What about the other major religions?

There are some pretty explicit food laws in the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament, in Leviticus and Deuteronomy. Chapter 14 of Deuteronomy gives a good list. 14:19 says, "And every creeping thing that flieth is unclean unto you: they shall not be eaten." This is presumably referring to insects, so they're out. Also out are pigs, camels, rabbits, anything from the water that doesn't have scales and fins (God hates shrimp!), any animal that "dies of itself" (i.e., carrion), and a smattering of other animals -- no eating bats, people.

Anyone who is actually keeping kosher will follow these laws, which means most Orthodox Jews and many other Jews. Not many Christians follow these dietary laws, but some do.

The unabridged OED is pretty much just for libraries and research institutions.

This is true, though a lot of people have access to the OED through a local library and don't know it. Lots of urban public libraries also subscribe to it, as do a decent number of library consortia, and these often allow you to use it online from home. And of course many, maybe most, academic libraries have access to it. I'm a Chicagoan and can use it online through a link at the Chicago Public Library's home page (once I provide my library card number, of course). It's a great resource to have available.

It's not just a matter of price, previous to them coming up with an online edition, the books took up like 3m of shelf space.

They used to print a two-volume Compact Edition, with the print reduced to a tiny size and a magnifying glass included. You can find the 1970s compact reprint of the 1933 OED in a lot of bookstores for not too much money -- mine cost ~$40 in about 1998. The print on the compact version is tiny, but into my late 30s I could read it unaided if I was in good light. Now I depend on the magnifying glass, but it's still useful and fun to browse.

The older edition isn't current, obviously, but it's still useful in sussing out the odd meanings that a common word had in 1638, or finding a word that was last used by Ben Jonson or in a charter issued during the reign of Henry VII. That's really the strength of the OED. There are much simpler sources for finding out what a word means today, but if you have any sort of historical or antiquarian interest in the language then you need to OED.

The nooks have a Bluetooth chip, but no antenna. That's why you can't recognize the headphones.

This was the case with the Nook Color. It had a bluetooth chip that wasn't activated by the stock software and didn't have an antenna. Cyanogenmod eventually got BT working, but the range was terrible. This wasn't a problem if you were just connecting a keyboard that would sit six inches from the device, but you couldn't wander around the room with headphones on.

The Nook Tablet didn't have bluetooth at all.

The HD and HD+ both have bluetooth enabled by default, but it can be pretty wonky.

unless you're part of the royal family, or in the deep south of the US, where family trees tend to be a lot... slimmer...

The classic example of this is, of course, poor mentally and physically disabled Carlos II of Spain of the cousin-bonking Hapsburgs. His father was his mother's uncle, and the family tree just gets worse from there. To quote Wikipedia, "Joanna [of Castile] was two of Charles' 16 great-great-great-grandmothers, six of his 32 great-great-great-great-grandmothers, and six of his 64 great-great-great-great-great-grandmothers." Oh, and Joanna went insane early in her life, so she wasn't exactly a genetic marvel herself. No wonder poor Chuck turned into something only a couple of steps above a wet sack of blubbering goo.

Without reading TFA, this actually seems like a cool app (if you're Icelandic, that is). It would be interesting to be able to press a button and see how closely related you are to your friends -- "Hey our great-great-great grandmothers were half-sisters!" Things like that. It would be mostly meaningless, but who doesn't want to know who's in the (very) extended family?

... is there some sort of 'Islamic geography' that has serious issues with basic tenents of what we know about our dear home geoid?

Many years ago I knew a Lebanese Muslim cartographer, who worked with one of my relatives (a geographer), and I actually talked to him about this sort of thing. The short version is that most of the the modern world maps he worked with were exactly the same as Western maps, centered on the Greenwich meridian because of the conventional measure of longitude and so as to avoid splitting up big landmasses. The avowedly Muslim ones would be just the same, only centered on Mecca or, more often, on the point on the equator due south of Mecca.

Centering the map on Mecca generally means cutting off Antarctica and the southern end of Argentina. Mecca is at about 21 N, so you can potentially get the north pole down to about 48 S (Tierra Del Fuego ends at about 56 S). The more normal practice of centering on the equator south of Mecca means that the edges of the map run through the eastern Pacific and cut Alaska off from the rest of the US, putting it and Hawaii at the far right of the map, while the Yukon stretches to the left edge of the map. That's not a huge difference from the standard Western map. It looks like it because of the distortions of the Mercator projection, but it's not generally a big deal. Centering the map on the Greenwich meridian is a convention; centering it on Mecca's meridian is a different one.

