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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 Ha…

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 an…

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 t…

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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 loo…

"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 Wik…

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 evidenc…

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 …

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 sittin…

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 …

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 pote…

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…

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 w…

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…

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 w…

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 move…

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 t…

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…

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 cre…