Labnotes

Pulp Librarian This is the story of the 1970s great calculator race... (thread)

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Design Objective

Are we designers shamelessly good at self promotion? What do tech designers write about? What do they read and share most? Posts about templates, news, case studies, etc get far more attention than essays about ethics and responsibility. Much content is self promotion, no surprise. And unfortunately, the people with the most experience to share don't have time to do so; the people with the most time to post, don't necessarily have insight from experience. So remember, just because it was posted on the internet and shared wide and far, doesn't mean it's good advice.

meg 👍

Something I have always wondered: why do airlines tell you departure AND boarding time? Like, we really only need to know boarding time, and if you’d stop telling us when we were supposed to take off, we’d stop getting mad that you never seem to do it

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Tools of the Trade

Beyond Interactive: Notebook Innovation at Netflix Netflix has quite the infrastructure to power Jupyter notebook.

Timsort: Fastest sorting algorithm for real world problems. I missed this one in Computer Science, maybe because it was first implemented in 2002. Timsort is O(nlogn) for worst case, and O(n) for best case, due to interesting combination of Binary insertion and galloping.

sclack Command line Slack client, because of course.

C Is Not a Low-level Language Unless your computer is a PDP-11:

Compiler writers let C programmers pretend that they are writing code that is "close to the metal" but must then generate machine code that has very different behavior if they want C programmers to keep believing that they are using a fast language.

Moon Mom 🌙 "Reminder that we should be using the 🥖 Baguette emoji as the directory separator"

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Lingua Scripta

JavaScript for impatient programmers I often link to Rauschmayer's blog posts because I like how well he introduces new JavaScript concepts: accessible to novice and experienced developers, covers common and advanced use cases, distills the Good Parts. Anyway, the book's out, go buy it.

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Lines of Code

engineering values ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ Hanging this in our engineering Slack room:

don’t be clever
code is a liability
ask, learn, and teach
design and architecture matter
first make it correct then make it fast
only make it fast if you know it matters
it’s not done until customers are getting value
it’s not done until there’s nothing left to take away
don’t automate something you haven’t done manually
quick incremental progress is better than the alternative
code is shared by the team. there is no such thing as my code
it’s easier to change a dry-erase board than a production system
code is written to be understood by humans first, computers second

Patricia Aas Generally good life advice:

OH: “Be like a compiler, and ignore comments.”

Vanessa McHale 🤗

how to write a garbage collector in bash:

rm -rf ~/my-code/

Amen Zine "That's very clever 😂😂😂"

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Architectural

John Cutler "This actually makes us faster"

Sean Heber Not wrong:

Programming is great because you can just take that huge messy chuck from the middle of your function and hide it away under a new name in a new function and feel good about how you "cleaned up" the original function by abstracting the internals.

This is exactly how I used to clean my room as a kid - I'd refactor all the junk on the floor to be under my bed. Boom - problem solved.

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Devoops

Josh Varty "Fixing bugs in production..."

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Peopleware

Scott Belsky Yes:

the enemy of tough decisions is, more often than not, a sunk cost.

a critical superpower in #TheMessyMiddle is being able to cut a loss rather than carry it as a subconscious debt.

Darrel Miller ⛅️☁️☁️☁️☁️

I just figured out how to remove the stigma of remote workers. I now describe myself as a Cloud Native Employee.

Meagan 🔥

It's weird that ppl interpret the moral of The Pied Piper story as "Don't trust strangers" when really it's "Always pay freelancers"

Chuck Wendig Go magic skeleton, go!

TUESDAY. The day you realize that nothing can stop you, because you are a MAGIC SKELETON packed with MEAT and animated with ELECTRICITY and IMAGINATION. You have a cave in your face full of sharp bones and five tentacles at the end of each arm. YOU CAN DO ANYTHING, MAGIC SKELETON

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Electric Dreams

Q: Why Do Keynote Speakers Keep Suggesting That Improving Security Is Possible? "A: Because Keynote Speakers Make Bad Life Decisions and Are Poor Role Models." Fantastic keynote by James Mickens, funny but also tackles serious topics like algorithmic bias, IoT security, and tech's Manifest Destiny. I watched it twice, it's that good.

All-optical machine learning using diffractive deep neural networks This 3D-printed paper implements a classification of handwritten digits and fashion products. To activate, shine a light through the paper!

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Locked Doors

henrikschroder Electronic voting machines are the wrong abstraction:

For people to have trust in their vote being counted, the voting machine needs to be understandable by everyone, not just software engineers specializing in cryptography.

