“Bertie Sheldrake was a South London pickle manufacturer who converted to Islam and became king of a far-flung Islamic republic before returning to London and settling back into obscurity.”

The number of supercentenarians in an area tends to fall dramatically about 100 years after accurate birth records are introduced.

Ukrainian defenders print out giant 1:1 life-size aerial photographs of damaged airfields. Once the site is repaired, they hang the images over the sites so they look damaged and not worth attacking again.

and 49 other things Tom Whitwell learned in 2023

First Zoom meeting of the week is in 20 minutes. I’m ready.

I’m going back to cross-posting from mitchw.blog to @mitchw@mastodon.social. Mastodon is part of the Fediverse (of course), but it’s not one with the fediverse.

This system may need further adjusting later today or this week, and almost certainly need adjusting in the near term as the fediverse evolves.

“I reversed my type 2 diabetes. Here’s how I did it”

Neil Barsky at The Guardian: One gray Sunday in the middle of the Covid lockdown, I received an unwelcome call from my family doctor. Until then, for virtually my entire life, I had managed to stay out of a doctor’s office, except for routine checkups. My luck had run out. “I am sorry to disturb you on a weekend,” she said. “But your tests just came back and your blood sugar levels are alarming.

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A new theory of “wobbly spacetime” potentially reconciles quantum mechanics and relativity—one of the greatest scientific mysteries of the past century.

The macroscopic world of relativity and the subatomic world of quantum physics are fundamentally different. And both those worlds are different—and mostly incomprehensible—to humans and the other complex life forms that inhabit Earth.

WSJ: Is This the End of ‘Intel Inside’? Intel is competing with nearly every other tech giant, including longtime joined-at-the-hip partner Microsoft.

Notes toward a theory of the Dad Thriller

Max Read: .. you know the kind of movies I’m talking about: Movies set on submarines; movies set on aircraft carriers; movies where lawyers are good guys; movies where guys secure the perimeter and/or the package; movies where a guy has to yell to make himself heard over a helicopter; movies where guys with guns break the door into a room decorated with cut-out newspaper headlines. … Movies that dads like.

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What went wrong with ‘the Metaverse’? An insider’s postmortem. The Metaverse failed, but metaverses like Fortnite are big and growing, with more to come. By Wagner James Au.

The way we live in the United States is not normal.

Kirsten Powers: I began to notice a learned helplessness in the United States, where people don’t revolt at the notion of a college education costing hundreds of thousands of dollars. I wondered why so many people treat it as completely normal that we have GoFundMe campaigns to help people pay for life-saving medical care that their health insurance won’t cover. I watched as people on social media claimed it was “pro-labor” to tip a person for ringing up your order at a food or coffee chain rather than demanding the multi-millionaire (or billionaire) owner of that company pay their employees a living wage (as is the norm in Europe, where tipping is not expected and the owners of the restaurants and stores are typically not among the uber-wealthy).

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Everybody Knows Flo From Progressive. Who Is Stephanie Courtney? How “Flo” transformed Progressive Insurance and the life of Stephanie Courtney, the actor who plays the role on commercials since 2008.

I found this entertaining and informative article surprisingly relevant to my own career and life.

‘I was told not to make eye contact with Tom Cruise’: meet the world’s most prolific film extra. Over a 60-year career, Jill Goldston has been a face in the crowd—literally, that’s her job—in 2,000 movies.

Raycast has a new feature where you can activate your Mac camera and look at yourself before jumping on a video call. I tried it out as soon as I got to my desk this morning, before having my first sip of coffee. That was a mistake.

So it begins. My Tumblr blog, formerly known as “Atomic Robot Live,” is now “Mitchipedia.” Now to discover the inevitable breakage! Let the wild rumpus of error messages begin!

Hollywood Goes Home: How Celebrity Endorsements Are Helping Dems Win Down Ballot. “In towns across the nation, there is _that _person — the kid who made it big, starred in some movies, became an action hero, maybe even won some awards. What if that person told you about an upcoming local election? Or a candidate who you should consider supporting? They are famous, sure, but they are more than that: They are _your town’s _famous person, someone with local credibility because they know what it’s like to grow up where you did. That’s the theory behind The Hometown Project, an progressive effort that looks to pair celebrities with candidates for state legislature, school board, or other local offices from the areas they grew up in.”

I will gladly endorse any Democrat running for office in my home town of East Northport, N.Y.

I’m having a couple of mandarin oranges with lunch. They’ve been sitting around the house a while. I think I will use the remaining fruits as billiard balls.

I recently discovered the power of not having opinions about things. Was Henry Kissinger a war criminal whose death we should celebrate? I don’t know. Maybe one day I’ll learn some things about him and come up with some conclusions. I have other things to do right now.

I registered the domain mitchipedia.org and now I love it so much I’m thinking about going to the hassle of changing alllllllll my social media accounts and my blog domain to that.

Red Hat kickstarts king-size Kubernetes cloud cost cuts. The Flaming Fedora fellowship debuts OpenShift Service on AWS (ROSA) with hosted control plane, which it claims can cut costs of running Kubernetes clusters by 20%. I wrote this.