Posts tagged “language”

• Symbol Salad is a great resource for those in need of special keyboard characters, like ¢ and ½.
• Organ Donation & Pascal’s Wager – via mergesort.me
• The current administration does not want to FAFO with an organized gang of wine moms. – via @froggyb
• Speaking of FAFO: I can’t believe this academic admitted to losing all his AI-generated research.
• The Ottawa Senators are selling jerseys with the names of the HBO Heated Rivalry characters for $325/ea (and donating the proceeds to a local queer hockey group) and they can’t keep them in stock because they sell out so quickly. – via The Athletic
• Rhode Island might ditch Mr. Potato Head license plates after Hasbro moves to Boston
• Well, fuck. Swearing Actually Seems to Make Humans Physically Stronger and There Really Is Something Soothing About Saying The ‘F’ Word
• This is absolutely wild: Back-scratching bovine leads scientists to reassess intelligence of cows (I mostly quit eating beef about 15 years ago and haven’t missed it at all. But now I’m going to feel even more guilty about the milk in my coffee.)
• It’s “Mental Illness Doesn’t Do That” Season Once Again
• This will be the first time the Patriots have been to the Super Bowl since Bill Belichick‘s girlfriend graduated high school. – via @bgoad85
• And now for the bad news:
  • Since beginning operations seven years ago, Brightline, which runs high-speed trains between Miami and Orlando and is the only private rail service in the country, has killed nearly 200 people. – via longreads.com
  • The South Carolina measles outbreak has surpassed the recorded case count in the 2025 Texas outbreak.
  • Immigration agents operating near Vail, CO placed branded ace of spades playing cards — similar to “death cards” left on corpses by U.S. forces during the Vietnam War — in cars left behind after immigrants’ arrests.
  • “FYI, a masked, anonymous, armed paramilitary force denying due process and breaking into people’s homes to arrest and detain people in camps is exactly what fascism looks like.” – via @darrigomelanie
  • Death of Cuban Detainee in El Paso ICE Facility Is Ruled a Homicide
  • America’s Would-Be Surgeon General, Casey Means, thinks improving health is a spiritual project?!

• Steve Carell helped make sure high school students affected by LA wildfires wouldn’t have to worry about paying for prom tickets.
• For reasons I cannot explain, I have still not managed to watch A Knight’s Tale, even though I know it was one of my mom’s favorite movies.
• It doesn’t look like they’ve released their 2025 operating dates yet, but the Breathtaker Alpine Coaster is a must for anyone visiting Aspen in the summer.
• Take a moment to complete The Heritage Foundation DOGE Survey and give them a piece of your mind. (If you decide to use your real email address, you’ll have to unsubscribe from their garbage newsletter.)
• Friendly reminder: There’s seriously no sane reason to drill for oil in Alaska and anyone saying otherwise doesn’t understand math.
• I had no idea that watermarks were invented in Italy in the 13th century.
• Practically all of Spain’s population growth since the COVID-19 pandemic is due to immigration.
• Can confirm: “the democratic party leadership sorely underestimates how much young people fucking despise them” – via @junlper.beer
• Make It Stop:
  • POTUS signs order designating English as the official language of the US
  • This whole story is nuts: With its top lawyer placed on leave after less than one week in the role, a culture of fear has paralyzed FEMA. – via The Handbasket
  • After the POTUS joint address to Congress earlier this week, Hayden Haynes, the chief of staff to House Speaker Mike Johnson and one of the most powerful aides on Capitol Hill, was arrested for driving drunk.
  • Why Techdirt Is Now A Democracy Blog (Whether We Like It Or Not) “[W]hat’s happening in the US right now is some sort of weird hybrid of the kind of power grabs we’ve seen in the tech industry, combined with a more traditional collapse of democratic institutions.”
  • The Iowa GOP advanced a bill making it a misdemeanor for a healthcare provider to administer a COVID vaccine. – via @piperformissouri.bsky.social

• Almost 96% of new cars registered in Norway in January were electric. – via kottke
• The Wild True Story Behind Kendrick Lamar‘s Super Bowl Halftime Show
• The Supreme Court of Hawaii ruled that insurance companies can’t bring their own legal actions against those blamed for the catastrophic 2023 Maui wildfire, allowing a $4 billion settlement to proceed.
• Trump’s Driving Legal Principle This Time: “What Are You Gonna Do About It?”
• The National Center for Missing & Exploited Children was told by the Department of Justice that they’d lose their funding if the organization didn’t remove any mentions of LGBTQIA+ issues from their public materials.
• Aggeggio is a lovely Italian word for everyday objects.
• The ‘Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly’ of the United States Government
• I need to investigate Tapestry, from iconfactory. It looks like a cool iOS app for aggregating content, and I’ve loved pretty much every other app they’ve ever made. – via hiro.report

• The key difference between a calque and a loanword is that a loanword isn’t translated into English whereas a calque is. – surprisingly not via kottke, although he posted it, too!
• Javier Grillo-Marxuach and Jose Molina are television writer/producers with over forty years of combined experience — on shows including Lost, Firefly, Sleepy Hollow, and Helix — and they have a great podcast.
• Should We Be Punching Nazis? You already know where I stand on this.
• My sons and I love Cautionary Tales, the Tim Harford podcast about mistakes and what we should learn from them. (He’s also written a children’s book, The Truth Detective: How to Make Sense of a World That Doesn’t Add Up.)
• Horror stories of cryonics: The gruesome fates of futurists hoping for immortality
• Is your heart a hardworking pump or a mystic miracle?
• What are Progressive Web Apps?

Pro Tip: There are exactly two things you can try AND do. You can try AND fail or you can try AND succeed. Otherwise you try TO do something.

I can’t stand when people say, “I could care less.”

“I could care less,” is one of those little things that drives me absolutely batshit crazy. If you could care less, it means you care. That’s not what you mean when you say that, is it? What you mean is that you don’t care. Someone posted this handy little graphic in a discussion forum and it really helps. (Click it to see!) Do you get it now?