TIL

The word “corn” is really only used unambiguously in North America and Australia.

Elsewhere, it is ambiguous, as “corn” can refer to any cereal crop, not just maize!

Richard Nixon, in the aftermath of Roe v. Wade and as recorded by himself on the Nixon tapes in 1973, said “I admit, there are times when abortions are necessary, I know that.” and gave as his example a pregnancy from:

“a black and a white”

—Richard Nixon, 1973

It is not enough to remain silent when questioned in order to invoke one’s right to remain silent. As of Berghuis v. Thompkins and Salinas v. Texas the supreme court ruled that simply remaining silent is not enough for silence not to be used against someone in court. One …

The FAA recommends children (under 2) sit in their parents’ lap rather than in their own seat.

This recommendation was made based on a prediction unrelated to air travel safety itself. Instead, even though young children are indeed slightly safer when placed in a restraint (and in a separate seat …

Chad Varah, a British priest, was the creator of the world’s first crisis hotline (the Samaritans, in 1953).

He created the hotline after assisting at a funeral at his first church service:

[…] for a fourteen-year-old girl who had taken her own life because she had begun to menstruate and …

There’s now at least one official FBI PSA containing a recommendation to use an ad blocker:

Tips to Protect Yourself

[…]

Use an ad blocking extension when performing internet searches.

Madame Wong’s was a restaurant in LA’s Chinatown which beginning in the late 1970s became important for promoting the growth of punk music.

It was owned by Esther Wong, who ultimately became known as the “Godmother of Punk” for the restaurant’s role as a punk venue.

A …

In 2013, Taylor Swift was groped by a radio DJ, who was subsequently fired.

When the DJ sued for defamation and claimed he was wrongfully terminated, Swift countersued for battery and sexual assault, seeking $1 in compensation.

She won, and was awarded the $1.

Only cooking with wine that you’d drink is a myth, according to Serious Eats.

They recommend keeping cheap boxed dry wine on hand, as it has the longest shelf-life.

There is some evidence (Zagorsky, 2007) that in the U.S., intelligence (as measured by IQ) is not correlated with wealth, though is correlated with income and financial distress.

The paper also contains an interesting table (Table 1) containing correlation factors for a number of other features beyond IQ score …

Dahala Khagrabari was, until 2015, the world’s only counter-counter-enclave — a patch of India, surrounded by Bangladesh, surrounded again by India, and surrounded again by Bangladesh.

Wikipedia has more info on the history of this and other enclaves.

This video summarizes things.

Parmigiano ages from the outside in, so the best-tasting, most aged parts of the cheese are just near the rind.

The word “kaffir” is an extremely offensive racial slur in parts of the world.

The name “makrut lime” is an alternative name for the fruit.

This Slate article links to some further resources.

The US Bureau of Labor has a Standard Occupational Classification which seeks to classify all workers into one of 867 occupations.

The most recent one from 2018 is here.

The original inventor of the shopping cart hired decoys to walk around supermarkets when the cart was first invented, given that prior to doing so, it didn’t seem to catch on.

An episode of 99PI mentioned that the NBA Logo is a silhouette of Jerry West (and that this is a widely known open secret).

The episode mentions that Jerry West doesn’t like being the logo — and also that the NBA has not publicly admitted this to be the case …

The lower part of the Hudson River, in particular that surrounding Manhattan, is technically not a river but a tidal estuary, as the direction it flows can change with the tides.

Police (and/or the state) are likely not liable for damage to private property done in the course of executing a search warrant, according to this source.

Up until the late 19th or early 20th century, young boys in the western world generally wore gowns or dresses until an age that varied between 2 and 8.

When a young boy would first wear a pair of pants, a ceremony was often held. It was known as breeching …

The Dutch Reach is a coined name for a suggestion to always open car doors using one’s opposite hand (i.e. across one’s body).

It’s suggested as a way to ensure one checks for ongoing cyclists coming from behind the vehicle.

Embalming became more common in the United States during the Civil War, as a service provided by a new profession of “embalmers” who could assist in body retrieval given that fallen soldiers were far away from their relatives.

After the war, the embalmers continued offering their services as a persisted …

There are two countries with no official capital, though they have de facto capitals — Switzerland (de facto capital being Bern) and Nauru (de facto capital being Yaren).

A fomite is an inanimate object which, when exposed to pathogens, can transfer disease to another person or host.

Jono Dry’s How I Plan My Drawings has a nice suggestion for how to zero in on the boundaries of an idea (in the context of an artistic work, but it seems likely more widely applicable).

