"Stand near an elephant herd, and you may feel a strange vibration in your chest. That’s not your heart beating in terror because you’re, well, standing next to an elephant herd. Or at least that’s not all it is. It’s also a sign that the elephants are talking to one another. Elephants are famous for their trumpeting, of course, but they also produce rumbles pitched so low that humans can’t hear them, only feel them as a sort of physical buzzing. Exactly how elephants do this has been a mystery — and while solving that mystery is not of first-order importance in understanding and preserving this largest of land animals, it would add new insight into how a whole range of species vocalize."
// Name this so it's quick to autocomplete
// in the URL bar, like "Paywall be gone".
javascript:(function(){window.open('<https://archive.today/'+encodeURIComponent(window.location.href)>);})();
#TIL using https://sentry.io for error & performance monitoring turned out easy... set it up for the parent app and it will already monitor all sub-routes, which means my flask blueprints (/threads, /ori) will already be monitored
#TIL that the American Enterprise Institute has built what looks to be a useful dashboard based on data aggregated by @planet4589 and @celestrak to visualize lots of information about trends in #space launches, #satellites and #SpaceDebris.
#TIL (or re-learnt) that the "5G" in "5G WiFi" is a short form of the 5 GHz frequency for #WiFi networks and doesn't have any connection with #5G (the mobile standard)
"yea Marco Polo reported this when we he first travelled there, the birth of a darker baby was the cause for celebration, and newborns were even artificially darkened to look more beautiful"
The New River is the second oldest river on the planet. I’ve only recently come to understand the real significance of the Appalachians. I was born and raised in and around these mountains, and they were always just — you know — mountains.
They reach back something like 350 million years. Predating dinosaurs? Really?
#TIL that @JasonPunyon curated and compiled a whopping archive of answers from #StackOverflow and assorted #StackExchange Q&A sites in a minimal sqlite format, where they can be downloaded and analyzed offline:
Amazing effort and great idea. Reminded me of the archives that #Kiwix kept of it (alongside Wikipedia and similar projects), but more streamlined and cross-platform. Nice.
Today I learned that my MacBook was loud and burning hot not because it's old and I keep dropping it off the sofa, but because of the felt my cats installed on the fan!
#TIL that Johnny Cash recorded the song The Chicken in Black because "he thought his label would hate it, and he wanted out of his record deal".
"The song tells the story of Johnny Cash getting a brain transplant, but his new brain came from a dead bank robber and instead of singing, Johnny too turns to robbing banks [...]"
I've been shifting focus at work, from performance engineering to observability, and that means learning a whole lot. More learning in public! First up: #loki. It's a databases for logs with some interesting design decisions that make it more performant than other logs databases. Here's a video I made with my colleague, Jay Clifford, to share what we've learned, including a demo app that ties in Loki, Grafana, and Alloy: https://youtu.be/1uk8LtQqsZQ
Quobna Ottobah Cugoano était un esclave affranchi d’origine ghanéenne, figure de la lutte abolitionniste.
Son ouvrage "Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil of Slavery" (1787) ferait de lui le premier auteur anti-esclavagiste noir.
Conférence de Jennifer Pitts, Collège de France, 14 mai 2024 :
"Les Lumières et l’esclavage : Cugoano, Condorcet et les débats sur l’abolition à la veille de la Révolution"
I have a huge amount of appreciation for the fact that Nautilus / #GNOMEFiles can seamlessly pattern-select, batch-rename and move files both from its treeview and from search results… all with keyboard shortcuts! Extremely useful to clean up filenames.
Today, in someone else's messy folders, I was able to cleanly rename everything and eliminate at least 40 duplicates in a directory that contained over 180 files, most of which were in the wrong locations.