RE: https://xoxo.zone/@Ashedryden/117243744577309764

@USelaine This one. Thank you for pointing out my embarrassing mistake!

While most puns make me feel numb, math puns make me feel number.

The Ancient Greek Water Clock That Kept the Most Accurate Time for 1,800 Years
https://www.openculture.com/2026/09/the-ancient-greek-water-clock-that-kept-the-most-accurate-time-for-1800-years.html

What Really Destroyed the Library of Alexandria?
https://unwall.app/www.nationalgeographic.com/newsletters/article/library-of-alexandria-destruction-stones-bones

Camels per capita vs. pigs per capita

Sixty years ago today, the starship Enterprise launched and with it, a vision of the future where humanity had moved beyond its divisions. I was there at the beginning, and I can tell you: we never imagined how far that dream would travel, into homes, into hearts, into the way generations imagined what we could still become. In a world that often feels as divided as ever, maybe that's exactly why we need it now: a reminder that unity was always the point.

"One guy in #Sweden built a #searchengine to fight Google, and it works.

It's called #MarginaliaSearch.

It runs its own #crawler and builds its own #index instead of borrowing Bing's. It has no ads, no investors, and no loans.

What it does differently: it ranks for text-heavy, non-commercial pages. Personal blogs. Old university pages.

The weird corners SEO strangled. Every result tells you whether the page uses affiliate links and JavaScript, and you can filter them out.

There's an "explore" mode that just shows you random sites from the index. It's open source under AGPL, so you can host your own copy.

It's keyword-based, so don't type a full question at it. Type two nouns and see where you land. Every #searchengine now shows you the same twelve #monetizedpages."

https://marginalia-search.com/

RE: https://hachyderm.io/@eliasulrich/117234902637900790

This 👇 #MarginaliaSearch is a really interesting search engine. I wonder why URLs are obfuscated in search results though.

when they reintroduce wolves. theyre going to ring your doorbell and they'll be like "hello, i have the wolves, have you been introduced to them?" and you'll be like "oh not yet actually, i must say hello" and you'll open the door and the wolves will be out there. "its fantastic to meet you" and you'll shake each wolfs paw

The version of San Francisco that I viscerally dislike is the one that Herb Caen mythologizes.

‘Don’t call it Frisco’ type of guy with no space in his writing or his imagination for a San Francisco that wasn’t just white and upper middle class. (Black working class people call it Frisco)

This piece articulates what I’ve been feeling about his work: https://www.oaklandreviewofbooks.org/herb/

Even better that it’s in the Oakland Review of Books.

#SanFrancisco #Frisco #Oakland

One day you’re young and cool, the next you’re arriving at events early because the lake next to the event might have interesting ducks

Michael Ventris, who deciphered Linear B, the syllabic script used to write Mycenaean Greek [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_B], died #OnThisDay 70 years ago.

Others had paved the way, notably Alice Kober [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice_Kober], who had analysed the script and discovered evidence of inflection, which was a starting-point for Ventris to correlate signs representing syllables that had (e.g.) the same consonant sound but different vowel sounds.

John Chadwick, the philologist who became Ventris's collaborator after his initial breakthrough, wrote an excellent account of the decipherment for the non-specialist in ‘The Decipherment of Linear B’: https://archive.org/details/deciphermentofli0000unse_o2q4 (multiple copies on @internetarchive)

Attached is the ‘tripod tablet’, whose discovery was an important confirmation of the correctness of Ventris’s system, and its transcription from Chadwick's book.

#language #linguistics #philology #decipherment #LinearB #Histodons #GreekLanguage #Greek #AncientHistory #OTD

I also like this part of Chadwick's account:

“In August 1954 Ventris’ lecture to the International Classical Congress at Copenhagen was a triumph; when he showed the slide of the tripod tablet deciphered the whole of the large audience burst into applause, before he had said a word. After he had finished, a number of prominent Greek scholars publicly congratulated him and declared themselves convinced. I myself was not present, and it was only gradually that I learnt from others the extent of this success; Ventris himself was too modest to tell me more than that it ‘went off all right’.”

#understatement

Anthropeum.com · Sep 5 2026
🟦🟩🟩🟨🟦🟦🟦🟦🟦🟩
87,728 · top 1% of players today! // I feel like I should be able to submit my score today instead of a dissertation for a PhD in anthropology. (If they ask for past scores, though...um... never mind.)

we wouldn’t have as many problems with map projections if they simply had made Earth flat in the first place

A new study found that when they sense parasitic flatworms in their vicinity, mussels stop filtering to avoid infection. Even more interestingly, they also stop filtering when they detect periwinkles that are an intermediate host for the flatworm. "Oh God, those filthy periwinkles are back, everyone clam up!" #clamFacts

https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1140674

Surprisingly wide range of prey of the "American cheetah":
"Yukon population occupying an elevated trophic position consistent with exploitation of anadromous fish, while the Wyoming population functioned as a generalist terrestrial predator."
https://cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(26)01003-1
🧪⚒️ #Geology #Paleobio

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