but they tend to exist in a (mostly) grounded reality rather than one where everyone just blithely accepts that vampires, werewolves and merfolk simply exist as an entire cultures - or that you've got mystical powers such as precognition and telekinesis as every day occurrences.

As you're using it, the term 'data' is referring to the maximum amount of information that can fit in the communications channel you're using.

Your personal data is largely limited by the fact that you're sharing that channel with many other people and your provider is only giving you a certain share of the maximum.

In terms of 'consuming', it would perhaps be better to say 'using'. If I run a bowling alley, I only have a limited number of shoes to rent and I only permit each customer to rent one pair of shoes. This limits the maximum number of customers I can have at one time, but I don't 'consume' the shoes - each customer returns the shoes after they're done.

Unfortunately, I think the series falls prey to the all-too-common business model of writing one book to see if there's interest and then following it up with a dozen books to pummel that interest into the ground.

If you look at it as a single, cohesive work, then you really get the "this could have used an editor" impression that there's simply too much and a lot could have be trimmed/excluded/modified to create a more streamlined narrative.

If you look at it as an episodic work (think Nancy Drew/Hardy Boys), then you've got too much backstory to learn. Imagine you're watching Friends and unable to understand what's going on because you skipped the entire season spent following Monica in cooking school.

I think you're completely missing the point of the book. It's like those people who watch Fight Club and think it would be cool to get their friends together and beat up each other up in the basement.

The point is that you don't want to be Holden Caulfield and that his ways of dealing with his problems are counter-productive. You're supposed to read The Catcher in the Rye and conclude "I don't want to be a whiny loser like Holden Caulfield" - while seeing the parallels in your own life that could result in that outcome.

The entire point of the book is that Caulfield is a whiny loser.

While you're supposed to sympathize with him (to an extent), you're also supposed to recognize that his actions and thoughts are an outgrowth of an inability to deal with his pain.

> follows the great-grandfather

I'd argue the protagonist is actually his daughter.

I don't think these 'plot holes' are particularly hard to explain away.

Remember, the mythology we're talking about is based on what was told to very young boys who barely knew their mother by their overly stoic father. The fact that he left out details he might not have thought important is hardly surprising - and that those boys might have made assumptions that weren't entirely correct.

From a storytelling standpoint, it you go strictly by Winchester boys' canon, there isn't much of a story to tell because John and Mary are hunters at different times.

24 Hz is around the frequency where our brain no longer discerns discrete images as discrete but rather sees them as smooth motion.

However, our ability to detect motion itself is about 5 ms. If there's a tiger lurking in the brush and it leaps out to eat us, it only takes us about 5 ms to detect that tiger. This is equivalent to 200 Hz (although it's not strictly a periodic phenomenon).

GDP is how much a nation produces in a year. Being a billionaire is about wealth. So you're trying to compare two different things - it's like asking whether the distance from New York to Chicago is faster than a Porsche.

Probably the question you're getting at is: could a billionaire buy all the goods/services of an entire nation?

To which the answer is "almost certainly not". With the exception of unusual microstates, the value of real property is those nations easily exceeds the liquid assets of any billionaire because as you start buying up that property, the cost of the remaining property explodes in value.