xefer · HackerTrans

hace 2 añosdiscuss

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

hace 3 añosdiscuss

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

hace 3 añosdiscuss

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

hace 14 añosdiscuss

To be honest, although I know the obvious benefits of metric, I still prefer imperial simply because of its messiness. I realize the system is archaic, etc., but I still like that connection, as attenuated as it may be, to our ancient past. Use metric for all scientific purposes, etc., but keep that connection to the natural world.

I suppose I like it in the same way I prefer natural languages to some artificial languages like Esperanto, etc. - or our base-60 time units as opposed to some other decimal-based system. :)

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