xefer

2 yıl öncediscuss

In Pale Fire, Nabokov coins a couple of great collective nouns when he writes "... an anthology of poets and a brocken of their wives ..."

The Brocken is the highest peak in the Harz mountains of Germany and is where witches are said to gather on Walpurgis Night. So it was quite a subtle dig.

xefer

3 yıl öncediscuss

There is the Atom Feed Format and there is the Atom Syndication Protocol:

  https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc4287
  https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc5023

These specs and the discussion about them at the time really are from a different era of the web. The Syndication Protocol fully embraced REST which was also white hot then. There was a real feeling that with a good format and a standardized way to consume and interact with the resources, it would allow for easier sharing of not just blog posts but other data as well.

As intense as the discussion was around the development of RFC-5023, it was basically ignored from the moment it was released and even the main spec author declared it basically dead not very long afterward:

https://web.archive.org/web/20090421042741/http://bitworking...

Needless to say, the web took an entirely different direction and while these specs exist, there isn't much interest in them any longer.

xefer

3 yıl öncediscuss

Scientific American during this period was a great magazine with fantastic graphics. I used to really look forward to each issue. Sometime in the 90s they made a decision to make the magazine more “accessible” to the general public. The style of graphics became much more cartoony and the articles themselves somewhat more simplistic.

xefer

4 yıl öncediscuss

...

xefer

4 yıl öncediscuss

If you happen to know the address of where the individual lived, you can make a much more targeted search if you know the census enumeration district. With the ED in hand, just looking up by last name may be sufficient, but you can also just step through the individual sheets.

This site has a way to look up the ED by street address:

https://stevemorse.org/census/unified.html

Depending on the street, there will be 1 or more districts; e.g.: "9-27", etc. Just enter that string in the "Enumeration District" search field. I knew the addresses of several relatives based on the 1940 census and it made looking them up in the 1950 census very easy.

xefer

5 yıl öncediscuss

"cannabis" and "hemp"

https://blogs.illinois.edu/view/25/107526

xefer

6 yıl öncediscuss

Maybe you’re already aware of it, but the book “Atlas of Remote Islands” may be of interest:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlas_of_Remote_Islands

At one time you could group Wikipedia articles in “books” that you could have printed. I had collected all the islands listed in the book mentioned above into a sort of companion:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book:A_Companion_Guide_to_At...

xefer

6 yıl öncediscuss

This is going back many years, but I seem to recall that one of the arguments against primordial black holes is that - assuming Hawking radiation is correct - we should see evidence of black holes evaporating if they are of the correct size, but that hasn't been seen.

https://www.nature.com/articles/248030a0

xefer

6 yıl öncediscuss

I believe there is a reference to this law in the movie “No Country for Old Men”.

The movie was set in 1980. In the famous coin toss scene Anton Chigurh explicitly states that the date on the quarter is 1958 and that it had been traveling for 22 years. That means it was a silver coin. The US Coin Act of 1965 changed the make up of coins from 90% silver to cladded nickel and zinc. The old silver coins very quickly disappeared from circulation. Any remaining ones were snatched up especially when the price of silver skyrocketed when the Hunt Brothers in Texas tried to corner the silver market in 1980, right in the time period when the movie was set.

So basically Chigurh had no business having a 1958 silver quarter in his pocket.

I think Cormac McCarthy was implicitly showing Chigurh was a dispassionate force of evil driving out the good.

xefer

6 yıl öncediscuss

I've seen people mention putting some sort of "use it or lose it" time limit on the money, so that people are motivate to inject it directly into the economy instead of just sitting on it.

I'm not sure how feasible such a thing is or if it would hurt the cause of keeping the economy moving.

xefer

7 yıl öncediscuss

That was an interesting note about the FPC. It's something I've wondered about for years ... and proof I didn't read until the very end of the linked article I guess :)

It reminds me of the small vestigial canal in Cambridge, the Broad Canal, that is one of the last remnants of a much larger canal network that ran through East Cambridge. I've always wondered why that last bit hasn't been filled in. It's a man-made canal, so if anything, filling it in would restore the original land. There's an old steel draw bridge spanning the canal that I don't think has actually been opened in 20 years. The bridge is actually a bit of a burden: the state recently did a good job widening the walking/bike bath along the Charles River but there's a pinch point at the bridge because the old pedestrian walk way across the bridge is so tight it can't readily accommodate the bike traffic it gets a lot of now.

There has to be some reason why they've left the bridge. My dad said when he was a kid he remembers barges delivering coal to the power plan that runs along the north side of that canal. It's all gas powered now, but I wonder if it could use coal in an emergency and they've left access to the plant for that reason?

xefer

7 yıl öncediscuss

On the subjects of Boston, its new-ish Seaport District and "Make more land": was it ever under discussion to simply fill in the Fort Point Channel completely? That could have potentially knitted the Seaport development into the city itself.

