Content-Type: text/shitpost

Etsy search for “not a place of honor” produces nothing relevant. This is a hundred-dollar-bill on the sidewalk, waiting to be picked up.

I want it on a doormat.

Tootsie Pops! New Himalayan pink salt flavor.

• The western blot was named as a joke. There was already a Southern blot test that was named after its inventor, Edwin Southern.

Though rarely seen, the Siberian Snow Camel is a majestic beast, with its splayed hooves and shaggy white fur. Modern populations of Snow Camels are believed to be remnants of the great herds that crossed the land bridge during the last ice age and whose descendants evolved into the bison of the North American plains.

This video is an unboxing of a 20,000-watt incandescent light bulb. (“It doesn't have a filament in it, it has eight garage door springs.”) My question: why was this bulb manufactured in the first place? What are the applications?

If you need that much light, even before LEDs, you would probably use mercury-vapor or metal halide lamps, which draw much less power and probably lasted a lot longer. So what's this for?

Also, I remember seeing in a museum an even larger incandescent bulb, touted as the largest ever made. Maybe at the Chicago Museum of Science and Industry? Does this ring a bell for anyone else?

Twitter says they're going to encourage their programmers to replace the term “dummy value” with “placeholder value” and now I can hardly wait for the chance to refer to someone as a “placeholder value”.

• Kola nuts are native to Africa, not South America.

A colleague asked me to provide “choice quotes” from Thomas's dissent, which I said “might be the most Clarence Thomasy thing I've ever read”. But I think they were disappointed, because what makes it so very Clarence Thomasy is how dry and fussy it is. Here's a choice quote, if you can call it that, which examplifies what I had in mind:

The Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals concluded that petitioner’s claim was procedurally barred under state law because it was “not raised previously on direct appeal” and thus was “waived for further review.” This state procedural bar was applied independent of any federal law, and it is adequate to support the decision below. We therefore lack jurisdiction to disturb the state court’s judgment.

Maybe I should write a longer article on the real blog explaining what this means. I wouldn't have to worry that doing so would kill the joke, because there is no joke and there was nothing funny to begin with.

Am I the only person who imagines that Clarence Thomas is severely constipated, like, almost all the time?

I thought that the recent McGirt decision would have some connection with _Sherrill v. Oneida Nation, but no, there is no mention of it whatever. I must be seriously confused about something, can anyone tell me what?

On review, I see that it did come up briefly in oral argument:

Sherrill is always in the room when the states and the tribes are negotiating agreements

so I'm not completely confused.

I would like to understand this better.

Finite sets are always compact. Suppose we have an infinite compact space. Is it possible that the only compact proper subspaces that it possesses are the finite ones? The answer turns out to be no. Every infinite compact space has an infinite compact proper subspace. So by repetition, every infinite compact space has an infinite descending chain of compact subspaces.

I thought hey, here we have a partial order (of infinite compact subspaces) in which every descending chain has a lower bound, so we can apply Zorn's lemma… except no, not every chain has a lower bound, what was I thinking? If we include the finite subspaces then every chain does have a lower bound and we can apply Zorn's lemma, but the result is the empty subspace so that was not useful.

Interesting: The example of !![0,1]!! shows that you can't always obtain a smaller compact subspace by deleting a finite set from the original space.

The compact subspaces of an infinite compact set form a rather interesting lattice structure. At the bottom are the finite subsets, arranged like a very ordinary Boolean lattice, but with no maximum element. (Isn't there a name for a complete associative lattice that may or may not have a maximum element?) Floating above this are the infinite compact subspaces, in which there are no minimal elements, and the original space at the top.

Consider just a relatively simple example. Let !!X!! be the one-point compactification of the natural numbers. That is, $$X = \Bbb N \cup {\infty}$$ where a subset !!G!! of !!X!! is open if and only if !!G!! is a finite set that does not contain !!∞!! or !!G!! is a cofinite set that does contain !!∞!!. An infinite compact subspace of !!X!! must contain !!∞!!.

Clarence Thomas's dissent in McGirt might be the most Clarence Thomasy thing I've ever read.

• Spanish for “tumbleweed” is “la rodadora”.

• There is a really cool-sounding museum in Ciudad Juárez called La Rodadora espacio interactivo (Tumbleweed interactive space). New place on my should-visit list!

• Townsville, Australia is not a joke. It is named for Robert Towns.

Montana is the U.S. version of Inner Mongolia.

The last thing I remember from my dreams this morning is someone informing me, very authoritatively, that there are three things that Alexander the Great really wants.

I don't remember the first two but the third was bow-tie pasta.

Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen
Had a very shiny nose.

Today I learned that Reddit has an r/notinteresting forum.

Amused, I checked into it, and was disappointed to discover that it was not interesting.

Disappointed?

