/link-log

Just like it says on the tin! 🔍

Information I've recently looked up or come across.

See also:

2023

March

January

  • Layoff Brain from Anne Helen Petersen

    Denigrating younger generations’ higher expectations is just another way of saying you’ve internalized the understanding that you should have none …

  • Blond is more than just a hair color by Tressie McMillan Cottom

    When people have outsize emotional reactions to benign inquiries about their self-evident beliefs, it is often an indicator that status is doing invisible work.

2022

December

July

June

March

February

January

2021

December

October

September

August

July

June

May

April

2020

What haven't I looked up this year. That said, I haven't been attentive to documenting it here. Let's try to get back on track.

November

October

2019

December

November

October

  • Difference(s) between .forEach and .map in Javascript. The crucial bit is this: .forEach doesn't return anything, .map returns a new array. They both let you do something to each item in an array, but only one gives back.
  • The difference between postfix and prefix unary operators, specifically incrementing. The MDN docs on Increment(++) did the best job explaining it for my brain.
    • postfix returns the value before doing the work
    • prefix returns the value after doing the work.

July

  • Watching the 2019 Track & Field Outdoor Championships and I think this is the first time I've watched the long-distance events and for the men's 5000m, the runner's started in 2 groups. I found a little about how these races start (~65% of the field in one group, the rest in another ahead of them) but not why. 🤔

June

2018

November

  • Why do I suddenly have to enter my SSH password every time I do something in Terminal with git/GitHub?
    • Because in an update to Sierra the default behavior--defaulting to saving passwords in the Keychain--was reversed and now you must turn it on deliberately in the SSH config file. OpenSSH updates in macOS 10.12.2 (via StackOverflow)

22-29 July

  • chondromalacia Oh! Runner's knee. Ha. Full name: chondromalacia patella. That just rolls right off the tongue, doesn't it. Info from Cedars-Sinai

    The patella is covered with a layer of smooth cartilage, which normally glides across the knee when the joint is bent.

    The pain is caused by an irritation of the undersurface or patella of the kneecap as the kneecap rubs against one side of the knee joint, irritating the cartilage surface.

    Oof. Just reading that makes my teeth hurt.

01-07 July

  • I've been watching tennis for a number of years, but I don't know and haven't looked up what the Open Era is.

    • Britcannica.com : tennis : history, Professional and open tennis. Ah, so prior to 1968 there just weren't tournaments where professionals and amateurs could compete openly.

      Although the traditional tournament circuit was avowedly amateur, leading players were paid substantial guarantees “under the table” in addition to expenses. For more than four decades there was discussion of having “open” competition between amateurs and pros to end the hypocrisy of “shamateurism,” but proposals were always defeated by conservative elements within the International Lawn Tennis Federation (ILTF—later the ITF).

13-19 May

04-10 February

  • My friend Tiff has a tradition of keeping us updated on the comings and goings of the booze cruise and cruise ship traffic when she's with her family in Mexico.
  • segfaults, or segmentation faults, or When Things Go Terribly Wrong I hang out in our #tech-ops channel at work because tech ops is not my purview, but Ben always provides lots of detail for historical record which turns out to be super useful for someone like me who likes to look things up. 🤓

2017

13-19 November

  • My contribution to Friendsgiving on Thursday next is applesauce (my favorite thing to make) and a cocktail and obviously I'm going to choose a gin cocktail and surprising precisely no one my first thought was: a French 75! 💕
    • Behind the Drink: the French 75
      • naturally, almost every recipe I've found today has slightly different amounts of each ingredient.
    • I'm also thinking I'll "just" go with a Bowie Knife: partly because most people don't know it and partly because there's just 1 version of the recipe (from Playboy of all places). 👩🏽‍🔬

06-12 November

  • I've got a plan to make candles this season and I've noticed the trend toward (a) wooden wicks and (b) actively pointing out the use of soy wax, so… I'm reading up:

    • I admit I didn't realize paraffin is / can be petroleum-based

    • Are paraffin wax candles dangerous? (apart from the fire hazard, that is)

      This CNN article from 2009 is the most balanced take I've found so far. Balanced because it cites a South Carolina State University study and doesn't hide or downplay that (a) there's still some debate (as ever) and (b) it is possible to mitigate the accumulation of the unwanted chemicals.

  • In reading that SCSU study, the following made me curious:

    Massoudi’s research stems from a desire to address a possible public health concern, boost the American agricultural economy and promote sustainability.

    The candles emissions study is funded by 1890 Research & Extension, a federal and state funded program that helps ensure SC State achieves its land-grant mission of improving the lives of limited resource individuals, families and communities through research, teaching and service.

    • Background on the 1890 Research and Extension Program
    • A little more detail about the Second Morrill Act of 1890, particularly aimed at the former Confederate states. "This act required each state to show that race was not an admissions criterion, or else to designate a separate land-grant institution for persons of color." I think I can be forgiven for being deeply sketpical on this point at that point in history, however. SCSU is an HBCU, so.

23-29 October

  • Why do we (Americans, anyway) pronouce "reveille" as "REH-va-lee"? Every time I see it, I hear it (in my head) the French way (guttural r and all) and it takes a beat to remember the other way.

