Today I Learned
===============
An assortment of trivia.
2022-01-14: AWS service terms include an exemption permitting AWS to be
used in safety-critical systems in the event of a zombie apocalypse:
"§42.10 [...] However, this restriction will not apply in the event
of the occurrence (certified by the United States Centers for
Disease Control or successor body) of a widespread viral infection
transmitted via bites or contact with bodily fluids that causes
human corpses to reanimate and seek to consume living human flesh,
blood, brain or nerve tissue and is likely to result in the fall of
organized civilization." https://aws.amazon.com/service-terms/
2021-12-31: ultracrepitarian: a person who expresses opinions on
matters outside the scope of their knowledge or expertise. Its
origin is "Sutor, ne ultra crepidam", a Latin expression meaning
literally "Shoemaker, not beyond the shoe", used to warn people
to avoid passing judgment beyond their expertise.
2021-11-26: The error handlers in dpkg are called ohshit/ohshite/oshitv
2021-09-18: The American wireless network operator T-Mobile US is a subsidiary
of Deutsche Telekom AG.
2021-08-13: McCain Foods Limited, a Canadian multinational, is the world's
largest manufacturer of frozen potato products.
2021-08-13: Even machines don't like being yelled at:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tDacjrSCeq4
2021-08-04: Pepper spray is a prohibited weapon in Canada.
2021-08-04: There are Caspian terns on Charleston Lake, ON.
2021-07-23: printf is Turing-complete. This fact was exploited to implement
tic-tac-toe: https://www.ioccc.org/2020/carlini/index.html , where 'int main() {
while(*d) printf(fmt, arg);'. Citation for Turing-completeness:
https://www.usenix.org/system/files/conference/usenixsecurity15/sec15-paper-carlini.pdf
2021-07-16: The X-Debbugs-No-Ack stops you from getting acknowledgments every
time you reply to a bug in the Debian BTS
2021-07-16: IKEA is owned by a Dutch company
2021-07-02: Printers at work will be offline indefinitely thanks to a RCE
vulnerability in the Windows print spooler:
https://msrc.microsoft.com/update-guide/vulnerability/CVE-2021-1675
2021-06-29: Peano also wrote an international auxiliary language, Latino sine
flexione ("Latin without inflections"), which is a simplified version of
Classical Latin. Most of his books and papers are in Latino sine flexione,
others are in Italian. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giuseppe_Peano
2021-06-26: bash scoping is 100% broken:
rak@zeta:~$ foo() { foo () { echo bar; } ; echo baz; } ; foo; foo
baz
bar
2021-06-26: theoldnet.com lets you browse the vintage web, using both the
Internet Archive and its own proxy service. https://theoldnet.com/
2021-06-26: There's a sufficiently large community of polka enthusiasts in
Pittsburgh to justify a (daily in the 90s, now every Saturday) hour-long radio
program called "Prime Time Polkas".
2021-06-26: Brandolini's Law: "The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is
an order of magnitude larger than to produce it."
2021-06-25: KDE3 lives on and look just as it did in 2008. It's now known as
TDE (Trinity Desktop Environment): https://www.trinitydesktop.org/index.php
2021-06-21: export TIME_STYLE=long-iso # make ls -l use YYYY-MM-DD in dired
(thanks twb)
2021-06-21: That you shouldn't set LC_ALL, but that you should instead use LANG.
This lets you override LC_* as needed.
2021-06-18: The US shipped more than 9k cubic meters of soil from Antarctica to
alleviate nuclear contamination. Cleanup of the McMurdo station nuclear reactor
took from 1972 to 1979. http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2014/ph241/reid2/
2021-06-17: MSN had a top-10 IRC network from 1998 to 2000, with a peak of ~23k
users in November 2000: https://netsplit.de/networks/top10.php?year=2000
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MSN_Chat
2021-06-17: Where you have parked in Pittsburgh in the past 30 days is a matter
of public record, and these records are accessible to the general public under
PA's right-to-know law. Here's the form to request a copy of the records:
https://apps.pittsburghpa.gov/ppa/Public_Parking_Authority_of_Pittsburgh_Right-To-Know_Law_Request_Policy.pdf
2021-06-14: At the G7 press conference:
Journalist: "What do you think the world ought to remember from this [year's
G7] summit that will make a real difference?"
The Right Honourable Justin Trudeau: "[...] The impacts of this G7 will be
felt long after the newspapers you write for will have been used to wrap
fish."
2021-06-14: Debian Bullseye will go into a full freeze on July 17, with a
tentative release date of July 31.
2021-06-14: It is reportbug, not the BTS, that causes wnpp bugs to be CC'd to
debian-devel.
2021-06-10: The great debate on whether or not 0.999... = 1 strikes again,
along with cries to revoke all Lets Encrypt certificates:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1715455
2021-06-09: The average American weighed 5% more in 2015-2018 than in 2005, and
airlines need to update weight estimates accordingly to remain within safe
operating limits
https://www.wsj.com/articles/heavier-passengers-on-planes-mean-new-safety-limits-for-airlines-11623243606
2021-06-05: Contrary to popular belief, luffa / loofah is not a type of sea
sponge, but a vine in the cucumber family.
2021-06-01: What's the difference between a Rolling Stone and a Scotsman?
N Ebyyvat Fgbar fnlf: Url lbh, trg bss bs zl pybhq.
N Fpbgfzna fnlf: Url, ZnpYrbq, trg bss zl rjr.
2021-05-31: TIL (after using LaTeX for 16 years) about \( math mode \), and that
it is preferable to $math mode$ for various reasons.
2021-05-30: Hours used to be of variable length: "Arabic time probably has its
roots in the common and most logical system of timekeeping used most places in
the world until about AD 1600. In those days, daytime was divided into 12 equal
parts, and nightime also into 12 equal parts. Depending on the season, hours
used in the daytime were either longer or shorter than hours used during the
night." https://archive.aramcoworld.com/issue/196902/dinner.at.when.htm
2021-05-18: Today I Remembered \hidewidth to let wide equations bleed into the
next cell in align* environments. Useful for having a sigle equation on one line
with two equations aligned on the next line below.
2021-05-10: It is illegal to move to Nova Scotia. (Despite §6 of the Canadian
Charter of Rights and Freedoms.)
2021-05-04. The Nasdaq stores stock prices using four-byte unsigned integers,
and the Nasdaq had to suspend trading of class A shares of Berkshire Hathaway
because their price got too close to the storeable limit of $429,496.7295
-- Ryan Kavanagh <rak@rak.ac>