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Friday, September 18, 2015

Friday links

Dr. Samuel Johnson was born on this date in 1709: here's a selection of his insults and Scotland-bashing quotes.



Hormone Guide: How to Speak to Women.

Harvard linguist points out the 58 most commonly misused words and phrases.

Close Calls: Three Times When the Human Race Barely Escaped Extinction.

ICYMI, Monday's links are here, and include a selection of really bad book covers (and books), the world's longest (700 miles) yard sale, 10 and 8 year old Seattle girls who launched their own spacecraft, and footage of an 800K gallon Jim Beam spill 1. hit by lightning then 2. sucked into the air by a tornado.

Monday, September 14, 2015

Monday links



Seattle sisters, 10 and 8, launch own craft to edge of space - with cat pic and LEGO R2-D2 on board.

On this date in 2014:  the battle of Baltimore, inspiration for the Star-Spangled Banner.

Firenado! Footage of the moment (in 2003) 800K gallons of Jim Beam accidentally released into a Kentucky lake bursts into flames after being hit by lightning... before a tornado sucks the flaming liquid 100 feet up into the air

Scottish distillery reveals results of 'space whisky' experiment.

ICYMI, Friday's links are here, and include a collection of dubious and obsolete medical remedies, two boys who tunneled out of Kindergarten to go buy a car, money-begging letters home from medieval college students, and a patent for a training system for walking through walls.

Really bad book covers (and books)

This started out being a post on bad pulp novel covers. I kept running into books that were awful even if the covers weren't that interesting, though, so the end result is something of a mixed bag.

When I was growing up my father had boxes of lurid hard-boiled detective novels in the basement, and I read a lot of them. Many of them were cheaper than 25 cents (as some of these apparently cost) and were known as "dime novels", and a lot of them had two novels in one book - if you flipped the book over and upside-down the second novel would now be the front of the book. Anyone else remember these?




“This novel probes a mounting social problem. Can the young divorcée return to a normal existence – or will she always be any man’s target?”:



This is in a category by itself: an 8th grade Serbian biology textbook from 1998 which for some reason features Nicholas Cage and Holly Hunter from Raising Arizona.


From 1983 - FORTH was an early programming language:





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There are approximately a billion of these online - find more herehere, here and here.