rothos

rapt, rape, rare, dare, ...

The U.N.'s report highlighted what areas are expected to be the next megacities and surpass the 10 million mark, including:

[...]

- Hajipur, India.

Estimated population of Hajipur in 2025 is 213k people. Not sure why it's on the list. Throws the rest of the article into question for me.

USPS is awful from a privacy perspective. USPS will email photos of your incoming mail to anyone who files a change-of-address form with your address as the new address. They don't require any sort of confirmation.

I know this because after I moved out of a place and started traveling for a while, I set up forwarding to my parents' address, and after clicking the "informed delivery" checkbox I immediately started getting photos of all my parents' mail.

I played for a while and didn't get a single "I" piece.

Amazing work. How much did it end up costing?

A list of "pairs of non-synonymous phrases where the words in one phrase are each synonyms of the words in the other".

It's the BBC -- why don't they denote the title of a short story with quotations? It's written throughout without any quotes.

Correct. A later year is actually a weaker claim to the copyright.

I don't think I'll ever get tired of seeing cool new things people build in Conway's Life.

Many years ago I had the privilege of witnessing open heart surgery on an infant, from within the operating room. (This was only possible because I had an indirect connection to the director of the hospital, and because I was in India. I was a student at the time. It was a respectable hospital in a major city.)

The surgery lasted for hours. At one point, the power went out, for maybe a minute or so. The surgeon immediately started singing to himself. I assumed it was for some combination of calming himself and keeping track of the time. It was a strange and beautiful experience I'll never forget, standing in the dark with the nurses, all the machines quiet, baby on the table with its chest pried open, listening to the surgeon's gentle humming of a lullaby.

Looking at the document, it seems like they make pretty strong judgments about the numbers they found even though they don't compare those numbers to any alternatives.

For example, who's to say that 59 minutes/day looking up knowledge isn't the cutting edge of what's possible, for the type and size of organization they consider? Probably far better than cabinets of paper archives.

Why does a 200-word article need a bullet-point summary at the top?

It will be interesting to see the financial world move toward blockchain. It's a better technology in many ways, but adoption is slow in big institutions. There will be an arms race between cryptoanarchists (who want total anonymity, and can cryptographically ensure it) and governments & banks (who want total traceability, and can cryptographically ensure it).

It's hard to predict, but I expect to see a corporatization/cephalization of blockchain over the next 10 years similar to that of the internet in the early 2000s, which had also been something of a wild west.