Posts tagged “death”

• Some resistance leaders have created a Google Doc to track what members of Congress are doing during this March recess.
• A flooded quarry, a mysterious millionaire and the dream of a new Atlantis: An innovative mission on the Welsh border, funded by an anonymous private investor, has begun work to create a ‘permanent human settlement’ under the sea.
• What do you think are the odds that you will die during the next year? Try to put a number to it — 1 in 100? 1 in 10,000? Whatever it is, it will be twice as large 8 years from now. Gompertz Law is fascinating fun with statistics, even if it gets a little more terrifying to read every time.
• If your website’s “LOGIN” menu link opens a new window or browser tab, please know that every single person who clicks it hates you.
• Make It Stop:
  • Engineers and executives at the so-called “Department of Government Efficiency” are drawing healthy taxpayer-funded salaries — sometimes from the very agencies they are cutting.
  • A Timeline of the Politicization and Weaponization of the Justice Department – via kottke
  • Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins told Fox that the solution to high egg prices is for people to raise chickens in their backyards. – via Today in Politics
  • The Los Angeles Times removed its new AI-powered “insights” feature from a column after the tool tried to defend the Ku Klux Klan.
  • With its ASMR videos of people being forced out of the country, the White House is turning suffering into entertainment. The administration is trying to showcase its program of “mass deportation” as reality-show style entertainment, through which voters will rationalize their cruelty.
  • Fired federal employees – some with top security clearances – were not given exit briefings. That means, allegedly, their laptops, security badges, usernames and password, etc. were not collected either. I cannot fathom this level of government incompetence.

• 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?

• “Productivity dysmorphia is the inability to see one’s own success, to acknowledge the volume of your own output.” – via Tom Whitwell
• How NASA has kept Apollo moon rocks safe from contamination for 50 years
• Everything you ever wanted to know about the history of tiki culture
• The Day the Music Burned is the story of the 2008 Universal fire.
• The current Banana Republic is nothing like it was when I was a kid. You can learn all about the company’s history at Abandoned Republic.
• The Launch is the story behind the 2019 debut of the Cosmic Crisp apple.
• The Ultimate Guide to Building a Hot Wheels Race Track
• For a little while now Apple has allowed you to tag someone as a legacy contact who can access and download the data in your account after your death. You can find the feature on the Sign-in & Security tab under your Apple Account at the top of the Settings app on your iOS device.

I probably have twenty P.J. O’Rourke books on my shelves. Truly one of the greats. I’ll miss him.