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Railroad yard engines and history
The port of Baltimore has just begun using an electric rail car mover. Again. Here’s a photo of the new one: And here’s a photo of one of the ones they used back in 1912: Continue reading
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Bald eagles are not bald
Words often change meanings over time. This happens in different ways. The word “deer” for example, today means a specific type of animal. But back in Old English, when the same word was “doer,” it meant any kind of animal. “Enthusiasm” changed in the opposite way; it comes from Greek and originally meant something very… Continue reading
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Bookmarking vs Collecting
Continuations is a newsletter/blog by Albert Wenger that has a fascinating button at the top right: Collect. What it evidently does is “Mint this entry as an NFT to add it to your collection.” An NFT is a “non-fungible token,” which means that it’s a digital object that’s uniquely identified and recorded in a permanent… Continue reading
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A darkness has descended
A moving and important essay from Max McCoy, in the Kansas Reflector. In 1967, Dr. Martin Luthor King said “Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.“ The Internet Archive unveiled a bust of Aaron Swartz. Swartz died 12 years ago by suicide;… Continue reading
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Time for dinner
The analysis of last week’s barmecidal meals is just a subcategory in a science that is — or at least should be — producing any number of treatises and research programs this time of year: aristology. In spite of the way it sounds, aristology doesn’t have anything to do with Aristotle. It’s the science (or… Continue reading
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Silly Word Games
A word has “vertical symmetry” when you can draw a vertical line in the middle and it’s the same on both sides — this is not quite the same as a palindrome, because it’s not just the same letters; it has to be visual symmetry. For that reason it matters whether the word is all… Continue reading
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A great summation
David Roth wrote an incandescent piece at Defector: Billionaire Dipshit And His Strike Team Of Greasy Beavises Are Stripping The Wires From The Federal Government. “…Musk just isn’t a very smart or principled guy, and has been insulated from any accountability by his wealth for long enough that he has liquefied into a slurry of… Continue reading
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Nice idea for spreadsheet design
I don’t mean the design of a spreadsheet; I mean the design of the spreadsheet application. As far as I know, nobody has proposed anything new for spreadsheet apps in ages. But here’s an idea: Ambsheets. A cell can contain multiple “ambiguous” values, making it easier to explore alternatives. Via Simon Willison. Continue reading
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My human family has no clueAbout this fact I have for you:When they can’t sniff, although they try,It’s ’cause their nose is up too high! If they watch me, they might learnTo recognize, detect, discernTheir local world (the stuff I know).The key is simple: nose down low! -Chocolate Continue reading
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The mistaken mistake
If you’ve read Jane Austen’s Emma, you may have noticed an odd little detail. Just a single word, in fact. You have to have read the right edition to have seen this, because some modern editions have changed the word in the mistaken belief that Austen herself made a mistake. But she didn’t. The word… Continue reading
About Me
I’m Pete Harbeson, a writer located near Boston, Massachusetts. In addition to writing my own content, I’ve learned to translate for my loquacious and opinionated pup Chocolate. I shouldn’t be surprised, but she mostly speaks in doggerel. You can find her contributions tagged with Chocolatiana.
Recent Posts
- Drink plenty of liquids
- “Hawkweed?”
- Walked to school in the snow uphill both ways
- Circumstance and pomp
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[citation needed]
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