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Cake day: January 30th, 2025

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  • I don’t know nearly enough about electrical engineering to consider what precautions must be taken when there is too much power flowing through the grid. I’ve seen enough fried motherboards that I can take a wild guess, but those were edge cases.

    I’d think that in the event of a day being especially clear, cold, and sunny, there’d be a ground-fault circuit that would take the surge instead of the house.















  • I heard this parable for the first time in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, believe it or not.

    It was during Fast Forward, one of the less popular later seasons of the 2003 show. They get blown a hundred years into the future, and have to fight the evil clones that their nemesis-of-the-season keeps throwing at them (it’s superhero sci-fi, just go with it).

    Leonardo’s clone–who, much like Frankenstein’s monster, never got a real canon name–was captured and the guys tried to take the chance to show him more mercy than he’d shown them. Leo believes that since the clone is, essentially, mostly him, he is capable of change. He delivers the parable, and then asks, ‘Are you a scorpion? Or a turtle?’ Then, like an absolute madlad, deliberately gives him a chance to betray them as a test of his ability to grow. He fails… mostly. There’s a bit at the end that gives it some ambiguity, leaves the question open-ended.

    Honestly, one of my all-time favorite moments in turtles, bar none. It’s rare to see such deep questions about nature and nurture asked and explored in a kid’s cartoon.