Posts tagged “history”

• I have several of these LEGO lighting kits and love them.
• Is it really true that no one buys books? According to the author, in 2020 only 268 titles sold more than 100,000 copies, and 96% of books sold less than a thousand copies. Big, if true.
• I’d never even considered combining an Arnold Palmer with a margarita.
• Was This Little-Known Standoff Between British Soldiers and Colonists the Real Start of the American Revolution? – via my dad
• One of the most surprising revelations in the Peacock comedy Mr. Throwback is that the Golden State Warriors point guard Steph Curry is a brilliant actor. (Oh, and he also dunked in a game for the first time in six years.)
• I really cannot decide if this article on testing push notifications on the iOS simulator was generated by AI or a human, but it’s got some helpful code that I was able to use.
• Just… why?
  • GOP blasted for gutting Medicaid to pay for $4.5 trillion tax cut
  • Army Deleting Online Content Related to Women, Minorities – via @tyleraking.com
  • In a strongly worded statement, Norwegian fuel company Haltbakk Bunkers has announced it will cease supplying fuel to U.S. military forces and criticized what happened when Ukraine president Zelensky visited the White House, referring to it as the “biggest shitshow ever presented live on TV.”
  • If “DOGE” is a federal agency, it can’t shield its records from the public. If it’s not an agency, then its tens of millions of dollars in funding weren’t legally allocated and should be returned. – via @propublica.org
  • The inside story of mass firings of Tesla Supercharger staff is pretty gross.
  • When You’re MAGA, They Let You Do It
  • Judge rules firing of federal workforce watchdog was illegal – via @browneyedsusan.bsky.social

• Jumblie is yet another fun little word game you can add to your morning routine of Wordle, Connections, &c.
• The appeal to nature fallacy is not a viable healthcare strategy. Sometimes “all natural” is far better, but other times nature tries to kill us. – via @kmpanthagani.bsky.social
• Matthew Green wrote a post about how AI will interface with end-to-end encryption. TL;DR: Maybe not so well! – via @matthewdgreen.bsky.social
• Related: Another day, another horrific and troubling example of AI going wrong – via @emily.space
• Related: Scientists covered a robot finger in living human skin.
• Those who do not study history are doomed to repeat it. Unfortunately those who do study history are also involuntarily dragged along for the ride.
• In college a friend suggested I read The Myth Adventure series by Robert Asprin. At the time it had been almost a decade since I’d read The Hobbit and the rest of Tolkien, and I thoroughly enjoyed returning to stories of dragons and wizards and swords. It looks like they’re no longer being published, but if you’re into that sort of tale, I’m sure you can find them used somewhere.

• Axios has put together a handy list of which companies are rolling back DEI policies and which are standing firm.
• Related: One of my favorite podcasts is The Rest is History. A recent episode highlights an incontrovertible fact plainly obvious to anyone who’s ever had to deal with a toddler. It doesn’t matter whether you’re dealing with a schoolyard bully, a demanding client, a political rival, or Hitler himself. Appeasement never works.
• If you have an Apple computer, you can click the command key and the plus key to increase the font size in (almost) every app. And command with the minus key makes the font smaller, natch. It might seem like a silly tip, but I can’t tell you how many times someone has been delighted when I show them this.
• Put your Taylor Swift musical knowledge to the test. – via @lilmisssunshine
• “Nobody controls me. I’m uncontrollable. The only one who controls me is me, and that’s just barely possible.” – John Lennon
• If you got a new laptop for Christmas, you should grab (at least) one of these 5-in-1 USB-C / HDMI hubs. I keep one in my computer bag and the other is (essentially) what I use as a docking station at home.
• “Artificial Intelligence will finally have arrived when my laptop can tell me specifically which process is actually still accessing the flash drive I’m trying to eject after closing every open app on the machine.” – via @kiplet

• This LA Times interactive map of the Southern California wildfires has been very handy. – via @dansinker.com
• “Just a reminder that the French revolution started with a climate crisis-induced famine, an empire that had overexpanded into too many foreign wars, and parasitic nobility that funneled all the wealth upward while regular citizens suffered.” – via @chris.writes.books
• If you want to “follow” me somewhere (other than here, of course), you should use my verified account on bluesky. I adored Twitter when it launched, and for many years after. But I haven’t looked at that social network in months and deleted my account a while ago. I’ve been enjoying Threads, but it looks like it’s time to abandon that platform, too. I’m very, very glad I have my own personal website. (I hardly ever look at Instagram, and doubt I’ll keep my account there for much longer. If I didn’t feel obligated to remain on LinkedIn, I’d quit that site, too.)
• In China, there are registries of haunted apartments. If you’re willing to live somewhere with a sinister history, you can get a discount of 30%. – via @tomwhitwell
• I am starting to get concerned about the bird flu, H5N1. Paying attention to updates from Your Local Epidemiologist is a good way to be prepared.
• A wilderness survival trainer spent years undercover, climbing the ranks of right-wing militias. He didn’t tell police or the FBI. He didn’t tell his family or friends. Then, in 2023, a ProPublica reporter received an envelope with no return address. Inside was a flash drive containing tens of thousands of secret files. – via @propublica
• “In species where males invest in weaponry (antlers, horns, tusks, etc.), female brains are bigger.” – via Kent Hendricks

