TIL

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 …

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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

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.

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 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.

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 …

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 …

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 …

(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 …

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.

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.