It takes 18 minutes to get from Vienna to Budapest
If you don’t care about slowing down and landing it seems. I saw a flight from Vienna to Shanghai on Flightradar24 which was passing overhead and it departed 18 minutes ago.
Sun, 21 Apr 2024 Smidgeons
Inspired by Maggie Appleton's smidgeons
I’ll be 93 before the next total solar eclipse I’m likely to see
Good chance I’ve seen the only one I’m ever going to.
Wed, 10 Apr 2024 We are closer in time to the T rex than the T rex was to the Stegosaurus
Despite the toy sets my son plays with, the T. rex was a 'late-stage' dinosaur, who lived 70 million years ago, and is one of the last new species to have existed before the dinosaurs all got wiped out.
Stegosaurus seems to have died out around 145 million years ago.
Mon, 26 Feb 2024 The word “kuka” comes from the name of the factory owners who produced the hoppers for the dustbin lorries
The generic Hungarian word for trash cans, 'kuka', unexpectedly originates from the names of German industrialists Johann Josef Keller and Jakob Knappich. The story is quite involved, to the extent that one would be tempted to dismiss it as a folk etymology, if it wasn't ridiculously well-attested. Keller and Knappich founded an acetylene factory in Augsburg, Bavaria in 1898. They named it Keller und Knappich Augsburg (KUKA). Their venture quickly expanded into manufacturing of welding equipment, household appliances, and eventually car parts and heavy industrial robots. In the 1920s, they manufactured hoppers for Hungarian municipal garbage trucks, which they stamped prominently with their logo. This led to refuse trucks being known colloquially referred to as "kukás auto" (lit. "car with KUKA written on it"), even long after KUKA stopped manufacturing those hoppers. And the noun kuka, referring to trash cans, arose as a backformation from there! And this is how two German industrialist gave their names to Hungarian trash cans. Of course, it probably helped that a word kuka existed in the Hungarian language already at that point (as an unrelated adjective referring to a mute person), much like snowflake existed before Snow and Flake founded the town.
Thu, 22 Feb 2024 There's a very strong tendancy for cities to cluster their road orientations along four axes.
From [Geoff Boeing](https://geoffboeing.com/2018/07/city-street-orientations-world/).
In some countries (US, Canada, Spain/Japan to a lesser extent) this is a result of deliberate planning. Outside of the US, it looks like there are a couple of key factors:
- Where the city is coastal (e.g. Bangkok, Barcelona, Dubai, Lagos, Melbourne) the orientation is perpendicular to the coastline, with the longest roads leading away from the sea
- Where the city has a river running through the centre (e.g. Budapest, Cairo, Warsaw)
**Exceptions**
There are more exceptions than cities that actually support my hypothesis, but the world is a funny place:
- Berlin, but there are potentially political reasons for this
- Hong Kong, likely due to its topography (Hong Kong is squeezed in between mountains and the sea)
- Moscow, but the Moskva river does not flow neatly from one side of the map to the other, it snakes its way from North West to South East taking lots of backwards and forwards turns
- Mumbai, which is built on a peninsula, limiting the number of roads which can go perpendicular to the coastline
- Rio, which is built on the mouth of a bay
- Rome, which is an interesting exception. I can't really see why this is. The Tiber does meander somewhat but has a clear North/South direction.
- Tehran is inland, but seems to pick up its polarity from the Caspian Sea to the North, so not fully an exception here
- Venice, which is also a geographical peculiarity in lots of waysYou can deduct paying ransomware fees from your taxes as a small business
I wonder if this creates any ways for businesses to artificially reduce their tax bills by paying large 'ransomware' fines and then laundering that back into the company somehow (or directly into individuals' pockets)? I mean, it sounds a lot like fraud, but I'm sure there are some people out there already doing it, and probably people providing this as a service on the Dark Web or something.
[https://www.americanbar.org/groups/gpsolo/publications/gp_solo/2021/november-december/impossible-be-sure-anything-hacking-taxes/](https://www.americanbar.org/groups/gpsolo/publications/gp_solo/2021/november-december/impossible-be-sure-anything-hacking-taxes/)
Fri, 9 Feb 2024 Aston “Family Man” Barrett had 41 children
Barrett told the BBC in 2013 that he had fathered 23 daughters and 18 sons. Bassist for Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry and for Bob Marley, died today ages 77.