• I watched Conclave over the holiday break and thought it was pretty good. The acting was great, of course, but I’d expect nothing less from a film featuring John Lithgow, Stanley Tucci, and Ralph Fiennes. If you dig Roman Catholic esoterica, I’d also suggest reading this deep dive into the Vatican’s secret saint-making process.
• Ozempic is a modified, synthetic version of a protein discovered in the venomous saliva of the Gila monster, a large, sluggish lizard native to the United States. – via Tom Whitwell’s 52 Things I Learned in 2024, not to be confused with Kent Hendricks’ equally-awesome list of 52 Things I Learned in 2024
• Some of the 77 Facts That Blew Our Minds in 2024 (from The Atlantic Science Desk) are really pretty wild! – via kottke
• The Ghosts in the Machine is a great explainer on the current kerfuffle over Spotify’s nefarious fake music.
• Please don’t say just, “hello,” via text. – via The Curious About Everything Newsletter, where I also found this awesome food map of Italy
• I enjoyed reading this quick essay on how to write readable sentences.
• What happens when websites start to vanish at random?
• An average of about 900 people per week have died of COVID-19 over the past year in the USA, according to the CDC. – via PBS

• Just a few days ago I said Shrinking was the best show on TV right now. Obviously I didn’t think I needed to include an “except for Bluey“ disclaimer, because certainly everyone agrees Bluey might well be the best show in the history of television. And they’re working on a Bluey movie?!
• “A well-placed swear word triggers emotional and physiological arousal, like an adrenaline boost, where your heart beats faster, and your sympathetic nervous system is given a charge, which enhances focus and energy just enough to help you perform better.” – via Arnold Schwarzenegger‘s Pump Club (threads / bluesky)
• “As we continue to face adversity in our daily lives, I’m reminded of the power of the deep breath and the walk in the woods, the vagus nerve and the parasympathetic nervous system.” – via The Curious About Everything Newsletter from Jodi Ettenberg (threads / bluesky)
• I’m very frustrated that we haven’t made time to watch the new Disney+ Star Wars series Skeleton Crew yet. Winter break starts this weekend so I imagine big bowls of popcorn and a few hours—in between football games—glued to the TV. (I’m worried that shareholders will look at the streaming numbers and decide it’s not worth the cost to keep producing Star Wars content.)
• Sotheby’s just auctioned off a 115-pound, two-foot-tall slab of marble that, around a millennia and a half ago, was inscribed with the Ten Commandments. – via crooked
• You are cutting it close if you haven’t gotten all your Christmas and/or Hanukkah shopping done yet. Might I suggest a plain white bolt t from Aviator Nation? They are crazy comfortable, cozy, stylish, and on sale right now. (Or you could buy someone an Apple App Store gift card and tell them to use it to download my handy cocktail recipe app!)
• Health department medical detectives find 84% of U.S. maternal deaths are preventable.
• The latest issue of Simple Apple Tutorials from Gannon Nordberg is a killer iPhone Notification Detox Guide.
• Bad news for people who hate good news:
  • 93% of kindergarteners in the U.S. are up to date on their childhood vaccines. – via Your Local Epidemiologist
  • HPV vaccines have been linked to a 62% drop in cervical cancer deaths in young women over the last decade. – via kottke

In episode 28 of the Hardcore History Addendum podcast, Dan Carlin discusses how one of the important lessons to be learned from the study of human history is to avoid political extremism like the plague. It seems, though, that — as a species — we are doomed to never learn this lesson, especially since we have extremely recent evidence which shows humans do not even have the capacity to avoid an actual plague like the plague.

One of the (very, very many) things that suck about losing your mom before forty is that I remember almost nothing about my own daily life prior to high school. And because my parents were divorced and I only got to see dad for a few weeks in the summer every year, there’s nobody I can ask. I have two sons and am constantly writing (and printing) notes and reminders for them, like, “You loved to eat oatmeal with blueberries and pineapple every morning for breakfast in my forty-two year-old Empire Strikes Back cereal bowl until you were six and decided that you hate oatmeal.” Or, “If you want to make pancakes the right way you have to use the frying pan with the blue enamel.” I would probably collapse in a puddle if I ever found even a single note like this from mom. She was a writer and left hundreds of notebooks and thousands of loose pages of things. She wrote me cards and letters nearly daily from the day I left for college until shortly before she died, but sadly I’ve never found anything along those lines.