The Roman calendar was really a hopeless mess of leftover lunarcy. Some months the Ides are the 15th, most the 13th, kalends were the first, and you counted dates forward to the next ides, kalends, or nones.

There was a good reason for 4:20 (though not particularly for 4/20.) It was when all of the Waldoes were done after-school activities and could get together and smoke before going home or riding bikes up and down the mountain or whatever.

They were both geeks, picked Pi Day as a day to get married. (I doubt they were the ones mentioned in the article, but I don't know them.)

Friends of mine had a Pi Day brunch yesterday. It didn't start at 9:26am, because that was just way too early, so they decided to end it at 9:26pm if anybody was still there. We reset one of the clocks to Eastern time so we could do 9:26pm EDT, cheer, etc.

yyyy/mm/dd has the advantage that it sorts correctly. dd/mm doesn't, especially if you drop leading zeros.

A few years ago I was at a conference in Germany, which was mostly held in English, with a few sessions in German. One of the speakers started out by saying that in some previous conferences he'd apologized for his English, but had been told by the moderator (who was Turkish) that "Bad English is the most widely spoken language in the world."

My experience is from decades ago at a different college, and every college is different (though many nationally-organized fraternities may have some consistency to them), and things change over time. We had 40-50 fraternity houses on campus, with maybe 4-5 "Animal House" kinds of places, a few "snootier than you" places, a few black fraternities that were social organizations without houses, an engineering nerd house, a few Aggie houses, a coed house, about 10-12 sororities. There were also some non-fraternity special residentials - Hillel, Ecology House, Ujamaa, a couple of artsie/music places. About half the male students joined fraternities after freshman year (and there wasn't much dorm space for upperclassmen, so otherwise they'd live in nearby student slums or out in the sticks.) The fraternities had a no-poaching rule that said you couldn't be a member of more than one, which meant that the houses were a bit whiter than average, though the years that my house wasn't full, we did have one or two boarders who were members of one of the black fraternities.

SAE wasn't any of those categories; they did have big open parties (drinking age was still 18, and they were close to freshman dorms, so yay, beer!), and a few noise complaints but not really more than average. I forget if the house where somebody died in an accident involving alcohol and falling was them or their next-door neighbor.

The Copenhagen bike-share system is free with a deposit of a coin that's worth about $5, which unlocks the bike, and you get your coin back when you relock it to a bikeshare rack. As the tourist guidebooks say, if you don't want to go to the trouble of returning your bike to the rack, a local bum will happily do it for you. (Ifound this to be correct, even when "not returning the bike" meant "hiding it in the shadows behind the store I was popping in to" - there wasn't a bikeshare rack nearby.)

Yes, XFCE is a nice light-weight window manager. Is there a light-weight distro that uses it? Ubuntu wants 5-10GB of disk, even for Xubuntu and Lubuntu. TinyCore can do a graphical environment with maybe 100MB, but is a bit too minimalist for me - I want something that can keep security update working with no more work than apt-get/yum/etc. I need a window manager, browser, shell, and maybe a C compiler or so, and I want something under 0.5 GB so I can keep a few spares on a desktop and spin up lots of cloud instances as well.

You don't want to end up like Weev, even though they did eventually let him out of jail. And you're apparently not somebody who's got the kind of personality he has, which, while it may make you less likely to end up in jail, isn't necessarily going to get you off the hook either.