John Russell

The most accessible explanation of quantum physics I ever heard was from @robertjsawyer.com at his science fiction writing course at Ryerson. Of course, he's since explored that area further in Quantum Night. Interested to hear what his latest thinking is!

Name was coined moments after the first time anyone ever dropped their phone in a lake.

Happy 48th Anniversary to the greatest outtake in television history.

Tim Conway's Elephant Story from The Carol Burnett Show.

1% vulpine

At the tail end, 14-15, "costume" was just turning a baseball cap backwards or some such and pounding on the nearest door.

What if we could cure every disease known to man with a single shot. Just need to run one final test. At the lab on the other side of town.

Kind of looks like an Osgood to me

The PRIMM-er pronunciation is just a fairy tale. You can't convince me someone didn't make that up as a prank.

This was a great UI innovation that should have more equivalents in the computer world. Like when you scroll through long lists of songs, artists, albums in iTunes, and a little strip of their first letters appears in the right margin. I have done little shortcuts like that using the first 2 letters

Similar story for hed, dek, graf

Topsail

"Hey! Where's the flood?!" That was the height of some people's comedy stylings in grade school.

Easy way to remember the usage: Cowboys say whoa. Bill and Ted say woah.

Descartes was a famous philosopher. He totally eclipsed his lesser-known contemporaries, Goscartes and Kesmartes.

Winfield

Olerud

There are a bazillion Unicode codepoints where if an email contains one of them, it's 100% guaranteed a phishing attempt or spam trying to evade filters. You would think the anti-spam folks could do more with this knowledge. (E.g. render suspicious characters as boxes or question marks like BITD.)

I think I never had the 2nd side of a notched floppy go bad. Perfect example of pessimistic vs. optimistic mindset. (Since the legend was that floppies started off double-sided by default, and batches that didn't pass quality control were designated as single-sided.)

Diskettes in those Commodore sleeves tended to not last as long as other ones, from what I recall. I wonder if they were always some officially endorsed but slightly cheap brand of floppy.

My dad was adamant that "petard" had another meaning in Shakespeare's time and that this line was a double-entendre fart joke. I have not investigated the scholarship on this.

🟡 M4.8 #earthquake detected 3 km ESE of Berkeley, California at 9/22/2025 2:56:12 AM PDT

This reflects data from the U.S. Geological Survey that is subject to change. Visit the USGS page linked below for the latest #quake information

You don't want the overcoat to come in contact with the undercoat.

Let he who is without sin...

TIL: the sign actually said "4th Largest City". I always remembered it being "4th 1/2 Largest City"! I thought that was clever wordplay on the sign, and why it would be shown in the WBK opening, because it's part of NYC and not officially its own city.

It's possible this was the first thing I ever saw on TV. I have memories of TV shows I watched -- Batman, Bonanza, Spider Man -- from very early on. Like before I knew the concept of "days of the week". So I would sit in front of the TV every day and be disappointed 6 days out of 7.

Ctrl-S / Ctrl-Q used to be such an important part of networking lore. Back when the baud rate could fit in 4 digits. These days it's more useful to pause the output of find, du, etc. to copy and paste something without it scrolling off the screen.

I can level a continent. But Where. Are. My. PANTS! (I'm just teasing Galactus. I thought he would have been a better Big Bad than Thanos in the Avengers.)

Speaking as a tennis player who is 6'3 1/2": There's a point right above 6'2" where longer limbs offer advantage in terms of reach, serve speed, etc. But aesthetically the proportions aren't as pleasing in motion. To be a fast mover, a tall player has to be extra skinny, sacrificing gracefulness.

That's a Sharpur image

Dependency

This, but it's the tutorial for doing self-signed certificates on a Mac that one person put together. xkcd.com/2347/