The phrase “don’t look a gift horse in the mouth” comes from this. If someone gives you a horse, you shouldn’t look into its mouth to see how old it is because, hey, free horse.

Oh, certainly. In case it’s helpful, here’s a post I made last spring with notes from a year of reading - it’s pretty much all SF and fantasy. Many of the books mentioned in this thread are there. I’ve been reading about the same amount since, and will probably do another post on the anniversary of that one.

I was surprised at how little I liked it given the hype.

I’d love to hear what you think, I enjoyed both quite a lot.

If you end up searching online for that kind of things, “hard science fiction” is the phrase that’s usually used for it.

A lot of good recommendations here. Some endorsements and other recommendations:

• Project Hail Mary by Weir is a no brainer choice if you liked The Marian. He gets the science right.
• Children of Time, by Adrian Tchaikovsky is amazing, and the first of a trilogy, so more to read.
• The whole Expanse series, by James Corey is good and he does a good job with the science, especially the celestial mechanics.
• The Uplift series (starting with Sundiver) by David Brin is great, and Brin is will known for hard SF. It’s from the 80s.
• Ancillary Justice, by Ann Leckie, is great and the first of a series as well.
• Beggars in Spain, by Nancy Kress, is great, with a good science background, though it’s more genetics than engineering. Really cool story though.
• I also agree with the recommendation on Saturn’s Children, by Charles Stross. Also the first of a loose series.

On the flip side, I really didn’t care for Three Body Problem, and though the Bobiverse books seem fun, I’m not sure I’d call them firmly hard SF.

I see a lot of recipes that have different temperatures if the pan is black or nonstick. It makes sense that you’d need to reduce the temp for the cast iron.

From your recommendation and others, I’m reading it now. Ten percent in and, yes, it sure has fast pacing.

I like the idea of tits without the commitment of owning, I’ll go there.

Why does the guy holding the sign look like Misha Collins?

The turntable is there because the microwaves bouncing around inside the unit don’t do so completely evenly; there will be spots that don’t get heated as much. Moving the food around inside the unit makes it so one of those cold spots isn’t consistently in one place in the food.

So with that as a context, if a cold spot is at or near the center of the turntable, it’s not going to get moved around in the food when it rotates. So better to put the food away from the center.

See this comment

See this comment

Okay, I finished We Are Legion (Bobiverse book one). It was fun, and I’ll probably read the next. Nothing especially deep, but amusing. A few things bugged me a little:

If I had seen this in a general community, I would have guessed it was a Gahan Wilson cartoon.

I’ve read both of those and agree they’re both excellent. Really good books. Very different from each other.

That last bit is interesting and funny. It was really popular in China, too, right?

So many recommendations that I’ve started reading it already. 20% in. Seems entertaining.

Book one of The Expanse series - really good. Had you watched the show?

I’m sure there’s an odd element caused by the fact that it was translated from Chinese (which involved tweaks for a western audience), but it certainly didn’t come close to living up to the hype for me.

I don’t know how different California is from other states, but it might be worth looking into the situation for your state.