Tag Archives: links

Did you know: JRR Tolkien’s great granddaughter, Ruth Tolkien, is the only blind person in the UK to be a competitive fencer. She is currently ranked the #186th best fencer in the country. Alpha – an ambiguously-AI-automated alliterative account about … Continue reading →

Multiocular O, “the rarest Cyrillic letter”, used only to describe the eyes of seraphim. Kind of sounds like something out of a Borges book. More on Low-Trust Russia: Do Russian Who Wants To Be A Millionaire contestants avoid asking the … Continue reading →

During the 1500s, the Caribbean was teeming with Jewish pirates, who named their ships things like Queen Esther and Shield of Abraham and had swashbuckling nicknames like “The Pirate Rabbi”. This month in bad graphs: Family Inequality on the weird … Continue reading →

Greek scholar Philitas of Cos “studied false arguments and erroneous word-usage so intensely that he wasted away and starved to death”. Outgroup Threat Responses, Ingroup Bias, And Nonapeptide Involvement Are Conserved Across Vertebrates. “In particular, the evolutionarily conserved, hormone-regulated nonapeptide … Continue reading →

A while ago when we discussed drug tolerance here, some people taught me about receptors that activated two different second messenger chains, and how you could modulate the balance of effects by finding agonists that disproportionately activated one or the … Continue reading →

Dave Barry’s 2016 Year In Review. “Fanatics got into the Capitol building and committed a mass shooting on Congress while it was in session, and you’ve never heard of them…people have completely forgotten that in 1972 we had over nineteen … Continue reading →

International Date Line In Judaism: Some authorities posit a “zone of pure doubt” stretching from longitudes 169W to 177E and containing Tonga, Samoa, and American Samoa, where it is so confusing when to observe Shabbat that Jews should just completely … Continue reading →

The town of Monkey’s Eyebrow, Kentucky is supposedly named because it’s in a county whose shape looks like a monkey’s head, and the town is around where the eyebrow would be. A man involved in a homophobic hate killing and … Continue reading →

Attn fans of Research Agreements: China has reconstructed the Porcelain Tower Redditor justdoittimes5 looks up some data relevant to my Against Tulip Subsidies and finds that medical students who studied science in undergrad gain no advantage over those who did … Continue reading →

Hey, remember that time when Merv, Turkmenistan was the largest city in the world? What about when it was Dobrovody, Ukraine? Here’s a helpful cheat sheet if you’re feeling a little lost. Marble quarries somehow look both exactly how you … Continue reading →