Namely — intentionally increase the failure rate of what you’re trying to accomplish …

Dolphins are a species of whale. Specifically, cetaceans (an infraorder of animals which is Latin for “whale”) are divided into toothed whales, such as dolphins and beluga whales, and baleen whales such as blue whales.

Arabica beans tend to be more flat and oval-shaped. They grow at higher altitudes in slightly colder climates, contain less caffeine, and contain more “complex” or varied flavors.

Robusta beans tend to be a bit more rounded, with straighter creases. They grow at lower climates, contain around double the caffeine …

Fraternal twins, which of course need not have any physical similarity, can also differ by “race”, or at least societally perceived race.

A few cases are noted in this Vox article.

(The article also points out that this is no different from any other physical characteristic which may differ in …

The F# language has built in support for annotating numeric values with units, and for such values it appears will do some dimensional analysis and statically complain if units are incorrect.

It’s unclear if there’s a large benefit in having this functionality in the core language rather than …

The Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) is a fundamental routing protocol of the internet which allows big networks (“autonomous systems”) to decide which paths to use to route traffic between each other [1].

Specifically, given some autonomous systems which connect to others, BGP allows systems within an autonomous system to reach …

There is a mailing list hosted here which tries to centralize reporting of outages across communications infrastructure (networks).

NANOG is a broader intentioned group, but one which typically will report or opine on outages as well.

Cooked eggs are more healthy than raw eggs, and not just because they have less risk of salmonella.

Cooking eggs also makes their protein content more digestible.

While perhaps seemingly being unrelated, the mode, median and mean are in fact three summary statistics that emerge from varying a single parameter.

The FDA rejected mandating that hens be vaccinated against salmonella. In the United Kingdom:

There are no laws mandating vaccination in Britain. But it is required, along with other safety measures, if farmers want to place an industry-sponsored red lion stamp on their eggs, which shows they have met basic …

The state of Oregon’s prisons have banned a large number of innocuous books which teach programming-related topics, under the guise that learning programming and related topics constitutes a security risk.

Other states are mentioned as doing the same in the above; (n.b. a quick moment of searching didn …

mpv and youtube-dl can talk directly to each other.

Specificaly:

$ mpv --ytdl-format=bestaudio ytdl://ytsearch:'think about things'

will immediately start mpv off playing the audio results of the youtube-dl search.

There are various ways to cut or partition a tree into lumber.

Each affects the physical and aesthetic quality of the resulting planks in different ways, as well as the material efficiency of the cuts.

In particular, boards containing the pith (i.e. center) of the tree are much more …

The legality of slavery of prisoners is literally codified in the thirteenth amendment abolishing slavery, which states:

Section 1. Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their …

Coffee containers, whether they’re airtight, evacuate air or even evacuate enough air to try and create a vacuum, don’t really affect the taste of the coffee meaningfully, especially under normal shelf-lives.

Use what you like, including the original bag.

Recycling aluminum requires around 5% of the energy required to produce it from raw bauxite ore. It is infinitely recyclable, and as such around 75% of the aluminum ever produced remains in use.

Glass is broken down into small particles known as cullet, which are mixed in proportion with new …

Returning a non-object as a JSON response (in particular returning an array) used to be a security vulnerability.

(As of 2020), the United States ranks 45th on the World Press Freedom Index (methodology here).

It ranks 52nd on the Freedom House Global Freedom Score list (methodology here).

The modern Chess rules had some unintended technicalities even until the 1970’s.

In particular, until the rules were amended, it was possible to read the castling rules as allowing a pawn promoted to a rook to then vertically castle with a king on its original square — i.e. e8 …

Don’t roll knobs immediately up to 10.

Doing so means that the only on-body adjustments that can be made are downward.

Instead, set volume down at least 1 stop, and then set appropriate amp settings (which will require more gain).

For tone, setting it half-way will give room in …

Stray animals are particularly well taken care of in Turkey.

Even during the COVID-19 crisis, the government put out an order that strays be looked after, given that fewer people were outside feeding them during the pandemic.

Whenever he scores a touchdown, DeAndre Hopkins tries to find his mother (who was blinded in an acid attack) in the crowd, to give her the football.

Prefixing (custom) HTTP Headers with X- is actually deprecated / no longer recommended by the IETF.

Toy Story 2 was nearly accidentally completely deleted due to an rm -rf /, except an employee was working from home and happened to have a backup of the film on their laptop.

Hitler was not elected in democratically. He only got 36.8% of the vote, and ultimately ascended to power by becoming chancellor.

