adonovan

The part about coal coming from dead trees during a window of time before bacteria evolved lignin digestion is no longer the scientific consensus. Such bacteria existed earlier; not all coal is high lignin; and coal still formed later. Too bad; it was a lovely story!

The usual answer for the macro trend is “the end of ZIRP”.

Before the Piper switchover, Google’s Perforce instance was running on one of the most expensive PCs ever built, with over $1m of DRAM. Its centralized design was not a setup one would want to copy.

The methane quantity from human legume consumption is negligible, and beans are just about the most greenhouse-efficient source of protein there is.

Cow “farts” (actually rumen belches) are something else entirely.

The most striking thing to me about IBM memos from this era is just how literate executives were. These days most VPs struggle to write a single sentence worth reading.

Flock: We’re supposed to be the surveilleurs, you see.

“API” meant “library functions” long before the first web server responded with JSON.

Double dash has long been the way to clearly indicate in plain ASCII text an em dash as distinct from a simple hyphen. So I think the author here is here emphatically reclaiming the use of the em dash while pointedly not using the Unicode character so beloved by LLMs.

What do you mean it stole your time?

Years back I was an intern in a bio lab whose ultracentrifuge achieved spin rates similar to a turbopump. On its titanium head was a bar code used to regulate the speed via a beam of light. Unfortunately the manufacturer issued some with the wrong bar code, causing them to overspin and, at one lab, undergo "rapid unexpected disassembly", sending chunks of flying titanium through concrete walls. Fortunately it was at night and no-one was hurt, but the salespeople travelled out to every customer site the next day to implement the product recall.

Brilliant!

Yeah, I get the sense “possibly for ritual use” is how anthropologists say “no idea”.

Can anyone tell whether these exposures occurred through the camera lens (from fallout particles in the sky of the depicted scenes) or in post- (or pre-) exposure handling of the film from hot dust carried by the photographer?