(It's interesting to note that maps are centered on Greenwich simply because latitude is measured from there, and yet the Greenwich meridian is very close to being an ideal central spot if you're interested in avoiding splitting any landmasses. A map centered on a Hamburg or Tunis meridian would perfectly split the Bering Strait, but Greenwich is pretty good. The world's mapmakers got lucky with that one.)

One would of course assume that an Iranian map would have some, shall we say, "provocative" interpretations of national boundaries and place names in the eastern Mediterranean.

On a semi-related note, in the geography-related fields it's demographers who are most prone to the nationalist (etc) political difficulties and shenanigans. My relative's department had a demographer from somewhere in East Africa who in the 1980s had to leave his home country after making population estimates that showed the wrong tribe as having a very high population. It's a lot easier to insist on lies about population numbers than on lies about the contours of the planet Earth.

The aspect ratio of 4:3 is quite close to A-type paper sizes, so it's nice for PDFs.

Yes, and it's closer to US letter-sized paper than 16:10 is. I've also long thought that a 4:3 screen is better for using the tablet as a laptop replacement with a bluetooth keyboard. At 16:10 the screen is too wide in landscape and too narrow in portrait. 4:3 is much better for this (though of course generally worse for watching video).

So I really want a 4:3 tablet, but I don't want to buy an iPad. The list of 4:3 Android tablets is short and undistinguished, owing (I presume) to Android being aimed at the 16:10 form factor. I don't especially want to buy a Windows 8 tablet, but a Windows tablet is likely to be more flexible than an iPad, and eventually there will be one with a better build quality and a better screen than most or all of the Android tablets in the link above.

So good for Microsoft and whatever hardware vendors winkled this out of them. I'd rather have a really nice 4:3 Android tablet, but that doesn't exist right now. "OK" might not be as good as "good", but it's better than "meh".

Actually, in it's earlier forms (especially in Rome) slavery could in fact be voluntary. People actually were able to sell themselves into slavery, usually to pay a debt. Of course, back then slaves weren't really as exploited as they were in more modern times and one could even buy themselves out of slavery if the made enough money. A lot of slaves weren't just free/cheap labor, they became skilled craftsmen and could make a decent amount of money on the side. Or there was always the gladiatorial games if you were really desperate, since those rarely ended in death.

You're talking about the debt bondage called nexum , which was outlawed in 326 BC, pretty early in Roman history. It had no real role in the bulk of Roman history.

The condition of slaves in ancient Rome varied considerably. Some were essentially professional workers, who had jobs and could expect to earn their freedom while they were still young enough to start a family and have a free life. At the high end, several future Emperors were educated by Greek slaves. At the other end, some slaves were miners who could expect to live only a few years. Some were agricultural workers who had a rough life with little chance of advancement, but who could hope to at least survive. Rome was a slave society, with a huge percentage of the population either current or former slaves. They did almost every job available, and their condition was just as varied.

As for gladiators, the best guess is that you had a 1 in 9 chance of dying in any bout. This means that the mean survival would be 6 bouts. Wikipedia suggests that 20-25% of losers died. These numbers are all educated guesses, but the general point stands. A slave who was a gladiator would probably have to survive something like 10 fights to gain his freedom, and his odds of surviving that were very, very poor.

I was wondering about that because the 500MB is labelled high speed. So is it unlimited 3G and 500MB of 4G? Or what?

The base plan is 500 MB of LTE/HSPA+/3G (whatever you can get where you are), then it's throttled to 2G/EDGE once you go past that. I like that in this situation. T-Mobile is advertising the amount of high speed data in big letters, rather than in the small text under the words "unlimited data". They're also making overage costs disappear. And you can pay for unlimited high speed data, and for unlimited high speed data with tethering, and less exorbitant than usual rates.

It's really good that one of the big carriers are doing something different. I hope it works out for them.

Interesting to see the average usage at 24Gb to 28Gb. When our local cable company was trying to bring in a 30Gb monthly cap, their argument was that 95% of their users went through 2Gb a month or less, effectively subsidizing heavier users. Total bollocks argument of course, but that's another story.

The summary is a little misleading. The 24-28 gb is the average use, but the mean is a lot lower. Here's the full quote:

"While average [U.S. home broadband usage] is 24-28 gigs per month, the average is skewed heavily by the whales. The median is actually 5.8 gigs, which is basically your non-streaming user," Stokols said.

So half of all users are using 5.8 gb or less. Still makes the 2 gb limit ridiculously low, but the 24-28 gb average is skewed by some heavy users.

