Content-Type: text/shitpost

For around 18 months in 1673–4, the city of New York was recaptured by the Dutch and named New Orange.

This got me thinking about a world in which New Amsterdam remained under Dutch control up to the present. (Perhaps it would include only some subset of Manhattan?) I need to think about this more.

Craig Burley has answered the question of why 3 isn't bigger: because it lacks fortitude!

Olivia Newton-John is the granddaughter of Max Born, winner of the 1954 Nobel Prize for Physics.

I've assumed for a long time that fares on rapit transit systems like the subway ot the BART should obey the triangle inequality: going from A to C directly shouldn't cost more than going from A to B, leaving the system, and then coming back in to go from B to C.

But now I wonder why I ever thought this. A short, direct route is a valuable thing, and a passenger might be willing to pay a premium for it.

Or to make the difference even clearer, suppose, that the route from A to C via B uses an old, grungy, low-speed service, and the direct route is fast and clean. You might be willing to pay more for the direct route.

Gitlab is having a one-day mini-conference in Brooklyn.

To send one person costs $499.

To send two people costs $998.

To send three people costs $1497.

To send 4 people costs $996.

You can send six people for the same cost as sending three, five for less than that.

Someone is not thinking about what they are doing.

Stuff like this really bugs me. It's not hard to get right. And it should be familiar to everyone how to get it right, because it's the way federal income tax works.

… to be late!

Today I spotted someone using the word “frankenblog” to mean an unfortunate mashup of the Tumblr and Wordpress software.

It's awesome that the prefix “Franken-” has become a productive morpheme.

One of my all-time favorite questions from the audience during a conference talk: I was discussing Y2K problems in date formats, I think in email message headers, and this attendee asked if my proposed practice, of using a 4-digit year, wasn't subject to Y10K problems instead.

There are two answers to that. One is that, in the context of a message header, there is nothing to stop you from going on to 5-digit years when the times comes. The problems intrude only if in the year 10000 you stupidly decide to roll over, odometer-style, to 0000.

But the larger answer is that it does not make sense to plan network protocols on an 8,000-year timescale. 8,000 years ago, we had invented fire and agriculture, but not writing. Metallurgy and metal tools were still works in progress.

Trying to predict the information technology needs of the year 10,000 is at least as silly as asking someone from the neolithic era whether message headers should use a 2- or 4-digit date format, and less likely to produce a useful answer.

Katara and I were on the sofa, and I mused aloud “It's funny how there's no adjective like “three-itude” that expresses how much threeness you have, or how much you are like the number three. You can't say ‘I wish I had as much threeitude as that other person.’”

Unsuspecting, she walked right into my trap:

“There isn't anything like that for any number, is there?”

“Forti-tude.”

If your band's cover of “Eleanor Rigby” is more than three minutes, you're doing something wrong.

Tags: itsTrue

The surname “Parker” was originally an occupational name. It dates back to the valet parking services instituted in 1534 at Hampton Court by Henry VIII.

Construed as relations, the logical ∧ operator is transitive, but the logical ∨ is not.

Hittites did not live in Mesopotamia. They lived in Anatolia, what is now Turkey.