Posts tagged “italy”

• 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

“They’re espadrilles but they’re flat,” my wife said to me in Rome with the same mistaken confidence it would be understood as if I’d remarked to her that Chamberlain should never have been fooled by the Stresa Conference and appeasement was always destined to fail.

• The story of the creation of the “Wanted” posters for Jonah Hex is pretty fascinating.
• About five years ago, on September 1, 2005, I sat at a coffee shop across the street from the Leaning Tower of Pisa and could not believe just how much it leans. And that was five years after they fixed it.
• Everybody loves lists, so Listiki — a site for finding, making, and sharing them — should be popular.
• Adjusting to today’s dollars, the United States has incurred more debt in the last decade then during the entire combined previous 211 years of the republic’s existence.
• How to Create a CD Ladder, from FrugalDad
• “In an era when very little remains shocking, Pierce might have actually managed to create a genuinely disturbing work of fiction, the literary equivalent of Schindler’s List rewritten by the Marquis De Sade and filmed as a Tim Burton animated feature.” (hat tip to rb)
• Just about 100 years ago — on July 24, 1910 — the New York Times featured an article titled “Will Future Generations Lose Historical Documents of To-Day?”.
• “When you are parting with your money, know the person on the other side of the deal thinks you are not so smart and is depending on the anchoring effect when they tell you how much you are about to save.”

• Potholes are a serious and dangerous road hazard in Los Angeles. Designers in Italy are promoting the idea of a brightly-colored second layer of asphalt which would turn roads into a sort of skin, so you can easily tell when there’s a pothole to avoid.
• It’s so very hard these days — but so very important — to remember that the email address on the other side of the screen is a real person, a lot like you.
• There is much to be learned from analyzing photos of Michael Bublé being stalked by a velociraptor. But you might have more fun looking at a few dozen movie posters recreated to feature Garry Shandling.
• There are only a few single English word domain names still available to register.
• Grab the Airplane and Go: True Tales from the Airplane Repossession Business
• The Los Angeles Department of City Planning audited itself and learned that it does a very poor job of planning.