xefer (u/xefer) - Readit News

xefer commented on Don't be terrified of Pale Fire unherd.com/2024/05/dont-b... · Posted by u/lermontov

xefer · a year ago

In Pale Fire, Nabokov coins a couple of great collective nouns when he writes "... an anthology of poets and a brocken of their wives ..."

The Brocken is the highest peak in the Harz mountains of Germany and is where witches are said to gather on Walpurgis Night. So it was quite a subtle dig.

xefer commented on Atom feed format was born 20 years ago rssboard.org/news/213/ato... · Posted by u/mrzool

xefer · 2 years ago

There is the Atom Feed Format and there is the Atom Syndication Protocol:

  https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc4287
  https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc5023

These specs and the discussion about them at the time really are from a different era of the web. The Syndication Protocol fully embraced REST which was also white hot then. There was a real feeling that with a good format and a standardized way to consume and interact with the resources, it would allow for easier sharing of not just blog posts but other data as well.

As intense as the discussion was around the development of RFC-5023, it was basically ignored from the moment it was released and even the main spec author declared it basically dead not very long afterward:

https://web.archive.org/web/20090421042741/http://bitworking...

Needless to say, the web took an entirely different direction and while these specs exist, there isn't much interest in them any longer.

xefer commented on How A Supernova Explodes (1985) [pdf] astro.uconn.edu/wp-conten... · Posted by u/rwmj

xefer · 2 years ago

Scientific American during this period was a great magazine with fantastic graphics. I used to really look forward to each issue. Sometime in the 90s they made a decision to make the magazine more “accessible” to the general public. The style of graphics became much more cartoony and the articles themselves somewhat more simplistic.

xefer commented on David Foster Wallace’s final attempt to make art moral newyorker.com/books/under... · Posted by u/lermontov

npilk · 3 years ago

Though unfinished, I highly recommend the Pale King. It's not as consistently great as some of DFW's other works, but the highs are as high as anything else he wrote and IMO it's a little more accessible than Infinite Jest. (For a new reader, I would start with some of his essays, e.g. Consider the Lobster: http://www.columbia.edu/~col8/lobsterarticle.pdf)

xefer · 3 years ago

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xefer commented on 1950 Census Records archives.gov/research/cen... · Posted by u/hhs

drewg123 · 3 years ago

I was using this to try to find the records that included my family. The search for 'Firstname Lastname" seems to search for Firstname OR Lastname. Does anybody know if its possible to search for Firstname AND Lastname and what the syntax for that might be? It seems to just still match any of the strings when entered that way.

xefer · 3 years ago

If you happen to know the address of where the individual lived, you can make a much more targeted search if you know the census enumeration district. With the ED in hand, just looking up by last name may be sufficient, but you can also just step through the individual sheets.

This site has a way to look up the ED by street address:

https://stevemorse.org/census/unified.html

Depending on the street, there will be 1 or more districts; e.g.: "9-27", etc. Just enter that string in the "Enumeration District" search field. I knew the addresses of several relatives based on the 1940 census and it made looking them up in the 1950 census very easy.

xefer commented on Surprising Shared Word Etymologies danielde.dev/blog/surpris... · Posted by u/DanielDe

xefer · 4 years ago

"cannabis" and "hemp"

https://blogs.illinois.edu/view/25/107526

xefer commented on St. Matthew Island is said to be the most remote place in Alaska hakaimagazine.com/feature... · Posted by u/Stratoscope

notsuoh · 5 years ago

I've always been really interested in these far flung places and used to spend hours on Google Earth scanning the middles of the oceans for islands like this and think about how to visit them.

In particular I've always been fascinated by Tristan da Cunha which has a village and is livable if you can get there:

https://wikitravel.org/en/Tristan_da_Cunha

And Bouvet Island, which is totally uninhabited:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bouvet_Island

And for whatever reason, one I discovered by browsing Google Earth directly (as opposed to the others which people mention as far flung places), which I can't remember the names of right now, but I can find them on Google maps though they're not labeled: a series of three islands between NZ and Antarctica, closer to Antarctica. Barren islands only potentially visitable for part of the year. The winds and sea in the Southern Ocean sound terrifying. Here's the pin:

Dropped pin Near South Pacific Ocean https://maps.app.goo.gl/PpsVCzE7LXLrZFZe8

We're lucky to be able to see some videos of these places on youtube. When I was little, there were only satellite images and the occasional grainy photo or two online if one did a deep search.

A short documentary of a place called Kurlis came out recently, you should watch it if you're interested. It's about conservation.

https://youtu.be/kHGarqZFY1k

This documentary is particularly interesting for me because I used to browse satellite imagery of the place and to see people walking around it it's as amazing as I had imagined. A volcano in the middle of a lake in a remote island???! Thinking about this stuff is also what led me to have a tech career that has been related to conservation of these places (Kurlis from satellite):

Dropped pin Near Severo-Kurilsky District, Sakhalin Oblast, Russia, 694550 https://maps.app.goo.gl/6X54ZqdruRgB5KYW7

xefer · 5 years ago

Maybe you’re already aware of it, but the book “Atlas of Remote Islands” may be of interest:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlas_of_Remote_Islands

At one time you could group Wikipedia articles in “books” that you could have printed. I had collected all the islands listed in the book mentioned above into a sort of companion:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book:A_Companion_Guide_to_At...

xefer commented on Physicists argue that black holes from the Big Bang could be the dark matter quantamagazine.org/black-... · Posted by u/greeneggs

tus88 · 5 years ago

Does dark matter emit hawking radiation?

xefer · 5 years ago

This is going back many years, but I seem to recall that one of the arguments against primordial black holes is that - assuming Hawking radiation is correct - we should see evidence of black holes evaporating if they are of the correct size, but that hasn't been seen.

https://www.nature.com/articles/248030a0