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.

How many Android phones have you had that didn't require you to either wait for your carrier to provide an update (and they never do), or give up and root the machine to install Cyanogenmod or whatever, or you just bought a new shiny phone to replace it? My HTC Aria is so hopelessly vendor-locked I doubt it's worth putting Cyanogen on it (the OTA upgrade from 2.1 to 2.3 never succeeded.) My newer Samsung did get upgraded to 4.4.2, but my Coby tablet running 4.0.4 isn't the version the manufacturer sells today, so I doubt they'll bother with customer satisfaction.

I haven't been able to Google up a good reference to Android documentation from Google that says how a regular user can upgrade their own Android version, as opposed to "Wait until your vendor ships an upgrade!"

Yes, folks, not all PCMCIA is the same. The newer ones support Cardbus cards; the older ones don't, and this machine is absolutely an older one. I've got a Pentium-75 laptop that only takes the original-flavored cards.

Yes, you'll have to look up your old friend Kermit (or Xmodem/Ymodem/Zmodem, or maybe even UUCP), and it'll have to run for a few days unless you can get it to sync up at higher speeds like 115200, but it's not information you really need much faster than that.

With an article title like this, there's supposed to be an Earth-shattering kaboom! Fortunately, if the article's correct, it seems like we just get a really bright star for a while, but no fatal gamma-ray bursts or anything like that.

The easy way to turn things white is to make roads out of concrete instead of asphalt. The catch is that the process used to make cement in most of the world involves heating calcium carbonate enough to bake out a CO2, leaving calcium oxides / hydroxides, so it's a surprisingly large generator of greenhouse gasses, more than making up for any albedo gains. Oops.

Israel doesn't have a lot of revenue sources or natural resources, so high-tech products like software are important to them, even more so than growing oranges on Palestinian land. And everybody has to serve in the army, except a few specially exempted groups, so just about everybody with a college education has been in the Army before they got that high-tech job, and a lot of them did computer jobs in the Army as well as marching around with Uzis, because every army these days needs computer technology. That doesn't mean that every high-tech company in Israel, or even every sleazy adware company in Israel, is a front for Mossad.

Homeland Security has two highly obvious reasons to put out urgent guidance to remove crapware - there's a Congressional partisan squabble that's caught their budget in the crossfire, so they want to get positive press mention rather than the negative mention they'd get if they didn't do that, and the NSA's just gotten caught bugging every computer in the world so Homeland Security needs to talk about anybody else they can being dangerous and scary.

Besides, if it really was Mossad, they'd have done a much better job.