09-15 October

  • Scylla & Charybdis: you'd think as a lit major (and a fan of the Percy Jackson series!) these wouldn't be names I'd have to look up, but here we are, friends; here we are. So, today we learned that they're both sea monsters, one on the rocks (Scylla) and one with a whirlpool (Charybdis), and they stayed across from each other.

    • what prompted me to look them up is this from What Works for Women at Work by Joan C. Williams and Rachel Dempsey:

      "Savvy is a threshold requirement for women. We have to be astute enough to tack back and forth, navigating between the Scylla of being "too feminine" (and so liked but not respected) and the Charybdis of being "too masculine" (and so respected but not liked)."

02-08 October

25 September-01 October

04-10 September

  • HTTP Status Codes: you might think after so many years making my living via the Internet I know these by heart, but you would be wrong, friendo!

    • favorite code: 418: I'm a teapot

      Any attempt to brew coffee with a teapot should result in the error code "418 I'm a teapot". The resulting entity body MAY be short and stout.

28 August-03 September

  • starboard, n. I know that it's the right side (facing forward) of a ship, but I was always forgetting to look up the why.

    This side of the ship was so called with reference to the single side rudders used in early Germanic ships, which were typically suspended on the right side of the vessel (for comfortable use by a right-handed helmsman). From the Oxford English Dictionary.

21-27 August

  • portage: noun "the carrying of boats or goods overland from one body of water to another or around an obstacle (such as a rapids)" Lori's post about an upcoming trip got me to look it up because I've never heard it in this context before. Neato! (We have Portage Bay in Seattle, but I never looked it up!) 🚣‍♀️

14-20 August

  • I was telling Jason about the occasional game of 6 Degrees of Ciarán Hinds that @tiffehr and I sometimes play. And he challenged me to go from Hinds to… Carrot Top. Honestly, I wasn't sure I'd be able to do it. But 5 minutes later… 😎

    Carrot Top The Aristocrats > Chris Rock The Fresh Prince of Bel Air > Will Smith Wild, Wild West > Kenneth Branagh half the movies in his career > Emma Thompson Harry Potter & the Deathly Hallows > Ciarán Hinds

    💥

07–13 August

  • cleaning silver… I know that you can clean silver jewelry with tin foil, boiling water, and baking soda, but almost none of the articles & blog posts touting the technique explain why. 😩 Philadelphia Museum of Art to the rescue! Hands-Free Silver "Polishing"

    It's an electrochemical reaction doing the heavy lifting. The baking soda makes it easier for electrons to move between the silver & aluminum and the aluminum reduces the silver sufide (tarnish) back to silver and produces aluminum sulfide in the process. Why boiling water? Makes the whole process go faster! Nifty.

  • permille ‰: I don't know how I've been a type nerd this long and never come across the permille, or indeed thought harder about the components of the word "per-cent" 😳 Of course it only has one 0 in the divisor! Oy.

    Came across it in The Loveliest Living Fossil by Jonathan Hoefler.

  • Monument to the Third International (Tatlin's Tower): listening to an episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, this tower came up and I couldn't remember ever hearing about it or having seen it. The hosts on NSTAAF remarked on its double-helix design predating the discovery of DNA's structure by several decades, but what I find interesting is this discussion about spirals and how they relate to/function as a metaphor for the repetition of capitalism. Huh!

  • Boricua: a Puerto Rican, especially one living in the United States. Listening to Code Switch last weekend, Bobbito reminded me I've heard this word a bunch of times (like in the middle of "Jenny from the Block"!) and always forget to look it up, but this time I remembered!

    Mystery solved! (:

  • I always mix up which type of soil produces blue and pink hydrangeas, Farmer's Almanac to the rescue! Low pH below 5.5 (acidic): blue; higher pH over 5.5 (more base): pink. (White flowered hydrangeas aren't affected by the soil's pH.)

31 July–04 August

  • Subaru's "pzev" badge on their vehicles (was behind one this morning on the way to work). Ah, "partial zero emissions vehicle".

    • What is a PZEV?

      PZEVs run on gasoline, yet offer extremely clean emissions with zero evaporative emissions.

    • Origin story: California's zero emission vehicles mandate, PZEVs are a compromise (and hard to type correctly).

    • Heh, one of the other sources I found was mostly a huffy rant about the California Air Resources Board, sooo no link for them.

  • HTMLHint: saw it in a commit for a big upcoming project.   - That about statement is… it could be better, but I like the way they're using the repo's wiki for the documentation. 👍

  • Transpiling ES6: ran through their Babel section just to see how it does things.

    • We end up in such weird places with the names of related / similar tools: Gulp, Brocoli, Brunch. Honestly.

  • heteroglossia from the phrase "a heteroglossic wonderland" (which goes straight on to the band name list).

    The intro on this isn't as good as it could be, but I think this bit in the first section gets at the meat in heteroglossia (and provides support for the relationship to code switching):

    Extending his argument, Bakhtin proposes that all languages represent a distinct point of view on the world, characterized by its own meaning and values. In this view, language is "shot through with intentions and accents" (1981: 324), and thus there are no neutral words. Even the most unremarkable statement possesses a taste, whether of a profession, a party, a generation, a place or a time. To Bakhtin, words do not exist until they are spoken, and that moment they are printed with the signature of the speaker.

    Bakhtin identifies the act of speech, or of writing, as a literary-verbal performance, one that requires speakers or authors to take a position, even if only by choosing the dialect in which they will speak.

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