A counting room full of people counting paper ballots is a machine, and it's a transparent machine where everyone inside it and outside of it can understand how it works, and trust that it's working properly.

But the biggest argument against electronic voting is that you're not solving any problems, you're just adding problems and decreasing the trust in the elections massively. And for what? To get election results a few hours faster? That's ridiculous.

Google Tracks You Even If Location History's Off. Here's How to Stop It FYI If you're using Google apps, Android or iOS, turning off Location History does not actually turn of location history. What a shocker that Google UI would make it difficult to stop Google from collecting your data. Article has more info on where to find the real setting.

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None of the Above

Clint Falin "editing two videos together can really change a story."

Momma Meets World Something many of us can relate to:

Hello, I’ve finished my free trial of adulting and I’m no longer interested. I’d like to cancel my subscription. Is there a manager I can speak to?

Brooke Pryor I feel like proper use of the Oxford comma is something to discuss before moving in together:

This is what happens when an AP style journalist marries an English major and the English major edits the wedding website copy

yolo contendere Bingo!

imagine if keeping your car idling 24/7 produced solved Sudokus you could trade for heroin

Goth Ms. Frizzle "today I learned that goats who won't stop head butting have to wear pool noodles and it feels like information I should share"

Ted Rogers "The Bay Area in two headlines"

Austen Allred Thread:

Silicon Valley expects you to start a company by finding a problem you have yourself, solving it, and it being a problem for others.

But Amazon’s story was basically, “I did the math on this new thing’s growth, then systematically found the ideal product to play into it.”

The Political Education of Silicon Valley "How the anti-government tech-libertarianism of John Perry Barlow gave way to enthusiasm for wealth redistribution and a Berniecrat named Ro Khanna."

T!MoRi "We are still in 2018, this guy is already in 2048 😀😁😁"

Ruth Ann Crystal, MD "To all of the haters that said this day would never come"

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Design Objective

Why Small Teams Win And Bigger Ones Fail This is not so much about people as constraints, and I agree, step 1 is trim the menu:

If you ever watched Kitchen Nightmares, Gordon Ramsay has a pattern of helping restaurants. To help them get back on track, he cuts down their menus to only a couple of dishes. Why? Because owners think that making every dish possible will increase their success, but instead they get crappy food and inventory problems. That’s why Ramsay’s first step is almost always to trim the menu.

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Tools of the Trade

Art of debugging with Chrome DevTools Shares useful and powerful tips, like how to access experimental DevTool features, how to log smarter, working with clipboard and snippets, and more.

How to Read an RFC Slowly, and carefully, and more than once. Also, learn the difference between SHOULD and MUST, and how to read ABNF.

That’s because in general, specifications are written so that behaviours are overtly specified; in other words, everything that is not explicitly disallowed is allowed. Therefore, reading too much into specifications can unintentionally cause harm, since you’ll be introducing new behaviours that others will have to work around.

lazygit Simple terminal UI for git commands.

idyll Markup language and web runtime for publishing interactive stories.

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Lingua Scripta

I Am Devloper 😭

programmer: "does x exist?"
javascript: "???"
programmer: "...does x not... not exist?"
javascript: "yeah it exists!"

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Lines of Code

Chris Oldwood This quick hack makes naming things easy peasy:

Yes, I'm sure it's obvious to some people but starting by writing code in main() and then recursively using the extract method refactoring to create the program would be an interesting approach as you'd always be writing from the caller's perspective. Just like TDD :o).

Rich Rogers That is where I spend most of my time when developing:

"You don't pay engineers to write code, you pay them to understand subtleties and edges of the problem. The code is incidental." - @dozba

I Am Devloper Current status:

> It'll just be a quick fix

Narrator: It wasn't.

David Pine "You have no idea how bad I wanted to pass this car, then I realized I shouldn’t... never pass a null pointer."

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Peopleware

Rob Russell The tech industry needs this kick in the pants:

Surgeons didn't want to use checklists because they were too full of themselves, but then accidental deaths fell by 30-50% in hospitals that adopted them. Know who else often suffers from the same hubris? Programmers.