Public libraries were one of the great achievements of Western civilization. However, it seems to me their time has passed. Classic books are available freely anything, and for books still in copyright, a variety of online "for profit" lending options make more sense than somehow tying reading to a physical building.

I think that the physical building is maybe the most important part of the modern public library. In many cities there is nowhere that you can go and sit down and do some work or read or whatever without having to buy something. If it's nice out then you can sit in a park or something, but here in Chicago it is nice out a vanishingly small amount of the time. In my 20s had roommates, no space to myself, and no cash to waste on lattes. The local library not only gave me an education through the books on the shelves, but also gave me a chance to sit down and get some working and thinking done in a space in which I wasn't going to be bothered by anyone. Without the library I wouldn't have been able to do that. Even now that I'm 41 and have more space to myself I still spend a fair amount of time working at the library. It's a place to sit and focus and be serious.

And yes, some public libraries end up functioning as de facto homeless shelters. But very few are only this.

I agree with you on a certain level, that we will someday soon move past the point at which tying book lending to a physical building is no longer necessary. But we need some sort of place in meatspace for people to go and do work. Right now that space is the public library. In the current climate or privatizing everything I can't imagine an open and free public space growing up to replace it. So we need to hold on to the libraries we have for as long as possible.

A couple of years ago I installed Damn Small Linux on a Gateway 2000 I pulled out of a dumpster. It was a 486 machine, and DSL worked reasonably well. DSL came with vim and I installed elinks from a .deb and compiled Pine and pretty soon had the same setup I did in the computer lab back in 1992. In September 2012 DSL put out their first release in 4 years, with very minimal changes from their 2008 release. I assume that it will still work on a 486. I don't know if a distro with a 2.4.31 kernel can be called "modern", but at least it's "recent".

As a baseball fan, I have read literally dozens of articles and hundreds of message boards rants on this subject. If you're interested, a little wading through Baseball Think Factory will allow you to relive the endless re-hashings at your leisure. More generally, this sort of statistical talk is very common among a certain segment of baseball fandom, and is (as has been mentioned before) the milieu from which Nate Silver emerged.

What's interesting about this specific issue is that Cabrera vs. Trout has been painted as a traditionalists vs. stat-heads vote, but an argument for Trout can be made with no reference to advance statistics. It goes like this:

Trout's traditional "slash line" (batting average, on-base percentage, and slugging percentage) is very similar to Cabrera's. Cabrera hit for more power, but otherwise they are nearly equal. Trout's home ballpark is harder to hit in than Cabrera's. Trout led the league in stolen bases with 49, Cabrera had 4. Cabrera grounded into 28 double plays, most in the league. Trout grounded into 7. Cabrera is a poor defensive player, Trout is an outstanding defensive player. Trout's team even had a better record than Cabrera's, even though Cabrera's Tigers made the playoffs and Trout's Angels didn't.

Nothing in that argument requires anything more complicated than the division required to work out batting average and the like. The fact that Trout's candidacy has been painted as just the result of statistical mumbo jumbo is ridiculous.

(It should be pointed out that there is a lot of mumbo jumbo in baseball's defensive statistics. They are not at all mature yet, and are heavily influenced by very subjective inputs. This is part of why I prefer the non-statistical argument for Trout. When someone says that Trout's glove was worth 2.1 wins above a replacement player (the number given at Baseball Reference he is speaking with a false precision. Silver, it should be noted, doesn't fall into this trap, and I should say that Sean Foreman at Baseball Reference doesn't believe that his 2.1 win number is anything more than an educated guess.)

Apple are totally going to sue Fu Xi for starting the iChing in 2850 BC. All I can say is that it's a good thing for Fu that he's dead. And fictional.

It's been available for years in other places; my partner wrote her dissertation on 17th century science, and used scans of Hooke from a couple of online sources. The National Library of Medicine has a beautiful flash version of it. There is a decent version at the University of Wisconsin. It's at archive.org in a nice scan. The PG edition is very good, an original spelling transcription with scans of the original plates. IIRC there's also a scanned edition in the (pay access) database Early English Books Online. So this is not news at all.

But it's always a good time to look at Hooke. His illustrations really are astonishingly beautiful, and weren't bested for a century or more, and the text conveys something of the wonder to be the first person to *ever* see these things. It's pretty astonishing to imagine what that might have felt like. Hooke not only first saw cells, he coined the word in its biological sense, because he thought the cells in cork bark looked like the cells that monks live in. Hooke was a polymath, a successful mathematician, an architect and inventor, and by all accounts a very good musician. He was also apparently a bit unpleasant and a little crazed, but genius is allowed these things (at least when it's no longer around to annoy you)