My brothers, sisters, and siblings I have spent far too long on this. I present to you:

The Periodic Table of Rock and Roll

John Finnemore on the French horn/cor anglais:

"I was idly wondering why the cor anglais has a French name meaning ‘English horn’, and the French horn has an English name meaning… well, ‘French horn’. I looked it up, even though I knew there would just be some reasonable but rather dull explanation.

"There isn’t. There is a completely bonkers explanation, in both cases. Here’s the first.

"So. The cor anglais isn’t English, or French. But that’s nothing, because another thing it isn’t is… a horn. It’s basically an overgrown oboe, and it’s from Silesia. But being thin with a bulb on the end, it looks a little like the trumpets angels are shown playing in medieval art.

"Or at least it did to the Germans, who started calling it the Engellisches Horn, or angel’s horn. Can you see the hilarious misunderstanding that’s about to happen? Well, that happened. The Italians thought the Germans called it the English Horn, so they translated it to corno inglese. The French got it from the Italians, and called it the cor anglais. The British got it from the French, and presumably stared at it, thought ‘We can’t call that an English horn! It’s nothing to do with us, we’ve only just this minute seen one!’ …and I suppose decided just to keep the French name to save embarrassment.

"But that is rationality itself compared to what happened with the “French” horn.

"Right. The French horn. It isn’t French, or English… but it is a horn. So that’s something. (In fact, horn players just call it ‘the horn’, and they wish you would too, but they can’t make you.) This story is simpler than the cor anglais one, but even more gloriously stupid.

"The French were famous for making beautiful hunting-horn type horns: curly tubes that made a nice noise when you blew through them. Then the Germans came up with a more complicated horn with slides and crooks and valves and what-have-you. So British horn players started calling the horns they played in orchestras French Horns, to make it clear they were having nothing to do with those funny looking new German horns with all the bits hanging off them. But the thing is… slides and crooks and valves and what-have-you are a really good idea. You can play tunes with them and everything. So, before long, in a brilliantly British combination of ruthless pragmatism and equally ruthless face-saving, British horn players were playing German horns… but still calling them French horns.

"In summary then: the cor anglais, or English horn, is a Silesian oboe that the Italians thought the Germans thought was English, but the Germans actually thought looked angelic. Whereas the French horn is a German horn that the British called the French horn to distinguish it from the German horn… which is what it is.

"All clear? Good. Carry on."

In retrospect, strange women lying in ponds distributing swords really might've been a better basis for a system of government.

ICE to Help Protect World Cup Host Cities from Making Any Money from International Tourists: https://theneedling.com/2026/06/09/ice-to-help-protect-world-cup-host-cities-from-making-any-money-from-international-tourists/

katie couric on the internet in 1994 is increasingly my vibe

Hot take: command line apps are a better AI interface than mcp

Response time isn't even right, it's more like just regular processing time now. There's nothing latent about it.

When did latency get redefined to mean response time?

I like to think of astronomy as the study of everything in the universe. True enough… but what are we missing?

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/are-astronomers-ignoring-some-of-the-cosmos/

[I wrote this!]

MLB will never do it but MLBPA and every other American pro league's PA should celebrate a Curt Flood Day https://pca.st/episode/b55f0a74-d83a-4ed0-b8de-57d0121ecdc1

Has anyone tried one of those Daylight Computer things? They looked fascinating, but I’ve never seen one in the wild.

https://daylightcomputer.com/

Interesting to see Copilot injecting ads into PR descriptions. Although there are a handful of older instances of this, if GitHub search is working properly, it looks like this started happening at scale around 10 days ago with more than 1k injections of this particular ad per day since then (if you search for other ad strings, you can find the rate of other ads)

https://github.com/search?q=%22%E2%9A%A1+Quickly+spin+up+copilot+coding+tasks+from+anywhere+on+your+macOS+or+Windows+machine+with+Raycast%22&type=pullrequests&s=created&o=asc&p=1

What will they think of next?

RE: https://newsie.social/@TheNeedling/116508337552424571

As fans unveiled Mariners legend Randy Johnson’s retired number tonight, many were delighted to discover the confetti raining down on them was actually an explosion of feathers.

Them: If you tax billionaires, they’ll just leave.

Me: Why are you listing the benefits? I thought you were against this.

My township makes announcements and whatnot on Facebook. If it is a long post, you can only see so much before logging in. So, if I want to get information about my local government, I have to ask Mark Zuckerberg.

Something is very, very wrong with that.

#OnThisDay, 1 May 1944, South African Phyllis Latour parachutes into occupied France to be a radio operator for the British Special Operations Executive.

She's never captured.

She died in 2023, in New Zealand.

#WomenInHistory #OTD #History #WomensHistory #WorldWar2 #Histodons
1/2

Once again, my professional recommendation in response to the latest Linux kernel vulnerability in the news is that you should gather up all your electronic devices, cast them into the sea, and retreat to the woods.

Each night, gather your children and tell them tales of the Before Times when the hubris of humanity grew so large that we made idols of sand and spoke to them as equals. Remind them that the sand, of course, did not speak or think, but we imagined it could, and let it guide us to folly.

Should a stranger ever come to your village with a glowing rectangle, encourage the youth to beat them with sticks.

#infosec

I stared at this picture for an hour, trying to write a caption that was worthy of this masterpiece of photographic art. In the end, I realized that there was absolutely nothing I could add to the perfection captured in this image. Enjoy it. Immerse yourself in it. EXPERIENCE IT.

“but how would you know what the IP address was, grandad?”

“well, that’s the thing, it didn’t have one.”

“oh, so how would you update the firmware then?”

“it had none. it was just a tea kettle.”

“woah.”

#microfiction

Number of people who go bankrupt every year because of medical bills or illness-related work loss:

🇦🇺 0
🇨🇦 0
🇩🇰 0
🇫🇮 0
🇫🇷 0
🇩🇪 0
🇮🇸 0
🇮🇪 0
🇮🇹 0
🇯🇵 0
🇳🇱 0
🇳🇴 0
🇵🇹 0
🇪🇸 0
🇸🇪 0
🇬🇧 0
🇺🇸 530,000

There’s a lesson there.