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26 Dec 17:49

52 Interesting Things I Learned in 2023

by Jason Kottke

Inspired by Tom Whitwell’s annual list, I kept track of some things I learned this year, one for each week. Here we go:

  1. Ciabatta was invented in 1982.
  2. “If our planet was 50% larger in diameter, we would not be able to venture into space, at least using rockets for transport.”
  3. Purple Heart medals that were made for the planned (and then cancelled) invasion of Japan in 1945 are still being given out to wounded US military personnel.
  4. More than 100,000 public school students in NYC were homeless during the 2021-22 school year.
  5. The San Francisco subway system still runs on 5 1/4-inch floppies.
  6. NYPL librarians have discovered that “up to 75 percent of books published before 1964 may now be in the public domain”.
  7. Gangkhar Puensum, a mountain in Bhutan with an elevation of 24,836 feet (7,570 m), is the tallest unclimbed mountain in the world. (Mountaineering has been banned in Bhutan since 2003.)
  8. The founder of Lululemon picked that name for the company because he thought it would be funny to hear Japanese speakers try to say it. What an asshole.
  9. Eigengrau is the name of the dark grey color people see in the absence of light.
  10. Bees can make green honey.
  11. Baby scorpions are called scorplings.
  12. Alaskan finishers of the Iditarod can get a custom license plate.
  13. Any Rubik’s Cube can be solved in 20 moves.
  14. Hurricanes don’t cross the equator.
  15. Lake Maracaibo in northwestern Venezuela sees almost 300 thunderstorms a year.
  16. Premier League referees are forbidden to work games played by their favorite teams (or their close rivals).
  17. The climate crisis has cost $16 million per hour in extreme weather damage over the past 20 years.
  18. The word for computer in Iceland translates to “prophetess of numbers”.
  19. All but two of the moons of Uranus are named after Shakespeare characters — the remaining two are from a poem by Alexander Pope.
  20. Bottled water has an expiration date — it’s the bottle not the water that expires.
  21. There are satellites that were launched in the early to mid 60s that are still operational.
  22. Multicellular life developed on Earth more than 25 separate times.
  23. US citizens or permanent residents with permanent disabilities can get a free lifetime pass to US National Parks (and other federal lands).
  24. If you try to pack information on a hard drive more densely than 10^69 bits/m^2, the hard drive will collapse into a black hole.
  25. Queen Victoria had a dog named “Looty” that was stolen from China by a British soldier while looting a palace in Peking in 1860.
  26. Colorado is not a rectangle — it actually has 697 sides.
  27. Horseshoe crabs are older than Saturn’s rings.
  28. Inmate is the ninth most common household type in America.
  29. Humans have pumped so much groundwater out of the ground that it’s changed the tilt of the Earth’s axis 31.5 inches to the east.
  30. “By 1920, the network of interurbans in the US was so dense that a determined commuter could hop interlinked streetcars from Waterville, Maine, to Sheboygan, Wisconsin — a journey of 1,000 miles — exclusively by electric trolley.”
  31. The Great British Kettle Surge is the simultaneous putting-on of the kettle in British households during commercial breaks of particularly popular TV programs, resulting in electricity surges.
  32. The Parker Solar Probe is the fastest object ever built by humans — at its closest approach to the Sun, it will reach speeds of 430,000 mph (690,000 km/h), or 0.064% the speed of light.
  33. The top speed of zeppelins was about 80 mph (129 km/h).
  34. Ernest Hemingway only used 59 exclamation points across his entire collection of works.
  35. TIL there’s a whole genus of South American spiders whose species are named after people and things in the 1987 movie Predator, e.g. “Predatoroonops schwarzeneggeri”.
  36. Robert Butler, who died this year aged 95, directed the initial episodes for Batman, Star Trek, Moonlighting, Hill Street Blues, Hogan’s Heroes, and Remington Steele.
  37. I cannot believe this is the first I’ve heard of this: in the original Super Mario Bros., you can continue where you left off in the last game by holding A down when you press Start. This would have saved me so much time as a kid.
  38. Thomas Smallwood, an African American shoemaker, coined the term “Underground Railroad” in 1842.
  39. Swedish criminal gangs are using fake Spotify streams to launder money.
  40. Human ancestors almost went extinct 900,000 years ago. “A new technique analysing modern genetic data suggests that pre-humans survived in a group of only 1,280 individuals.”
  41. “People who enroll in genetic studies are genetically predisposed to do so.”
  42. MLB broadcaster Vin Scully’s career lasted 67 seasons, during which he called a game managed by Connie Mack (born in 1862) and one Julio Urías (born in 1996) played in.
  43. When the Regimbartia attenuata beetle gets eaten by a frog, rather than accepting its fate to be digested, it crawls through the frog’s bowels and emerges through its butt. “The quickest run from mouth to anus was just six minutes.”
  44. The rarest single-game event in baseball is not the perfect game but hitting two grand slams in one inning, which has only been done once in more than 235,000 games.
  45. Crab-like bodies have evolved at least five separate times in the past 250 million years.
  46. Almost 800,000 Maryland licence plates include a URL that now points to an online casino in the Philippines because someone let the domain registration lapse.
  47. From 1999 to 2020, there were 1.63 million excess deaths among Black Americans (when compared to the death rates of white Americans).
  48. Almost 75% of all films from the golden age of silent films (1912-1929) have been lost.
  49. For years beginning in 2018, every copy of macOS has included a PDF copy of Satoshi Nakamoto’s Bitcoin whitepaper.
  50. This San Francisco barbershop has a “silent mode” for patrons who don’t want to chat with barbers.
  51. According to America’s Test Kitchen, you can use your SodaStream to double the life of your salad greens.
  52. Deadline’s chief film critic had never played or even heard of Tetris before seeing the film about the game’s genesis.
    1. Here are my lists from 2022 and 2021.

