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The Penicillin Myth

Sun, 14 Dec 2025 06:23:20 GMT

quote [Competing theories seek to explain inconsistencies surrounding Alexander Fleming’s famed discovery.] Entry Comment: Go get your penicillin.

The dystopian Pottersville in ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’ is starting to feel less like fiction

Sat, 13 Dec 2025 06:00:38 GMT

quote [Frank Capra’s dark vision of corruption and greed highlights both the dangers of concentrated power and the quiet effectiveness of collective action.] Entry Comment: And you'll see it's a wonderful life

Compartmentalizing

Fri, 12 Dec 2025 06:00:39 GMT

quote [How the shipping container, a dominant force in ocean shipping, came from a truck driver whose invention proved to be too good at its job.] Entry Comment: I be overseas like shipping containers

A Thousand and One Nights in Italy: The Moorish Fantasias of Cesare Mattei and Ferdinando Panciatichi

Thu, 11 Dec 2025 06:00:29 GMT

quote [In mid-19th century Italy, two eccentric aristocrats set forth on parallel projects: constructing ostentatious castles in a Moorish Revival style. Iván Moure Pazos tours the psychedelic chambers of Rochetta Mattei, optimised for electrohomeopathic healing, and Castello di Sammezzano, an immersive, orientalist fever dream.] Entry Comment: I'll get lost at night in Italy

A Volcanic Eruption in 1345 May Have Triggered a Chain of Events That Brought the Black Death to Europe

Wed, 10 Dec 2025 06:01:30 GMT

quote [Ash from the explosion may have led to crop failure and famine in southern Europe, leading some Italian cities to import grain—which possibly carried fleas infected with the bubonic plague] Entry Comment: And black death raged across the land

Somebody Told Me (The User Provider Should Use An Adaptor To Proxy The Query Factory Builder)

Tue, 09 Dec 2025 22:48:58 GMT

quote [You ever found yourself trying to do something really simple, like show a username on a web page, but you can't because there's too much "architecture"? This...] Entry Comment: FINISH THEM! So a music dump anyone listen to anything interesting?

Harlow's still here

Tue, 09 Dec 2025 06:00:28 GMT

quote [Fifty years ago, Harlow was the queen of Philadelphia nightlife, Jack Kelly’s girlfriend, and the city's most famous transgender woman. Today, she’s ready to tell her story.] Entry Comment: Cats hanging down like in Philly

The Ball of The Burning Men

Mon, 08 Dec 2025 13:52:34 GMT

quote [On a freezing January night in 1393, music and laughter filled the Hôtel Saint-Pol, a sprawling palace on the right bank of Paris. The French court had gathered for a masquerade ball in honour of a lady-in-waiting’s remarriage — a diversion meant to lift the spirits of King Charles VI, a 24-year-old monarch already shadowed by bouts of mental instability.] Entry Comment: The smell of death and dried blood

In 1995, a Netscape employee wrote a hack in 10 days that now runs the Internet

Sun, 07 Dec 2025 15:56:56 GMT

quote [Eich himself wrote in 2006 that “ECMAScript,” the official name for the language standard, “was always an unwanted trade name that sounds like a skin disease.”] Entry Comment: No new facts for people in the know, but a nice recollection of 90s style programming and trademarks lingering in our machines. Also: the 10 days were a demo prototype, as the article states itself.

A Theology of Smuggling

Sun, 07 Dec 2025 11:58:04 GMT

quote [In the early 1980s, in Tucson, activists and religious leaders joined forces to protect refugees at the U.S.-Mexico border. Their collaboration galvanized the Sanctuary Movement.] Entry Comment: Oh, with the smuggling crew