As of OpenSSH 8.2, OpenSSH now supports U2F for authentication.

This is a totally separate authentication mechanism entirely from say, ED25519 host keys with a second factor; here, the U2F (e.g. Yubikey) is / has the key on it.

To use it though, both sides (server and client) have …

There aren’t really any liquid magnets.

The Curie temperature of a material is the temperature above which it loses its magnetic properties.

Even ferrofluids are not actually liquid magnets, they’re small solid magnets suspended in a liquid (oil).

The Gauss-Lucas Theorem is an interesting theorem relating the roots of a polynomial P to the roots of its derivative P’.

Specifically, it states that the roots of P’ all lie within the convex hull of the roots of P.

PEP 405 introduced a pyvenv.cfg file, useful for creating lightweight virtual environments without the hacks done by virtualenv historically. Doing so is much, much faster as well, since now creation of a virtual environment is essentially just creating 2 files (one file and a symlink).

It also though changed …

There is no evidence that scraping a bee sting is better than pulling it out.

The two are equivalent, and what matters is more how long the stinger is left inside; the quicker the removal, the better.

Every subway platform in NYC has a black and white striped board on it.

Conductors must point at the board at each station, to prove that they’re paying attention.

Watch this video and smile.

namei(1) (provided by util-linux on macOS) is a nifty utility for fully resolving symbolic links.

Given a chain of links, it will show e.g.:

⊙  namei =python                                     julian@Air ●
f: /Users/julian/.local/bin/python
d /
d Users
d julian
l .local -> /Users/julian/.dotfiles/.local
d /
d Users …

This video has an interesting showerthought about how to define who wins the olympics.

In short, rather than absolute number of medals (which favors large nations) or medals per capita (which favors small nations), a probabilistic-y combination of them is proposed (that’s obviously the technical term for it. Essentially …

This rolled up Twitter thread has a nice explanation of SIR (“suceptible”, “infected”, “recovered”) models of disease / processes.

Forecasting s-curves (sigmoid, logistic, etc.) is hard.

This article has an easy explanation of why, and a conclusion that often predicting the specific s-curve given data is hard even up until one is already at the “flattening” portion of the curve.

This 3b1b video points out a nice heuristic for how to find solutions to a general problem.

The “source” problem there is about randomly choosing points on a sphere and asking what the probability is that the induced tetrahedron contains the center of the sphere.

But the “algorithm” to find …

Using a spreadsheet is an oddly good low-tech way to write out the layers of a song (for e.g. covering it / reproducing it).

As an example, for Jai Paul’s All Night, writing out something like:

mkdir -p will create a directory with its parents. But cp takes a parents option as well.

cp --parents foo/bar/baz/quux.txt some/directory will create some/directory/foo/bar/baz/quux.txt without any of the other directory structure from the original location.

dstat can replace a bunch of other statistical performance counting things (I/O, CPU, Disk, Network, Syscalls, etc.).

Try cooking vegetables “a l’etuvee.”

It retains tons of flavor. Any non-green vegetable is a good candidate — turnips, carrots, parsnips, cauliflower, squash, etc.

Cut them into pieces, put them flat in a pot. Fill the pot with enough water to cover 1/4 of the vegetables. Add a hunk …

Use socat instead of netcat. It takes something more like endpoint syntax (and does many more kinds of ports and configurable connectivity that come with them).

Tons of examples here.

Interesting thread with some opinions on which ingredients it’s worth splurging on.

11 Foot 8 is the nickname of a bridge in North Carolina that everyone essentially crashes into.

There are a ton of videos on YouTube of various “can opening” crashes despite numerous warning signs.

git you magnificent beast…

pv is a useful utility to insert in shell pipelines for watching how much data passes through the pipe.

This page has a few simple examples, and there are more I’m sure with some googling around.

An analysis [1] calculates that the fraction of bitcoin “permanently” lost (due to e.g. wallets without keys, etc.) is around 25% of current circulation.

Poka-Yoke is a methodology in which a system is designed to methodologically discourage incorrect operation.

E.g. (from the above Wikipedia page):

a fixture that holds pieces for processing might be modified to only allow pieces to be held in the correct orientation, or a digital counter might track the …

This 3b1b video overviews the Borsuk-Ulam Theorem, and its applications for the Necklace Splitting problem.

It’s a super nice connection between topology and combinatorics.

Webster’s has a dictionary where words are sorted not alphabetically, but by when they’re known to have entered the English language — older words earlier on.