Bobby Ghoshal Something to consider when on-boarding new employees:

👋 I've graphed a common problem (and its solution) in the workplace. @nickstamas named it "The Prior Idiots Phenomenon" 🙏. The problem... new person joins your team, believes everything is broken because everyone before them is an idiot... here's what you should do instead:

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Techtopia

Theodor Holm Nelson Contemplate this:

Every day, computers are making people easier to use. -- DavidTemkin

Wells Fargo says hundreds of customers lost homes after computer glitch No. Wells Fargo designed their programs such that hundred of people would lose their homes. Glitches are unexpected and you get random results. Sometimes glitches favor the bank, sometimes glitches favor the customer. So where are the storied about people getting free houses because of computer glitches?

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Locked Doors

Chaff Bugs: Deterring Attackers by Making Software Buggier I love that this research paper is using emoji:

Most efforts to secure software attempt either to eliminate bugs or to add mitigations that make exploitation more difficult. … Rather than eliminating bugs, we instead add large numbers of bugs that are provably (but not obviously) non-exploitable. Attackers who attempt to find and exploit bugs in software will, with high probability, find an intentionally placed non-exploitable bug and waste precious resources in trying to build a working exploit.

Pinboard From a thread about internet security and political campaigns:

Training campaigns on email security is like teaching teenagers to drive responsibly. They will listen and promise to be good, and they sound sane and rational, but then they are opening attachments behind the Denny's at 3 AM

Amy Renee "Reminds me of application patching…"

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None of the Above

Melissa Troutt This Doctor Strange cosplay is bonkers.

Ned Pyle The rest of this thread is as funny:

Do people only own paperclips now in order to reset devices that replaced paper? 🤔

Lynn "folks, I've solved it"

Stone Cold Jane Austen Yes:

Netflix should add the category "Sorry There Are No More Episodes of Bake-Off and Queer Eye, You're Clearly Going Through Some Stuff, Here Are Some Other Soothing Shows with People Being Nice to Each Other over Low-Stakes Things"

Ben Thompson 📺

6 year-old son: Where do cows watch movies?
Me: A MOOOOOO-vie theater.
Son: No.
Me: [Surprised] Then where?
Son: MOOOOOO-Tube

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OMG I’m old 😵

@AskAKorean Can we get these in my local supermarket, and Avocados too, thank you very much:

Genius at work. E-mart in Korea is now selling the "One a Day Banana" pack, containing several bananas of different ripeness so that you can eat them over several days.

James McLeod I feel you:

I am now officially, "I just want to buy the exact same thing I bought several years ago because it wore out, and I'm mad they changed the product," years old.

Jordan D. White This little nugget pulled from a NYT article is off-the-charts hypocrisy:

What’s the problem @TwitterSafety? It’s almost like it would be INCREDIBLY UNPLEASANT to be targeted by trolls on your platform.

Brandon Carbaugh "Portable cookie technology"!

Okay HOLD THE FUCK UP.

I just opened my wife's purse to get something for her and found A COOKIE INSIDE?

Women, do y'all just have SNACKS in there?! And you ALWAYS HAVE???

ARE YOU SERIOUSLY TELLING ME TOXIC MASCULINITY HAS FUCKED MEN OUT OF PORTABLE COOKIE TECHNOLOGY??!?!??!!

Ben Engel "Seems about right"

Businessweek "LOL"

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Design Objective

Refresh This is what a modern browser should be. Adapt to multiple contexts, help you juggle/finish tasks, supplemental memory.

Christy Allison 👍

We need design that is faster and slower. Faster for people who are trying to get things done, and slower for people who are trying to comprehend. We’ve trained people to scan even complicated news stories, but we need to encourage long-form reading of thoughtful content #aeadc

Christy Allison This is where good design emerges:

For every piece of content we have to ask, "why do we need this?" Every design is intentional or it's not design. #aeadc

Fostering focus for small screens "How we redesigned Dropbox mobile for rapid work"

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Tools of the Trade

Uncle Cal I just finished a 7 tab problem, when I read this tweet:

I no longer quantify problems in the length of time it took to solve them, or the lines of code. My new measurement is "Tabs".

"This was a 30 tab problem. I had to go in deep."

"I solved that one with only 1 tab. "

:)

brandon cullum Descript sounds like magic:

Starting to play around with narrative style podcast episodes for the day job. Have been using @DescriptApp it is AMAZING! Edit audio like its a word doc

JBD "Blockchain devops" is my new band's name:

You just take one buzz word, put it right next to another, and profit. Blockchain devops, serverless blockchain, cloud native serverless, cloud native observability, observability blockchain.

Celestine Omin "Changing course mid-sprint."

