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325 mg aspirin pills were originally 5 grains. A carat was 4 grains. The unit was used by apothecaries, jewelers, and bullet makers.

In Canada, Santa's postcode is H0H 0H0. In the 1800s a letter addressed Sromfidevi England was eventually delivered to Sir Humphry Davy.

Clocks at NIST Boulder in Colorado run faster than NIST Gaithersburg in Maryland by about 1.55 microseconds per year because of the 1500 meter altitude difference. It's about 1 nanosecond per year per meter. They both have to use a fudge factor to adjust down to sea level.

They're pretty sure the primordial environment was a hydrothermal vent in an anoxic high phosphorus soda lake with methane, ammonia, and UV exposure. Nowadays those lakes don't have the methane and ammonia, so that environment isn't there anymore. https://www.science.org/content/article/unusual-soda-lakes-m...

The surfaces of clay particles in these lakes have been dubbed "the primordial sandwich".

The early protocells were 'alive', they were self-replicating, but they required nutrients and metabolic processes that only existed near mineral surfaces and would starve if they drifted away. They had to evolve new enzymes to become 'free-living'.

So it looks like the LUCA was one of these early protocells with an incomplete metabolism.

They made a walking robotic exoskeleton for a snake. https://lifeboat.com/blog/2023/01/madman-invents-robot-suit-...

There's a diagram of the size of everything in the universe from quarks to the whole observable universe. https://www.universetoday.com/163927/everything-in-the-unive...

The old process depended on a small amount of undocumented residue that was removed in the new process.

Obligatory FreeFall reference http://freefall.purrsia.com/ff1500/fc01415.htm

As Kevin Bacon put it in Quicksilver, "What happened to all that money?" "Nothing happened to it. The money's still there. It just belongs to somebody else now."

IP-locating databases have mostly switched to showing the default location as being in the middle of a lake, so that people will know it's not a real house.

related: Null Island at 0° / 0° https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Null_Island

Also https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-07-31/shipwreck-cargo-revea...

> In 1968, analyst Richard Brandon told the ACM that the typical programmer was "excessively independent ... often egocentric, slightly neurotic, and he borders upon a limited schizophrenia. The incidence of beards, sandals, and other symptoms of rugged individualism or nonconformity are notably greater among this demographic group."

The Smokey Stover themed "WHAT THIS COUNTRY NEEDS IS FOO" (1938) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W2pljKyCgwc

At least it fixed itself.

Bugger. The reaction wheels have gone bad. https://arstechnica.com/space/2026/07/reaction-wheel-failure...

The name has been cited as Uhackatik and/or Uhaachatik. Northern Quebec, 25 km wide. 51.2° N

https://craterexplorer.ca/uhackatik-impact-crater/

James Burke's book version of 'Connections' https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/55024.Connections

Also Douglas Coupland's 'Microserfs', described as "Here's a guy who seems to have spent a week with engineers and effortlessly absorbed everything that is important about engineering culture, everything that matters about working at a big company, and everything that matters about working at a startup." https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2748.Microserfs

It was mentioned in http://www.terrydunkle.com/glass.php and in a Sky & Telescope magazine article from 1989 which explained why Perkin-Elmer began using very meticulous step by step procedure checklists after that. To prevent any major mistakes. Oh the irony.

In 1968, a team of Perkin-Elmer technicians were carrying the million dollar Copernicus space telescope mirror to the other side of the lab. They tripped over a piece of scrap lumber. Shaka, when the walls fell.

"Like so many good ideas, nuclear pulse propulsion started with a Polish guy living in New Mexico." (Stanisław Ulam)

Victor Borge pronounced his punctuation marks. O:-) https://duckduckgo.com/?q=victor+borge+punctuation&ia=videos...

Among other things, turbulent currents of liquid iron in the Earth's core can make the core drift eastward or westward, which causes the crust and mantle to turn slower or faster. Same thing with the strength of the jet stream.

A 20 year search leads to the discovery of the nitroplast, a nitrogen-fixing organelle hiding inside algae.

Bookmarklet: javascript:void(location.href='http://megalodon.jp/'+location.href)

The vote for independence was on July 2. Then it took them two days to hash out the wording. They printed the first batch of broadsheets in Philadelphia and sent them to the state capitals. This batch was reprinted in NH a few weeks later.

Medieval Help Desk - how to use this new 'book' thing https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pdkucf6wxU4#help

No, the Baudot / Western Union mechanical teletype code assignments were worked out in the late 1800s and early 1900s. This was later developed into ASCII. Computer keyboards came much later. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baudot_code

In the original performance, he had a page turner.

“You mean we all came from Earth?” said Nikolai, unbelieving. “Yes,” the holo said kindly. “The first true settlers in space were born on Earth—produced by sexual means. Of course, hundreds of years have passed since then. You are a Shaper. Shapers are never born.” “Who lives on Earth now?” “Human beings.” “Ohhhh,” said Nikolai, his falling tones betraying a rapid loss of interest. --- Twenty Evocations (1984) Bruce Sterling

The other commenters are referring to bare metal interpreted Forth with no OS, or bare metal ROM Basic with no OS, as opposed to machine code with no OS.