xefer

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.

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.

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.

...

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.

"cannabis" and "hemp"

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

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...

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

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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."

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?

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

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...

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

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...

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.

I noticed they mentioned the speed reduction "Boston, for example, has reduced the city speed limit from 30 miles per hour to 25 mph." Cambridge across the river followed suit soon afterward, but having lived there for decades I can't say I've noticed one iota of difference in the speed cars travel. 25 mph is still ridiculously fast in most of the tight neighborhood streets. Really the speed limit should be reduced even further to 20 mph and even 15 in some areas accompanied by much stricter enforcement. It's not uncommon to see cars hitting 40+ going down some of the straighter roads that emanate out of the major squares.

I am a daily all-weather bike commuter and to be honest have not had a problem with cars. I don't really mind the concept of SOVs- we use one ourselves; it's just that they need to be much more tightly controlled at least in these neighborhoods.

If an account is blocked they shouldn’t be able to see or interact with your Twitter feed.

Twitter allows for the mass importation of block lists.

Is there an active project to create a master list of corporate accounts to block?

It’s also possible that there is such a pent-up demand for housing in San Francisco that no amount of building could realistically do enough to make things truly affordable.

I believe this (long!) video of a Dennis Whyte talk from 2016 was posted to HN way back when:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KkpqA8yG9T4

It sounded pretty encouraging, but I have no idea what progress has been made or if these ideas had run into any roadblocks in two years since this was first discussed.

I have to imagine that one of the perhaps unintended side effects of lots of driverless vehicles buzzing around is that they'll act as a kind of traffic calming mechanism. I assume these things will have to obey speed limits and traffic laws to the letter.

So I'm curious: have you tried removing details from your Facebook ad preferences?

On the desktop website go to: Settings | Ads | Your Interests. There is a huge ontology of various subjects that have been algorithmically assigned to you. If you remove these, I believe ads targeted to those interests should go away. I periodically just sweep them all clean so I have no interests. I get very few ads and those that I go get are completely generic. I never see anything that would seem creepily aware of who I am.

I heartily agree with this statement. I had a business meeting in there years ago and it was the first time I had ever really been inside. I couldn't believe how miserable and depressing the place was.

There's always a discussion going on about what to do with Government Center and City Hall. To me the best thing to do would be to admit the entire enterprise was a tragic mistake, and restore the original street layout. I'm not suggesting they restore the old look - sadly that's lost forever, but at least give the place some actual street life.

If the City Hall building really must be saved, then deconstruct it instead of just demolishing it, and rebuild it out in some industrial park in the suburbs where it would blend in with its natural environment.

I’m reminded of Freeman Dyson’s essay in Edge some time ago. [1] I was struck by this statement:

“The fundamental reason why carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is critically important to biology is that there is so little of it. A field of corn growing in full sunlight in the middle of the day uses up all the carbon dioxide within a meter of the ground in about five minutes.”

[1] https://www.edge.org/conversation/heretical-thoughts-about-s...

I like Banksy's work well enough, but the thing that has always bothered me about his persona is the collusion in the art and media world to maintain his supposed anonymity. I simply can't believe that there aren't large numbers of people who know exactly who he is, so why is he privileged by the media in this way?

A couple of interesting points to consider when thinking about putting a base on the Moon:

"Each Apollo mission increased the mass of the lunar atmosphere by about 30%, and it took several weeks for the atmosphere to return to its natural state. Highly sensitive measurement or communication instruments may be affected by the additional atmospheric particles." [1]

"Studies have also revealed that the balance is very delicate. At present, the solar wind sweeps the lunar atmosphere into space very efficiently, limiting its density to that of a collisionless gas (an exosphere). If the atmosphere were, however, a factor of just 1000 denser, this process would invert itself and the atmosphere would remain stable for tens of thousands of years. Just the Apollo missions to the Moon increased the atmospheric density by a factor of 10 with rocket exhaust (mostly CHON compounds). Large scale human activity on the Moon could push the total mass over the limit and create an artificial atmosphere, pushing the Exobase off the surface and creating a stable, if highly tenuous atmosphere which could threaten precisely the most important asset that the Moon can offer us: its sterility and almost atmosphereless nature." [2]

[1] http://www.tsgc.utexas.edu/tadp/1995/spects/environment.html

[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20050214155703/http://www.iac.es...