Content-Type: text/shitpost

Waldo Peirce and his friend John Reed booked passage together on a freighter from Boston to England. As the ship was leaving Boston Harbor, Peirce decided that the accommodations were not to his taste. Without a word to anyone, he jumped off the back of the ship and swam several miles back to shore. Reed was then arrested by the ship's captain for the murder of his vanished travelling companion and thrown into the brig. When the freighter eventually arrived in England, Peirce was at the dock waiting to greet his friend Reed—he had dried himself off and taken a faster ship to England.

(Wikipedia)

• Midichlorians predated The Phantom Menace. There is a bacterium of that name. It is the closest known living relative of the free-living bacterium that joined symbiotically with the ancestor of the eukaryotic cell and became the mitochondrion.

Yesterday during a discussion of the necessarily relative nature of “potential energy”, the topic veered into what it would be like if we measured people's height from the center of the sun instead from to the surface of the earth.

Me: You'd be like 92 million miles tall.

Katara: Everyone would be the same!

Me: Yeah, but we'd all be taller at night than during the day.

The Big Dictionary has no citation for “pizazz” from before 1937. The earliest one is:

Pizazz, to quote the Harvard Lampoon and Harpers Bazaar, is an indefinable dynamic quality. (New York Times, 26 Feb 1937)

This strongly suggests that an antedating could be obtained by going through contemporary issues of Harvard Lampoon and Harpers Bazaar.

The spelling of pizazz has always been variable, but I was surprised to learn that during the 1960s it was sometimes spelled “bezazz”.

Weird.

• There's a Deaf Smith County in Texas.

• It's named after Deaf Smith. What did I expect?

• Deaf Smith was born Erastus Smith. His nickname was because he had a hearing impairment.

• The smell of burnt matches is caused by sulfur dioxide.

• The Big Dictionary's earliest citation for the phrase “R&D” is from Pohl and Kornbluth's novel The Space Merchants.

A while back I complained that the sufficx ‘-potamus’ wasn't widely-enough used. Today I saw this Reddit comment:

The only people I see with this quote on their car or on a t-shirt is the stay at home dependapotamus that complains about everything…

All the news that's Rupert Grint.

I dreamed that it was well-known that George H. W. Bush habitually cheated when putting together jigsaw puzzles, to persuade people that he was better at doing them than he really was.

In the dream I imagined that he would take a piece out of the puzzle and put it on the table. Then, when someone came by who might observe, he would pick up the piece he had removed, look at it for a moment, and put it instantly in the right spot.

But when I suggested this to someone else, they said that what he actually did was even more devious and underhanded. I was not able to find out what it was.

I also dreamt I was visiting Shanghai and left my money on the bus.

• Rollie Fingers was offered the chance to play for the Cincinnati Reds, but refused because they would have required him to shave his mustache. .

• Michael Douglas is the son of Kirk Douglas

The more I think about this, the more it seems to me that a monad is not at all a monoid in the category of endofunctors, but actually a monoidal subcategory.

That's the problem.

According to Twitter, I may have won the Iowa caucuses. What do I do now?

Where the morphisms are made up
and the objects don't matter!