Colin Percival (cperciva), upon being dismissed due to never having won a prestigious mathematical award such as a Putnam fellowship, revealing that he had in fact won a Putnam fellowship in 1999.
Considering the James Van Der Beek of Dawson's Creek fame is having to hold a fundraising auction of his memorabilia to fund his cancer treatment, cancer is expensive in the US.
While the orientation is interesting, the coloring is very poor. With no key, it would seem that the colors are used to differentiate countries, but they have too many adjacent countries colored the same default beige. This makes Canada, Greenland and Iceland all appear to be the same country, likewise with Australia, New Zealand, and Papua New Guinea. Also Mexico and most of the Caribbean (except Haiti).
Basically his whole "return of magic" premise seems to be rooted in his listening to "The Telepathy Tapes" and it confirming/supporting some of his latent beliefs. But the Telepathy Tapes is utter nonsense and self delusion based on wishful thinking and the "Autism Parent" movement.
Don't bother with this one - the latest post (The Return of Magic) is promoting a load of unscientific woo (The Telepathy Tapes). The author seems to seriously mean the title of the post literally.
I think you may just be used to Python still relying on functions for string processing, where Ruby has methods on the String class for manipulating strings.
It seems to me that Python still has these holdovers from when it was not fully object-oriented, where a lot of string and data structure manipulation is done with language-level functions rather than methods on the objects, which can be quite confusing.
Not just high heels, but also many boots have sharp protrusions (e.g. lace hooks on some hiking boots and work boots, metal decorations on goth and cowboy boots)