Nobody ever replied to one of my comments with poetry before. Thank you. Upvoted.

DC is near the bottom because it's small, and California and Texas are near the top because they are large. This is an excellent presentation, but it would be more useful to see it expressed as a population density ranking, not just a population ranking.

Yes, I suspect he has extended the storyline signficantly. He has said that there's an ending, but he's taking his time getting there. And that's fine. It makes for a deeper and more nuanced story.

I can see the clothes and the wings for a costume, but can't quite picture actual humans with the OOTS body style and faces (with no noses)!

I am also amazed that the story arc has gone on for TWENTY years!

I'm curious which ones.

I have been a fan of Rich Burlew's webcomic Order of the Stick (OOTS) for many years. I have noticed over the past few years that I am waiting longer, on the average, between installments.

Knowing that Burlew has health problems, I decided to make this graph, which shows the counts of all installments having the same copyright year. I correlated bars on the graph with public announcements Burlew has made about his health.

The comic started out as a series of gags involving meta-humor about the Dungeons and Dragons role-playing game, but has evolved into an epic story with a rather intricate plot and diverse cast of characters. It is clearly approaching a climactic conclusion but still has a way to go.

I cannot say that the recent decline in productivity is a direct result of declining health, because Burlew's notifications over the past few years indicate that he has branched out into several other projects, mostly dealing with OOTS merchandise, so it may be that his health has deteriorated to a stable level and he now devotes less attention to the webcomic due to other activities going on.

Sources: (Source)

• https://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots.html (examining the links for copyright dates)
• https://archive.org to examine prior versions of the https://giantitp comments page.

Tools used: (Tool) Web browser to gather data, Google Sheets to tabulate data and make graph, Google Slides to add callout labels to the graph.

I guess China is improving. They're better off than India.

The yellow color in California is likely due to pollution blowing in from China. California has the strictest clean air standards in the nation, but according to a study described in this article, "pollutants from China have caused a 65% increase in the Western Ozone – or, as it’s also referred to, smog. One study shows that 29% of the particulates in smog in San Francisco come directly from China’s coal plants." (The Wall Street Journal article is a better source but that article is behind a paywall.)

Actually there's a lot of movement at higher altitudes. You don't have to climb very high on a mountain to notice the temperature drop.

Temperature and pressure are related. If you pressurize air, it heats up. If you reduce the pressure, it cools down. Higher altitudes are lower in atmospheric pressure.

I think it's possible that mecha is still in a lot of anime but mecha is no longer the centerpiece, it's just part of the everyday world in the story.

Consider the Avatar movie, and the most recent installment Avatar: The Way of Water. The original Avatar came out about 13 years ago. Even then, the mech suits were just part of the collection of high-tech military equipment in the story, and the story certainly didn't revolve around it although it was prominently featured near the end. In the second movie, it was simply there as a minor element of the background.

I never particularly enjoyed mecha anime. I rather liked Patlabor but didn't see anything else of interest since then.

I also wouldn't say it's a decline without seeing the actual rate of production. For all we know, the production rate of mecha anime might have increased over the years, but the production of other genres has increased more.

If it isn't a decline, possibly one reason for it is that you can't do much with the genre that hasn't already been done, and those few recent are well regarded because they did something original. Other than that, the genre is likely tapped out. OR... it gets absorbed into other genres as an everyday feature, with the anime work not being about mecha itself.

That reminds me of this academic paper cited in the Wikipedia article on Master of Business Administration. While this focused on MBA rankings and not overall university rankings, I found it interesting that a simple ranking made by combining incoming student GMAT scores with salary after graduation resulted in a ranking that well-approximated the rankings by publications like USNews and Business Week.

Interesting that most of them are in the United States, and the relative movements among the top half of the chart are smaller than the movements in the bottom half.

Fish isn't considered an "animal"? It's conspicuously absent from that chart, and seafood is my primary source of meat. Due to that, I am skeptical of the value and correctness of this chart.

That isn't dark web, that's just putting a noindex meta tag on HTML pages you don't want search engines to index. or password-protecting pages with htaccess. Anyone who knows how to get to the pages can still do so with a normal browser. The fact that they aren't indexed by search engines doesn't make them "dark".

TOR sites aren't searchable on sites like Google, so they fit that original definition. Google's objective is to index everything, so the open-internet sites remaining that haven't been searched by one of the major search engines are probably negligible.

I am skeptical of the reliability of The Daily Beast as a source for this, particularly since the links to the alleged patents don't work, and I was unable to find those patent titles in the Google patents search engine. According to the Wikipedia article on the inventor, these patents are likely intended as hoaxes to mislead adversaries.

I can envision the situation at home. "See you later honey, I want... er, HAVE to go to work."

They opened a Pandora's box.

I worked for the NRL a couple decades ago. They do pretty cool stuff, much of it classified, but cool nonetheless. I envied the four guys I met who worked in a lab where they spent all day inventing experimental small flying machines, some autonomous, some radio controlled. Those guys basically got to enjoy a hobby they were passionate about and get paid for it. One told me he would never leave that job even if he was offered higher pay to do something else.

That's true. The point remains that one cannot tell what "price" means in the context of that chart. Maybe it's carbon credits, given that US and China are omitted. Only the OP really knows.

Why are the biggest emitters (US and China) omitted?

And what is "price"? Cost of health care as a result of emissions? Spot price of fossil fuels used to produce those emissions? Price of implementing energy alternatives to produce the same power as produced by emission-producing powerplants? Price of carbon credits in each country? Total cost of paying for carbon credits?

What are your sources for data? Please be specific, otherwise the graph is meaningless.

It's a tax loophole. It's closed now. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_Irish_arrangement

But companies moved on to other loopholes that are as good or better.

Looks like their tax rate went down.