Category: Fun

Some links: 106

Some posts about gratitude and the big picture:

  • Day One, by Tim Sommers.
  • Gratitude Monday: well, okay, by Bas Bleu.
  • Not just heat death: Here are five ways the Universe could end, by Paul Sutter.

    [A] phase transition would start in some random spot in the cosmos and race outward at the speed of light, containing within it a brand new kind of universe almost certainly incompatible with the kind of life, chemistry, and even atomic physics that our Universe has managed to concoct.

    Because this phase transition bubble expands at the speed of light, there would be no warning of its arrival. One day, we would simply be going about our business and then blink: The new Universe takes its place. Whatever particles had composed our bodies and whatever forces held them together would vanish, to be replaced with a new quantum configuration.

    Sleep tight.

  • Process, process, process: Dwelling in the Doing: A New Year’s Resolve, by Gary Borjesson.

    So, here’s to dwelling in the doing, learning how to love the very things we spend most of our time doing. Happiness itself is like this. It’s not the surge of joy we feel when we find what we’ve been searching for, cross the finish line, or finish building the boat. It is, rather, a way of living in active engagement with the good, meaningful things that make up our life. Your friends, for example.

And one simple way to make a time machine: Dinosaur Comics #4283, by Ryan North.

Some links: 100

  • Walter Shawlee, slipstick reseller, has passed.

    Over time, his customers included a weather station in Antarctica, where many electronic gadgets could not take the cold; photo editors responsible for adjusting image sizes (they like slide rules for their clear displays of different values for the same ratio); an archaeologist who found that calculators got too dusty to work properly during digs; the drug company Pfizer, which gave away slide rules as gifts during a trade show; slide rule enthusiasts in Afghanistan and French Polynesia; and “guys from NASA,” Mr. Shawlee told Engineering Times in 2000.

  • Sorry, overwintering turtles don’t breathe through their butts.

    The notion that cloacal gas exchange helps North American turtles survive long winters trapped under the ice is pervasive in pop science, but to date, there is no solid evidence that hidden-necked turtles use cloacal gas exchange. The skin and mouth lining are where gas exchange happens during winter hibernation.

  • The Old English for spider is gange-wæfre (“walker-weaver”).
  • From Zack Stanton for McSweeney’s, “Morrissey or Trump?”

    This could only happen to me / Who has been through anything like this?

  • Guest column for Washington Business Journal by Alan Berube and Tracy Hadden Loh: “Caps and Wizards moving to Virginia isn’t ‘regionalism.’ It’s gaslighting.”

Some links: 97

  • Ooh, shiny, shiny.
  • Hilary Howard visits the Jewel Streets neighborhood of Brooklyn/Queens, at 4 feet above MSE. It’s not often that you see Phragmites australis growing on a street corner.
  • Yes, outdoor cats are a problem. Probably worse than you think.

    Just the amount of different insects and invertebrates that they are eating in their diet. We know that they eat insects. That wasn’t necessarily new, but we didn’t really have an idea that they were eating so many things. And I think our concern there is that most scientists that have done these studies in the past were not really looking for insects and they’re not taxonomists trained to understand insects.

  • Mary Pipher makes brightness in the dark. “We cannot stop all the destruction, but we can light candles for one another.”

That explains Blofeld’s cat

“No time to die: An in-depth analysis of James Bond’s exposure to infectious agents,” by Wouter Graumans et al.

We hypothesize that his foolhardy courage, sometimes purposefully eliciting life-threatening situations, might even be a consequence of Toxoplasmosis.

Particularly worrying:

While Bond was traveling to Japan (1967) shortly after the H2N2 pandemic (1957–1958), his actions were at odds with knowledge on the different modes of respiratory virus transmission. Bond regularly joined crowds without social distancing including on public transport.

h/t: Jennifer Ouellette at Ars Technica

“Lakeland, Florida but they will deliver it to your door step”

Ed Solomon keeps a text-message spammer-scammer going for an hour and a half.

10:41 A.M. “Richard Weeks”
i got $150,000 delivered to me when i applied for the grant and you dont have to pay it back.. you can also apply

10:41 A.M. Ed Solomon
shut up. no way—are you serious??

10:42 A.M. “Richard Weeks”
I’m very serious and am not pulling your legs. I’m so happy cuz when i received the Money from Ups, I quickly paid off my bills and saved the rest to the bank. Though, currently thinking on Investments

And so…

11:24 A.M. Ed Solomon
thanks. okay. and tell me honestly. and i promise i won’t tell her. Is SHE the one who gave you the rash? (cause i was wondering why you and i both have the same thing)

11:26 A.M. “Richard Weeks”
yes shes the one

Ah, the power of saying, “yes, and.”