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Lines of Code

Sarah Drasner "I made dis"

Eric Lawrence When and how to comment code.

Andrew Clark Starring The Rebase Five:

Queer Eye but for people with messy codebases

The Expert Beginner 🤔

It's a lot easier to follow the single responsibility principle when you have all of your code in a single, centralized class.

Javi Velasco Grrr …

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Architectural

Tim O'Reilly Pragmatic:

OH: "We can't entirely eliminate our technical debt. My goal is to refinance it at a lower interest rate." 😂

Nate Silver Applies in so many contexts:

My least favorite genre of argument is: Here's something in the past that was handled really stupidly, so let's make sure to handle this new thing stupidly too just for consistency's sake.

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Peopleware

While We Sleep, Our Mind Goes on an Amazing Journey Sleep is fascinating.

Great Talks Most People Have Never Heard Great list. I only got around to read “You and Your Research”, which is a fantastic talk about research, focusing on stuff that matters, and working with other people:

Another trait, it took me a while to notice. I noticed the following facts about people who work with the door open or the door closed. I notice that if you have the door to your office closed, you get more work done today and tomorrow, and you are more productive than most. But 10 years later somehow you don't know quite know what problems are worth working on; all the hard work you do is sort of tangential in importance. He who works with the door open gets all kinds of interruptions, but he also occasionally gets clues as to what the world is and what might be important.

A comprehensive guide to the new science of treating lower back pain Biopsychosocial:

Multidisciplinary rehab takes the “biopsychosocial” view of back pain — again, that the pain arises from the interplay of physical, psychological, and social factors. It can of course be tricky to disentangle whether mood disorders like anxiety or depression contribute to people’s pain, or whether they arise out of the pain, but either way, the biopsychosocial model views the physical as only one part of the equation.

You are fluent in this language We're all fluent in the language of pictures, a TED talk by Christoph Niemann.

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Techtopia

The Bullshit Web On a web that is slower, less useful, and more intrusive:

Bullshit — in the form of CPU-sucking surveillance, unnecessarily-interruptive elements, and behaviours that nobody responsible for a website would themselves find appealing as a visitor — is unwelcome and intolerable.

Everything bad about Facebook is bad for the same reason Seeing Facebook through these eyes:

Facebook didn’t intend for any of this to happen. It just wanted to connect people. But there is a thread running from Perkins’ death to religious violence in Myanmar and the company’s half-assed attempts at combating fake news. Facebook really is evil. Not on purpose. In the banal kind of way.

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None of the Above

Dozens of professional goats briefly took over a neighborhood in Boise Not just any old goat, but professional goats! These goats get paid to goat around!

Chase Mitchell Ditto:

Little secret about me: my answer to the question “would you like a receipt” is based on absolutely nothing and changes all the time

Best of Nextdoor "Meanwhile in Austin..."

Angela Kinsey 😭

Netflix Life "Which character from The Office are you?"

Angela

Alejandro Oviedo "you don't get a trillion dollars by selling just one cable for a phone's lifetime..."

Dragon Energy As a trillion dollar company, you’d think that #Apple could figure out a way to make better cords.

David Fickling Cost/benefit:

Here's a thread about how Polynesian war canoes prove that humans are never going to colonize space in any foreseeable future:

Humans of Late Capitalism No.

How Silicon Valley Became a Den of Spies "The West Coast is a growing target of foreign espionage. And it’s not ready to fight back."

Julia Galef "brb, jumping on this amazing arbitrage opportunity you guys"

Customer's email exchange with Cards Against Humanity escalates beyond all expectations "Be careful what you wish for"

poorly drawn lines "dwell"

TAHKION "finally switched to emacs once and for all, can definitely see why this is by far the best text editor"

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Design Objective

Yes, Alan, There Is An ROI For UX Design I find the hardest problem in product management is getting designers to think about business value. But it doesn't help that design ROI is elusive:

For example, say you get many support calls because the design doesn’t do something the users expect. That’s a high cost due to a poor design decision. If it’s easy, you could ballpark a number. (Number of calls x average support call cost.) You may not need the math if everyone agrees that’s likely expensive. High value doesn’t always need to be quantified; it just needs to be seen.

10 rules for better dashboard design An important distinction may people miss on:

As the dashboard is one of the most visually exciting views, it’s often a first thing that is being designed. I would recommend the opposite. A dashboard is a summary view of everything else, display a key info from various part of the application, it’s just more practical to design it the end.