If I recall correctly, during the "Big Dig" work they had to jump through all sorts of hoops to run the new harbor tunnel road under the channel and deal with the water, and mud, etc. The entire South Bay has already been almost entirely filled in as can be seen on the map at the top of the linked article. Why not just finish it off entirely? Does it serve any actual purpose at this point?

I always feel like a bit of a wet blanket when it comes to the Seaport. Sure, it's nice to see the development happening, but it still feels very car-centric and cut off from the rest of the city. Just looking at a satellite image shows that there's a lot more roads and parking than actual buildings. It also feels very disconnected from the city center. Getting into town requires a fairly long walk across one of several windy, car-filled bridges.

xefer

7 yıl öncediscuss

You’re correct. If you listen to what he’s actually saying it’s told from the perspective of Hader and it only shifts when he’s doing an impression of Cruise or Rogan.

xefer

7 yıl öncediscuss

I found this reference in which the abstract provides this definition: "The age of the Solar System can be defined as the time of formation of the first solid grains in the nebular disc surrounding the proto-Sun"

https://doi.org/10.1038/ngeo941

"The age of the Solar System can be defined as the time of formation of the first solid grains in the nebular disc surrounding the proto-Sun. This age is estimated by dating calcium–aluminium-rich inclusions in meteorites. These inclusions are considered as the earliest formed solids in the solar nebula. Their formation marks the beginning for several long- and short-lived radiogenic clocks that are used to precisely define the timescales of Solar System events, such as the formation and evolution of planetary bodies1,2,3. Here we present the 207Pb–206Pb isotope systematics in a calcium–aluminium-rich inclusion from the Northwest Africa 2364 CV3-group chondritic meteorite, which indicate that the inclusion formed 4,568.2 million years ago."

xefer

7 yıl öncediscuss

How is the time of "solar system formation" defined?

Presumably a system slowly forms out of gas and dust but at what point does the accumulating material cross some threshold to where it is considered a new system? Solar ignition?

xefer

7 yıl öncediscuss

The thing that stands out for me about this period is the lack of a "descent from antiquity". [1]

There is no well-established genealogical descent in Western Europe from antiquity to the modern era. Familial lines of descent can be traced to the very late Roman period, and from the early medieval period to the modern era. But there is a chasm that can't be crossed because the societal norms that allowed families to be traced broke down for some time and only reformed later.

To me this is a concrete symptom of a fairly severe disruption. How it's labeled is an interesting discussion, but clearly something happened.

[1] See deeper discussion here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Descent_from_antiquity

xefer

7 yıl öncediscuss

As a comment to that article references: it’s certainly a great story, but it makes it seem that this is the catalogue of the library, when in fact it is one of 16 volumes, 14 of which are already known.

The referenced page at The Arnamagnæan Institute stays:

“There were 16 volumes of indices in all; 14 of these are in the Biblioteca Colombina in Seville, where what remains of Colón’s library is kept. The other two were presumed missing — but now it seems that one of them wound up in the collection of Árni Magnússon.“ [1]

It’s great that this was found (and one is still missing) but perhaps not quite as profound as the article would lead one to believe.

[1] https://manuscript.ku.dk/news/a-new-discovery-in-the-arnamag...

xefer

7 yıl öncediscuss

Re-reading this article from The New York Times Magazine, “Recycling Is Garbage” (1996) is really interesting today. It goes over the whole panic that kicked off the recycling movement during that time period.

https://www.nytimes.com/1996/06/30/magazine/recycling-is-gar...

I had almost forgotten the story of the Mobro 4000. For days the national press was obsessed with watching it try to find a place to offload.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobro_4000

xefer

7 yıl öncediscuss

There were eye witness reports to that effect, but the proof would be in the flight recorders.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-ethiopia-airplane-witness...

xefer

7 yıl öncediscuss

I read the Pevear and Volokhonsky translation about 10 years ago. There were a lot of good references and footnotes.

But way into the novel, as the Russian army is about to crush the last remnants of Napoleon’s army retreating from Moscow, Field Marshall Kutuzov first tells his gathered troops to consider that the French are human too and have suffered along with them. Then, after a dramatic pause he continues:

    “But, that said, who invited them here? It’s their own doing, f… th… in the f…”, he suddenly said, raising his head.”

But there was no footnote indicating what the redacted text was, which I found odd. I went to various other online translations and all had the phrase redacted in a similar way.

I even found an original Russian version online and even that was redacted. (I don't know a lick of Russian so it took a bit to find it.)

The original text had:

— А и то сказать, кто же их к нам звал? Поделом им, м… и… в г…. — вдруг сказал он, подняв голову.

I asked some of my Russian-speaking colleagues what this was and even they were a bit stumped but after some searching they found the redacted text was

м[ать] и[хъ] в г[узно]

Which they said was some crude old-fashioned way to say to basically screw their mother in the ass.

Submissions

Person from Porlock

The earliest use of the F-word discovered (2015)

Bar graphs criticized for misrepresenting data

Moral Dilemma for Google's Driverless Vehicle Control Software

All Roads Lead to "Philosophy"

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