That's fine, I have no problem with that. But y'all are jumping all over me for adding some geographic detail to your less-vague comment (specifying MA 6) as though I'm some colonialist monster. Friend, I've got news for you - the "Salish Sea" is not the original native name for these waters. It was coined in the late '80s by a WWU professor, using a term concocted by linguists from the name of a native people who live hundreds of miles away in present-day Montana, to express that the areas called "Strait of Juan de Fuca", "Strait of Georgia", and "Puget Sound" are all interconnected and should be thought of as one combined ecosystem in an inland sea. Just because someone wants a little geographical distinction in an area encompassing nearly 7,000 square miles, how about not assuming that they're a colonialist "a-hole"?

Sorry to burst your bubble, but:

>The first known use of the term "Salish Sea" was in 1988 when Bert Webber, a geography and environmental social studies professor emeritus in Huxley College of the Environment at Western Washington University in Bellingham, Washington, created the name for the combined waters in the region with the intention to complement the names Georgia Strait, Puget Sound, and Strait of Juan de Fuca, not replace them.

To quote Dr. Webber,

>BUT WHAT TO CALL OUR INLAND SEA?
>
>I knew that the tribes around our inland sea from both British Columbia and Washington State all shared a historical connection with the Coast Salish language. I also knew that the indigenous people occupying our inland sea were different from those living on the North West Coast of Washington State and those of the West Coast of Vancouver Island in British Columbia. As well, the indigenous people of the tribes living to the north on the British Columbia coast differed from those with a link to Salish languages. The name Salish Sea acknowledges the first peoples to live on the shores of our inland sea.

The first people who lived around this basin spoke a huge variety of languages, and probably didn't have one single word or name for this massive body of water. In fact, as David Buerge points out in his 2021 article "Why We Should Stop Calling it the Salish Sea",

>Webber misappropriates a linguistic term to identify his sea. Many native groups on its putative shore developed spectacular cultures over thousands of years, but not one ever identified themselves as Salish. It is a white term. It appeared in the 1840s when the Jesuit philologist, Gregorio Mengarini (1811-1886), was inspired to leave Italy and work as a missionary among the Flathead People in the American West.

He goes on to explain that this fellow traveled to Montana and lived with a people who called themselves Say LEESH. He became proficient in their language and wrote a dictionary of it, which linguists later used to realize that languages spoken by people living further to the west were similar, so they started calling them the Salish languages. Importantly, none of those people used this term to describe their own language - instead, as you'd expect, they each had their own terms. Similarly, they have different words to refer to this water, none of which is "Salish Sea".

So in summary, the term "Salish Sea" was coined in the late '80s by a WWU professor, using a term concocted by linguists from the name of a native people who live hundreds of miles away in present-day Montana, under which they lumped all peoples living in this area who spoke similar languages, even though none of them called themselves by it.

Now that's not to say that the current Indian tribes are unilaterally opposed to the name - a coalition of 70 tribes from around the region call themselves the Coast Salish Gathering and use the term to refer to this water in stating their desire to protect it. But if you want the historic name, from before European colonizers came to this land, then perhaps you should call it Tlahlch, like the S'klallam people do, or Kwailkw, as the Chemainus say.

(And just because someone wants to clarify some geographic distinction within a large body of water, kindly don't assume they're a colonialist "a-hole".)

Which was precisely my point.

I absolutely do - my point was that the original comment's assertion that Salish Sea = Puget Sound was wrong, especially since you said you were in MA 6. The Salish Sea encompasses a wide area, and specific geographic designators within that area are useful to understanding more precisely where something happened.

So if anything the Strait, not the Sound.

Bogachiel State Park should have showers, though they may be currently closed for the winter. Their phone number is on their website, you should be able to give them a call for more information: https://www.parks.wa.gov/478/Bogachiel

>Due to a quirk of Washington's constitution, we can't charge income tax.

More precisely, there is case law from 1933 (Culliton v. Chase) in which the State Supreme Court held that income is property and thus can only be taxed at a flat 1%. There is an argument that the court got it wrong in Culliton by misunderstanding the prior holding in Aberdeen Savings & Loan Assoc. v. Chase from 1930, as laid out here. If that argument holds water, legislative or initiative action to instate an income tax may prevail.

That's a good question. I'm not sure where to find the sales figures either. But the excise tax on cannabis products is 37%, while the spirits sales tax is 20.5%. However, there is also a spirits liter tax of $3.7708 per liter, which means that the effective tax rate is inversely proportional to the price per liter.

I bet!

Cool! Do you know if they still do that? I got to climb up to the top of the dome of St. Paul's Cathedral in London, and the view from up there is similarly amazing.

I've got to wonder how that tradition started - seems like there must have been a common thread.

To keep people from accidentally damaging it by walking across it. It's made of bronze, which is fairly soft, so it wouldn't stand up to foot traffic. There's a bust of George Washington on one side of the rotunda that is rumored to grant good luck to those who rub his nose, and as a result his nose is much shinier than the rest of him because the patina wears off from everyone touching it.

Neat!

Had the opportunity to spend a week on the capitol campus in middle school working as a legislative page. That was quite a fun experience - got to work on the Senate floor, run messages between offices, ended up broadcast on TVW at one point.

Fun facts I've heard from there:

One of the tour guides told me that sometimes they have brass ensembles come in and play back and forth across the rotunda from the different levels - that must be quite a thing to hear!

Apparently the central chandelier there is large enough to enclose a VW bug, and when the 2001 earthquake hit it didn't stop swinging for days.

The dome is the largest self-supporting masonry dome in the USA, and the light at the very top of the building is the southernmost navigational light on Puget Sound.

>Even if the two beams were mirrored into the same trajectory, it's possible they'd refract while traveling due to their different wavelengths and end up as two dots at the end anyway.

Do you mean that they would refract differently passing through an interface, or that the two beams would interfere with each other? It seems like the former should be able to be controlled on the device side as long as you are careful with the optics (though shining the laser through an interface would split the beams, but nothing we can do about that). You could probably cheat your way around inter-beam interference by using a pair of pulse-width modulated lasers set out of phase so that the beams don't overlap and relying on persistence of vision for the laser to be perceived as yellow.

Inside a crown for the "Queen of the Skies".

Yeah, they definitely come across as the more militant atheist type to me. Not so much the "I don't believe in a deity, please respect that and stop trying to convert me" type as the "there is no deity, you are stupid for believing so, I am suing you because you decorated your office in accordance with your faith" type. Ironically, atheists who embody many of the traits that turn people off to blowhard theists. Which is too bad, because there are definitely important issues that they try to address, but their heavy-handed approach makes it easier to dismiss them as irrational and intolerant.

I've thought about doing it, but the hassle of applying for the State Parks permit in advance and paying the fee seems excessive for just some cool shots.

>No idea what a “seed” combine is though…

A little Googling suggest perhaps a combine built for harvesting grass seed?