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Tools of the Trade

Harrison Kwik Hmm …

The most useful programming tip I have ever gotten was to increase my font sizes in my editors. Doing so has dramatically reduced eye strain and has also helped me with my desk posture since I tend to lean forward less often now.

I Am Devloper Evil:

Every now and then, ping one of your competitor's websites using an IE6 VM. Keep them on their toes.

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Web-end

MinMax in CSS Grid — 3/3 Flexibility Great example of using CSS Grid to create simple layouts that adapt well to different screen sizes. Time to replace "pixel perfect" with intrinsic designs.

ajlkn That's me and flexbox:

CSS at 9AM

display: flex;
align-items: center;
justify-content: center;

CSS at 4AM

position:absolute;
left: -18.245555px;
top: -24.99999998px;;
margin-left:5.333333px; /* ajdustment */
margin-top: -0px; /* idk???? */

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Locked Doors

Joseph Fahmy 🔥

Amazon is one of the few companies that actually listen to their shareholders. Mainly through Alexa, but still.

DizzyD 😭

It's 2020 and 90% of all SMS traffic is verification codes.

Stuart Winter-Tear "I'm using this new form to submit my finds to bug bounty platforms - really simplifies the reporting process:"

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Startup Life

Paras Chopra Interesting thread about hiring at different stages of the business:

1/ At @wingify, we have changed our org structure several times.

A short thread on what I've learned about ORGANIZATION DESIGN in last 8 years.

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Techtopia

Rhodri Marsden The future sounded much better 24 years ago:

I remember being completely enchanted by the internet in 1994, but now it’s 2018 and everyone is arguing and I’m being relentlessly pursued by an advert for a pair of slippers I bought two months ago.

Les Orchard Yeah, I'd watch that:

Knight Rider reboot where KITT is actually just an Uber driver named Kit who keeps getting dragged into adventures by Michael to keep his 5-star rating.

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None of the Above

Ferris Jabr Wow:

If you put chalk under a powerful microscope—white cliffs of Dover type chalk, not the modern blackboard variety—you will see something like this

Because it's not just a rock. It's an accumulation of ancient skeletons: the armored husks of single-celled, ocean-dwelling plankton

James Gitto So the origin of the word "parking" has nothing to do with multi-level concrete buildings, quite the opposite:

TIL that ‘Parking’ was originally the planting of trees along the road to green D.C. This lead to horses being tied to the trees. When cars came along cars would park next to them. So DC cut them down and widened the road for cars to park thus ‘parking’

Megan McArdle Are newspapers just an historical blip?

Somehow in the twentieth century, newspapers figured out how to scam department stores into paying them to tell the local citizenry which city councillors were corrupt. It was a magnificent think for us, and for America. But it's ending.

The only reason we have a GoPro. I keep watching on a loop:

Katie McLaughlin "I rated all the bee emoji. 🐝"

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Design Objective

Building the Google Photos Web UI The design details that go into a user interface.

Improving the usability of multi-selecting from a long list TL;DR

When it comes to unfamiliar items it’s better to visually expose the items instead of hiding them. It’s even better to do it in a logically organized way: create groups with meaningful titles, and let the users zoom in to the groups they are interested in.

Zach Holman I go through this cycle at least once a week:

Design is basically:

• Okay, let’s design this.
• Huh. This one’s actually pretty tricky.
• Everything I’m trying feels wrong.
• Fuck.
• Nothing in life really matters anyway. I should change careers.
• o shit this is coming together
• I am literally god, what can I design next

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Tools of the Trade

Michael D. Hill I encourage you to read this entire thread:

let's talk a little bit about showing your working code to your product person.

a basic recommendation, which will seem strange and likely freak you out the first time you hear it.

look to show your new stuff every day or two.

How decision trees work Even if you're not a data scientist, you may find decision trees useful.

How to write a good software design doc "A design doc is the most useful tool for making sure the right work gets done."

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Web-end

A one year PWA retrospective Pinterest finds value in PWA:

Looking back over one full year since we started rebuilding our mobile web, we’re so proud of the experience we’ve created for our users. Not only is it significantly faster, it’s also our first platform to support right-to-left languages and “night mode.” Investing in a full-featured PWA has exceeded our expectations. And we’re just getting started.

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Lines of Code

Trent Willis But complete rewrites are more fun (and seldom successful)!

I feel that too often we use "legacy codebase" to mean "bad". When the reality is that "legacy" usually means "currently working without any real issues, but not optimally".

