I've been climbing with C and his dog Sadie (pictured here yesterday) for about ten years now. Each goodbye said to a long‑time friend is with the understanding that it's temporary: there will be another time together, as surely as the sun will rise in the morning. Au revoir, auf Wiedersehen, do svidaniya: on seeing again.

A part of us knows that nothing lasts forever—not even the sun—and yet that doesn't diminish the feeling of continuity that friendship brings.

I like communication that's no longer than it needs to be, especially when it features a word with a silent b.

The story I mentioned a while back about really-really-concise communiques between Victor Hugo and his publisher is now deemed apocryphal by Wikipedia for reasons explained here. I originally read about it decades ago in the Guinness Book of World Records, which I trusted for no good reason.

When my brother and I were kids we were entertained by how you can fold a dollar bill to make Washington's head look like a mushroom. Below, mosaic artifacts in an excerpt from Google Street View's imagery of a foreign exchange service's storefront.

I was curious how accurate the gyroscopes in my phone are. The phone is on a turntable in this pic. Converting rad/s to rpm:

   3.490 × 60 / 2π = 33.33

It was really close at 45 rpm as well.

In 2003, George Bush and his associates tried to run Iraq as they saw fit. They fired the Iraqi army and ran roughshod over existing norms and institutions. They put people loyal to themselves in power.

Elon Musk thinks that similar tactics will work well with Twitter.