Sun, 4 Feb 2024 Airliners undergo approximately 10 000 hours of inspections per year
From{" "} Wikipedia
| Check Name | Frequency | Time | Time per year |
|---|---|---|---|
| A | ~500 flight hours | ~60 hours | 41 · 60h = 240h |
| B | 6-8 months | ~170 hours | 7/12 · 170h = ~100h |
| C | 20-24 months | ~5 000 hours | 11/12 · 2 500 = ~2 300h |
| D | 6-10 years | ~50 000 hours | 50 000 / 7 = ~7 100h |
| Total | ~9 760h |
1: An average 737 flies around 2000 hours per year: [ https://simpleflying.com/the-worlds-most-flown-boeing-737s]
Apple hosts individual databases for each application for each user using Cassandra and FoundationDB to build a “data layer” for application engineers to interact with
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39028672](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39028672)
Wed, 17 Jan 2024 Musical notes are weird in Hungary
Let’s take a look…
| Most common | C | C♯ | D | E♭ | E | F | F♯ | G | G♯ | A | B♭ | B | C |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Less common | C♮ | D♭ | D♮ | D♯ | E♮ | F♮ | G♭ | G♮ | A♭ | A♮ | A♯ | B♮ | C♮ |
| Rare | B♯ | B♯♯ | E♭♭ | F♭♭ | F♭ | E♯ | E♯♯ | F♯♯ | B♭♭ | C♭♭ | A♯♯ | B♯ | |
| Hungarian | C | C♯ | D | E♭ | E | F | F♯ | G | G♯ | A | B | H | C |
Depending on a note’s role in a scale, it may be written weirdly. For example, you rarely would refer to a B♯ on its own, but it’s the third degree of the G♯ major scale.
SvelteKit's Node adapter limits incoming requests to 512kb by default.
This **is** documented, I just missed it. [https://kit.svelte.dev/docs/adapter-node#environment-variables-bodysizelimit](https://kit.svelte.dev/docs/adapter-node#environment-variables-bodysizelimit)
`BODY_SIZE_LIMIT=100000000` will fix it for you (obviously set this to whatever you fancy. Integer numbers of bytes work, string representations of human readable file sizes such as `100mb` do not seem to).
Tue, 9 Jan 2024 Apple Music doesn't let you see the 'last played' date of any tracks which are not in your library
And given that it doesn't integrate with Last.fm, it's a bit of a pain.
**Problem statement:**
_I want to have a list of all the music I've listened to on Apple Music._
**Challenges**
1. I listen to Apple Music on my iPhone, my iPad, my personal MacBook (using the Music app exclusively), my work MacBook (using the Music app), and my work Windows laptop (using the Apple Music web interface).
2. Apple Music does not offer (or at least, not in a way that I've found) the possibility to get the last played date of a track which is **not** in your library.
3. Apple Music doesn't integrate with tools like Last.fm to be able to 'scrobble' listens in realtime (and further, Last.fm is blocked on my work computers).
4. Spotify also is blocked on my work computers, so that's not a solution either
Tue, 9 Jan 2024 The circulation of the Hindustan Times is almost double that of The Times (of London)
Although it should be noted that that's based on data from 2020 as circulation numbers are not being reported by The Times and several other newspapers since then.
Mon, 8 Jan 2024 There is some evidence that SIDS is preceded by seizures
This adds to the similarities between SIDS and SUDEP. [https://www.neurology.org/doi/10.1212/WNL.0000000000208038](https://www.neurology.org/doi/10.1212/WNL.0000000000208038)
Sat, 6 Jan 2024 Nestlé have outstanding grinding technology which means that their Nespresso pods can beat third party pods even with objectively worse coffee
They also have some patents such as a rubber gasket on the back of the pods and a paper liner to distribute the water which make it difficult for third party pods to extract as evenly and as successfully.
Sat, 6 Jan 2024 Switzerland used to have massive problems with goitre and developmental birth defects
It turns out this was because during the ice age a permafrost layer locked iodine under the ice. This discovery ultimately led to iodising salt.
Thu, 28 Dec 2023 The same guy helped Orbán and Netanyahu to power: George Birnbaum
He did it (unsurprisingly) by dividing people. In Hungary, demonising Soros was his idea.
[https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-66065550](https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-66065550)
Sat, 16 Dec 2023 We have a sample of meteor rocks on earth which we can’t get into
Some of the screws broke so now Nasa are making new screwdrivers to open the container.
Sat, 16 Dec 2023 The concept of 'steelmanning' is the opposite of 'strawmanning'
When you are arguing, building a 'straw man' is a cheap way of attacking an opponent by misconstruing their argument and destroying the 'straw man' rather than the real argument. For example, if the opposing view is something like 'I am against animal testing', the straw man argument might see a response like 'so you would prefer us to use untested drugs on people?'
The concept of 'steelmanning' is the opposite. Instead of trying to construct a weak version of your opponent's position to tear apart, build the strongest possible version of their point and then consider it based on its merits. For example, you might choose to interpret 'I am against animal testing' as 'I believe that we can avoid using animals to test cosmetics'. You can then review this with your opponent and see if this point can be supported or refuted.
There's **a lot** of interesting stuff in [this article](https://liamrosen.com/arguments.html).
Thu, 14 Dec 2023 A sequence of individually minor mistakes led to an engine exploding in a Qantas A380.
[This was an interesting read](https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/a-matter-of-millimeters-the-story-of-qantas-flight-32-bdaa62dc98e7) but very long and dry. The key take away for me on this I think is that given how thorough this review was and how many minor issues it found in a process as subject to scrutiny as aviation safety, it seems as though similar problems must be hiding **everywhere**.
Sun, 10 Dec 2023