When viewed that way, it's much easier to support incremental improvements instead of complete rewrites.

Pizzaburger Hot Dog "The hard problem of naming things"

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Architectural

system-design-primer This repo covers the basics of large-scale system design. Good resource if you're learning on the job, or prepping for an interview.

Visual Agility: Why We Model On the benefits of thinking visually, for architecture design:

When we, as a field, for the most part turned away from BDUF (big design upfront) toward Agile methods, we tended, unfortunately, to turn away from architecture visualization and modeling. We've argued here that sketching and modeling is indeed a way to be agile – to learn with the cheapest method that will uncover key issues, alternatives, and give us a better handle on our design approach.

Christopher Church "Simplified chart I'm using to explain the nines of availability."

Doctor Octothorpe In case you were wondering what I think of Kubernetes:

Coworker: "You can learn Kubernetes in a day."

Me: "You can learn chess in a day."

Cindy Sridharan It's great for résumé padding, but make sure your org is big enough to justify the cost:

At a previous job, we decided against doing K8s. A disgruntled engineer spent the entirety of their tenure being grumpy about this decision.

It takes well over a million dollars just in engineer salary to get K8s up and running from scratch. And you still might not get there.

Assaf "Microservices can be difficult to debug. An illustration."

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Peopleware

Melatonin: Much More Than You Wanted To Know TL;DR The effective dose of Melatonin is 0.3mg. It doesn't work (any better) in larger doses, yet drugstores sell 10mg pills, because of course. Anyway, read this for a good night sleep.

ᴠᴀɴ sᴄʜɴᴇɪᴅᴇʀ That describes me well:

I like to describe myself as an extroverted introvert. I can temporarily be extroverted for about 45mins and then I need to be alone for 6 months to recover.

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Electric Dreams

Eirini Malliaraki 🎣

Give an AI a fish, and it can identify that fish forever. Give an AI a fishing rod, and it can identify that fishing rod forever.

~Ancient supervized learning classification maxim

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Techtopia

Gary Rivers The next Unicorn:

Milk delivery 25 years ago was essentially a subscription service offering products with recyclable/reusable packaging, delivered by electric vehicles.

Part of me thinks that if a techie firm were to have proposed this same idea today people would think it was incredible.

Alex Sexton 📺

Well intentioned employee: “If we spend the extra money and get TVs to display the menu we won’t have to print new menus every time we change the prices.”

6mo later:

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None of the Above

Wᴀʀʀᴇɴ Eʟʟɪs This cup, it does not lie:

Laura Lovette 😭

Can you imagine how awkward it would be if your pet went on your phone and found the 1000s of pictures you have of them sleeping

sophie Tortoise has a food name:

My mum was too embarrassed to tell the vet our tortoise was called voldetort so she just said his name was Susan

Ruth Graham "A+"

Dan Duvall 😭

My mom has a podcast but you can only hear it if you have the password to my voicemail

SamuraiKnitter This is how the Queen subtweets:

All right. You need ninety-two years of background. The Queen (hereafter QE) has always loved brooches and so everyone gives them to her as gifts. Everyone. A horse-racing org gave her a gift for lifetime achievements a while back - the 'trophy' was a brooch. You get it.

AirballGuy "La twitta que t’essaye d’attraper en DM"

Andrés Pertierra This is absolutely true. You either moderate public forums, or some users moderate them for you.

On a related note, "100% free speech" platforms don't work online and just mean being flooded by bigots who make spaces so toxic that people just leave.

The only way AskHistorians has avoided becoming a total cesspool is our policy of heavy moderation.

Eve Forster "This gets funnier and funnier the more I watch it"

Paul Cooper Paul writes about ruins (ancient, modern & imaginary), and has a thread of threads. I spent an hour learning and enjoying the beautiful photography. Recommended!

The Altai region of Central Asia seems at first to be a remote & peaceful place. But it also sits on the world's busiest flight path for space missions.

Here used-up rockets regularly crash to earth, & local people are left to salvage what they can of the wreckage.

TheTweetOfGod Well, that's settled:

I’m deeply sorry for the racist, sexist and homophobic things I wrote when I was younger.

Jim Bliss TIL the S in SEO is short for Stegosaurus:

I love this.

When the Far Side came out in 1982, paleontologists realised they'd never actually named that part of a stegosaurus and began using the term informally. And now, 36 years later, if you type "Thagomizer" into a search engine...

Fluff Society "He looks friendly until he's got a bowcaster pointed at you"