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Joined 7 months ago
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Cake day: September 9th, 2025

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  • The earliest known english-language account of a dinosaur bone is in Robert Plot’s 1677 The natural history of Oxford-shire: being an essay toward the natural history of England. This is how he explains what we now know as a megalosaurus thighbone:

    There happily came to Oxford while I was writing of this, a living Elephant to be shown publickly at the ACT, An. 1676, with whose Bones . I compared ours; and found those of the Elephant not only of a different Shape, but also incomparably different to ours, though the Beast were very young and not half grown. If then they are neither the Bones of Horses, Oxen, nor Elephants, as I am strongly persuaded they are not . It remains, that (notwithstanding their extravagant Magnitude) they must have been the bones of Men or Women: Nor doth any thing hinder but they may have been so, provided it be clearly made out, that there have been Men and Women of proportionable Stature in all Ages of the World, down even to our own Days

    The whole account is pretty interesting. He speculates about the origin of the bones and their medicinal uses and discusses the particulars of a few giants.







  • If anyone’s curious what happened to the translation here, the original Russian is abbreviated — the full phrase would be «мороженое в ассортименте» (ice cream in assortment) — but they abbreviated assortment and Russian doesn’t have articles so they use them when you wouldn’t expect. Also, this is most likely eastern Ukraine because they quote the prices in both hryvnia and roubles.












  • I mean, he definitely did it. We all remember the breathless coverage of his 2am ketamine tweets to manipulate the market:

    Musk’s May 13 tweet — “Twitter deal temporarily on hold pending details supporting calculation that spam/fake accounts do indeed represent less than 5% of users” — was “false because the buyout was not, in fact, ‘temporarily on hold,’” the lawsuit says. That’s because Twitter did not agree to put the deal on hold, and there was nothing in the merger agreement the two parties signed that allowed Musk to put it on hold, according to the lawsuit.

    I wonder if he has enough clout left with the Trump admin to weasel out of this one, like he did with the Tesla deal.






  • The word sardonic used to mean what we now use sarcastic for — verbally ironic. Sarcasm comes from the Greek “to tear flesh, bite the lip in rage, sneer” and meant “bitterly cutting or caustic” when it first entered English. For me, although I understand that hypothetically you could have sarcasm that doesn’t have this inherently negative bent to it, the word still retains a fair bit of its original connotation for good reason.



  • Hint: It’s more than you think:

    In Chicago, for instance, reimagining those right-of-ways could open up nearly $8.3 billion in redevelopment potential within three miles of the Windy City’s epicenter; in Boston, it’s $16.3 billion.

    And in both cities, the annualized household costs of maintaining infrastructure over its lifestyle and paying the costs of driving are north of $23,000 a year — a price so few residents are willing to actually pay that local governments are struggling to fill their potholes.

    “What we typically hear in the press is that congestion costs us billions of dollars a year,” Kennedy adds. "But whatever the number might be, it’s usually a scare tactic that’s multiplied by the entire population. When you start breaking that number down per household or per capita, the number is actually not that big — and it’s dwarfed by the overall costs of having to own and operate several vehicles per household, as well as all the infrastructure to go with it.

    “We need to get some numbers out there that [show] why our municipalities are effectively broke, why the roads are so bad, and why we have to continually cut services and raise taxes just to tread water as a municipality,” he continued.