      Tags: lists

      💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org

14 Oct 16:33

Why is the US Attorney General meeting with the guy who owns Fox News?

by Gryphen

I mean WTF?

Courtesy of NYT:

Attorney General William P. Barr met privately Wednesday evening with Rupert Murdoch, the media mogul who is one of President Trump’s frequent confidants but whose Fox News is viewed by the president as more hostile toward him than it used to be.

The meeting was held at Mr. Murdoch’s home in New York, according to someone familiar with it. It was unclear if anyone else attended or what was discussed. Aides to both Mr. Murdoch and Mr. Barr declined requests for comment on the meeting.

…….

Recently, Fox News personalities have questioned the validity of efforts by House Democrats to impeach the president. They have also helped draw attention to the debunked theory that Ukraine interfered in the 2016 election to aid Democrats, a theory favored by Mr. Trump but which contradicts the findings of American intelligence communities and the Mueller report that Russia intervened in the election to help Republicans. And anchors such as Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham have remained vocally supportive of the president.

Nonetheless, Mr. Trump believes that the network has become more critical of him, and he has grown increasingly critical of Fox News, denouncing some anchors and reporters he does not consider to be friendly to him, such as Shepard Smith and even Ed Henry, with whom he held a recent interview. And while Mr. Trump talks frequently with Tucker Carlson, another Fox News host, Mr. Carlson has been critical of Mr. Trump’s July call with the president of Ukraine, which prompted the impeachment inquiry. Mr. Carlson said in a column for The Daily Caller website that there was “no way” to spin what took place on that call as a positive for Mr. Trump.

Okay to answer my own question the reason that Barr is meeting with Rupert Murdoch is becasue Trump told him to. 

But why in the hell would Barr agree to go, and why would Murdoch accept the meeting?

They have to know that this will get the attention of the congressional Democrats who are absolutely going to want to subpoena Murdoch now. 

And since we know that Trump calls Murdoch and Fox News hosts on a daily basis what in the hell was Barr going to say that Trump himself could not say in a phone call?

Oh wait, that’s it.

Whatever Barr talked with Murdoch about is something that they do not want said in a phone call that might be intercepted by Congress.

But what might that be?

Uh oh, I think I might know.

Courtesy of WaPo:

Shepard Smith, one of Fox News’ leading anchors and a frequent critic of President Trump, will step down from the network, effective immediately, the network announced Friday.

Smith, Fox’s chief news anchor and anchor of its afternoon news program, “Shepard Smith Reporting,” said the decision to leave was his own, but gave no further reason for his departure. He announced his resignation on the air on his Friday program, which Fox said would be his last.

Smith has been at Fox News since its founding 23 years ago, and was one of the first people hired for its launch in 1996.

In a statement, Smith said, “Recently I asked the company to allow me to leave Fox News and begin a new chapter. After requesting that I stay, they graciously obliged. The opportunities afforded this guy from small town Mississippi have been many. It’s been an honor and a privilege to report the news each day to our loyal audience in context and with perspective, without fear or favor.”

Yeah, I don’t buy that at all, do you?

And the fact that this happened right after the Barr visit, just seems a little too coincidental. 

However if a member of Trump’s Administration really did pressure a cable news outlet to fire one of their journalists for being too hard on them, that opens a whole new can of impeachable worms. 

So yeah, Murdoch is mostly definitely getting a subpoena. 

The post Why is the US Attorney General meeting with the guy who owns Fox News? appeared first on The Immoral Minority.

02 Oct 15:54

Paul Manafort has started cooperating with the Mueller investigation.

by Gryphen

Well, we knew he was going to do it, and now he is. 

Courtesy of Politico

Paul Manafort met Monday with special counsel Robert Mueller’s office as part of his cooperation agreement in the special counsel’s investigation into Russia interference in the 2016 presidential election.

The sit-down at the special counsel’s downtown Washington D.C. office stems from Manafort’s guilty plea last month, which requires the former Trump campaign chairman to cooperate “fully, truthfully, completely, and forthrightly…in any and all matters as to which the government deems the cooperation relevant.”

Spokesmen for Manafort and Mueller declined comment on the meeting.

There have got to be a lot of things harshing Trump’s mellow right now, but having his one-time campaign manager spilling his guts to his most hated enemy must be pretty high on that list. 

Manafort has so many songs to sing, it is hard to imagine which selection the investigators will want to hear first. 

Could it be one about why the Trump campaign forced the RNC to change their position on Ukraine?

Or perhaps it is the one about what happened during the Trump Tower meeting and whether or not Trump knew about it.

Or maybe, just maybe Manafort could talk about the information that was shared when his lawyers and Trump’s lawyers had a joint-defense agreement, and whether there was any talk of a pardon. 

Like I said so many entertaining songs may issue forth from this particular canary. 

The post Paul Manafort has started cooperating with the Mueller investigation. appeared first on The Immoral Minority.

08 Mar 04:24

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