It's kinda funny that we still have “happen”, “happy”, “mishap”, “hapless”, “haphazard”, and so on, but the original word “hap” is completely gone.

“Pissburgh”.

I did this twice.

I am so, so sorry.

I don't know why you would care, but here are the additions I have made over the years:

    #
    # MJD additions
    #
    <Multi_key> <p> <i>                             : "π"    U03c0   # GREEK SMALL LETTER PI
    <Multi_key> <e> <p> <s>                         : "ε"    U03c0   # GREEK SMALL LETTER EPSILON
    <Multi_key> <grave> <grave>                     : "ʻ"    U02BB   # MODIFIER LETTER TURNED COMMA (Okina)
    <Multi_key> <o> <equal>                         : "ő"   U0151   # LATIN SMALL LETTER O WITH DOUBLE ACUTE
    <Multi_key> <O> <equal>                         : "Ő"   U0150   # LATIN CAPITAL LETTER O WITH DOUBLE ACUTE

    <Multi_key> <O> <1>                             : "①"   U2460   # CIRCLED DIGIT  ONE
    <Multi_key> <O> <2>                             : "②"   U2461   # CIRCLED DIGIT   TWO
    <Multi_key> <O> <3>                             : "③"   U2462  # CIRCLED DIGIT  THREE
    <Multi_key> <O> <4>                             : "④"   U2463   # CIRCLED DIGIT  FOUR
    <Multi_key> <O> <5>                             : "⑤"   U2464   # CIRCLED DIGIT  FIVE
    <Multi_key> <O> <6>                             : "⑥"   U2465   # CIRCLED DIGIT  SIX
    <Multi_key> <O> <7>                             : "⑦"   U2466   # CIRCLED DIGIT  SEVEN
    <Multi_key> <O> <8>                             : "⑧"   U2467   # CIRCLED DIGIT  EIGHT
    <Multi_key> <O> <9>                             : "⑨"   U2468   # CIRCLED DIGIT  NINE
    <Multi_key> <O> <0>                             : "⓪"   U24EA   # CIRCLED DIGIT  ZERO

    <Multi_key> <bar> <minus>                       : "⊢"    U22A2  # RIGHT TACK
    <Multi_key> <bar> <equal>                       : "⊧"    U22A7 # MODELS

    <Multi_key> <i> <n>                       : "ϵ"    U03F5 # GREEK LUNATE EPSILON SIGN

    <Multi_key> <bracketleft> <bracketleft>     : "⸢"    U2E22  # TOP LEFT HALF BRACKET
    <Multi_key> <bracketright> <bracketright>   : "⸣"    U2E23  # TOP RIGHT HALF BRACKET

    <Multi_key> <slash> <backslash>   : "∧"    U2227  # LOGICAL AND
    <Multi_key> <backslash> <slash>   : "∨"    U2228  # LOGICAL OR
    <Multi_key> <hyphen> <comma>      : "¬"    U00AC  # NOT SIGN
    <Multi_key> <tilde> <tilde>       : "¬"    U00AC  # NOT SIGN

    <Multi_key> <G> <H>     : "Ȝ"    U021C  # LATIN CAPITAL LETTER YOGH
    <Multi_key> <g> <h>     : "ȝ"    U021D  # LATIN SMALL LETTER YOGH

It turns out that the file I was given already had sequences for Ő and ő, but only with the <equal> before the letter, not after, which meant that 50% of the time I couldn't find it.

Following Tony Finch's suggestion I have been using ⸢ and ⸣ (square quotes) as scare quotes.

I sometimes think about adding sequences for Greek letters other than π and ε, but it's really not the right place to solve the problem.

My computer environment came equipped with a giant .XCompose file full of useful abbreviations, many of which I use frequently. It is much easier to commit to spelling ‘Sierpiński’ correctly when there is an easy and natural way to type the ‘ń’.

But some things were missing, and I have gradually added them over the years. Today I discovered that while it predefined sequences for þ and ð, it had none for ȝ. (This makes sense, as þ and ð are still used in modern Icelandic, and even appear in ISO 8859-1, whereas ȝ is obsolete.)

Early on I had to add a sequence for ‘ő’ so that I wouldn't have to misspell “Erdős”. You can see where my priorities are.

“Kennel” is (ultimately) from Latin canis.

I went searching for Thomas Caxton and instead I typed “caaxtron”.

ALL TREMBLE IN FEAR BEFORE CAAXTRON 9000 THE INVINCIBLE, PRINTER OF WORLDS

Trump is talking about using tanks to quell the George Floyd protests, but the Pentagon is getting cold feet:

As of Monday morning, 17,000 National Guard troops had been deployed in 23 states and Washington, DC. No state has requested federal assistance, however, subverting the normal process for domestic military intervention, Pentagon officials told The Beast.

I can't get over the word “subverting” there. What do the unnamed Pentagon officials think the “normal process” is, or should be?