Dictionary of the Khazars by Milorad Pavić.

It’s a novel written in the form of three (Christian, Jewish, and Muslim) interwoven but mutually-contradictory encyclopedias, with events and characters spanning over a thousand years of history.

Because of the inverse relationship between velocity and diameter.

The velocity is proportional to bladder pressure and inversely proportional to the square of the diameter of the urethra. The shape of the body parts outside the urethra is irrelevant.

We don’t make shirtwaists any more, so locking workers in factories is now perfectly safe! (And they say we don’t learn from history.)

Yeah, sounds like he’s trying to explain to boomers why their policies are obsolete.

All multi-cellular organisms use hormones and other chemicals to send signals between cells. Plants and animals inherited the same system—and many of the same molecular signals—but we adapt the specific purpose of each signal to whatever messages our bodies need to transmit.

It’s similar to how related languages can derive words from a common ancestor, but the meaning of the word in each language changes differently over time.

The quietest one I’ve found so far is Phillips Sonicare—it’s not much louder than an open tap or running shower.

Quietness is a quality easy to overlook until you find yourself reluctant to use it for fear of waking up everyone in your household/apartment building/surrounding neighborhood.

Many overseas self-media vloggers have hailed the technology, calling it “the future of education,” China Central Television (CCTV) reported on Tuesday.

Is “overseas self-media vloggers” the Chinese term for influencers?

He dropped out because he was the weak candidate.

How did he assess that, though? Especially when the candidate he told his supporters to vote for instead only got 16.4% of the vote compared to his own 50.4%.

Why did Smith drop out early if he was facing such a weak field? Was there some personal scandal?

The modern reprint must be the special Fermat edition.

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I bought the Compact Oxford English Dictionary (the one with micrographic text) as a gift for a friend who was a linguistics major. It was also around $300.

Greenland has over ten times the area of non-glaciated land that Iceland does. So if you’re measuring “green” in terms of absolute area instead of percentages, the name fits.

I think you run into trouble when you try to define consciousness by how reality reacts to it, because we have no objective access to how reality reacts to anything except as filtered through our own consciousness.

we can ask whether a system has an integrated point of view within which possible outcomes become meaningfully different for that system, rather than merely being classified differently by it

How about defining “meaningfully different” as outcomes that persist as distinct states into the arbitrarily distant future? That wouldn’t require any objective response from external reality, but it would require the system to have some ability to predict the evolution of external reality outside of its current task.

ibm choose ms-dos as their os because the owner of their first choice was out flying his plane when they went to make the deal so they went with their second choice bill gates

And Gates set up the meeting with the first guy, and as likely as not misrepresented its importance.

See Goodhart’s law: “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure”.

If LLMs are judged by some specific metric meant to track their negative impact, they’ll adapt to make the metric look good without improving the underlying impact.

My point isn’t whether or not the best candidate won, it’s that the outcome depended on how many candidates each faction split their votes between. A bigger field wasn’t a reflection of “where the base was” if more candidates supporting a position made it less likely to win.

I’ve gotten a summons almost every year. Most of the time I just call in a few times and don’t have to report; most of the times I do need to report in, I end up sitting in jury pool room for half a day and then going home. Once I was selected as an alternate juror; I spent a few weeks listening to testimony with the regular jurors, but wasn’t needed for the deliberations or verdict.