Larry’s Pretty Good Journal

A few links hoarded up, sometimes for a while:

“This guy saved a PNG to a bird.”

A very small selection of very good P.G. Wodehouse quotes. (via)

From Neal.fun: I’m Not a Robot, where you solve increasingly ridiculous CAPTCHAs. Level 11: “Select all the squares with Waldo” (via)

---L.

Subject quote from Castle on the Hill, Ed Sheeran.

… that money just can’t buy

A few links some of you may appreciate:

Sometimes you just need to watch a video of 24 hopping baby goats. (via)

Incidental Comics gives us a handy guide to Proofreader’s Marks. (via a friend)

First footage of live colossal squid in its native environment.

---L.

Subject quote from Can’t Buy Me Love, The Beatles.

A few interesting links:

Five minutes of skateboarding down a winding mountain road. Holy. Crap. (via)

TIL that orcas hunt moose. It’s opportunistic, when moose swim between islands of British Columbia and Alaska. But still—orcas hunt moose. (via)

Infant abstinence from peanuts causes peanut allergies. Dirt theory applies to not just germs but foods. (via)

---L.

Subject quote from Pink Pony Club, Chappell Roan.

Linkies covering future, present, and past:

Interactive tool for exploring how the climate of 70 global cities will likely change in 45 years. (via)

Updated advice about lightning safety when you’re outdoors. Lying down puts you in even more danger than standing up, and other useful nuggets. (via)

51,000 year old art found in Indonesia, oldest yet found. Over 50 thousand years ago, people. (via)

---L.

Subject quote from Sesostris, Lloyd Mifflin.

A few links, mainly random. Well, pretty much all random. It includes drums:

From r/MapPorn, a lovely shaded relief map of Manhattan made from USGS LiDAR data. Click through for the full-sized image. (via)

Orcas are still smashing up small European yachts, and we’ve finally worked out why: it’s a fad among teenage orcas. TIL bored teen orcas are just as problematic as bored teen humans. (via)

A huge cache of drum samples free to download and use. Or, yanno, just listen to fascinated as you try to figure out what makes each beat different. (via)

---L.

Subject quote from New York City, Maxwell Bodenheim.

On a loggy day after a seder,* a few links of varying importance:

Eaglet and janni got me a tea infuser in the shape of a certain South American camelid. It’s called Como Tea Llama. I am slain 💀

The origins of the various plants we eat, including an interactive or static map. Way 😎 (via)

“Scientists at UC Riverside have demonstrated a new, RNA-based vaccine strategy that is effective against any strain of a virus.” This is ‼️‼️ (via)


* Passover is, despite the occasion commemorated, not a solemn festival. The service mandates four glasses of wine.

---L.

Subject quote from Dream On, Aerosmith.

Getting warmer, getting warmer, already warm:

Following up on this post’s top link, NASA's Voyager 1 sends readable message to Earth after 4 nail-biting months of gibberish. (via)

Graph of date of peak cherry blossoms in Kyoto from 812 CE to today. The warmer average temperatures means earlier blooming. (via)

Zoomable map of all hotsprings in the United States, with temperatures. (via)

---L.

Subject quote from Naming of Parts, Henry Reed.

A few beautiful links:

Take Five, solo guitar transcription by Lucas Brar. (via)

Mars in 4K. CW: voiceover. Still worth watching on your best and largest screen. (via)

Superb Owl Sunday VIII. (via janni)

(I actually watched the Super Bowl for the first time in several decades—Eaglet plays flag-football as well as soccer-football, and wanted to see it. Spoiler: they skipped the game’s middle third because football is more boring to watch than play plus “who the heck is Usher?” Confession: I spent a lot of the game scrolling through r/SuperbOwl. As far as plague is concerned, we’re all negative now: Eaglet is back in school this week, though they skipped soccer-football practice yesterday because still tired, and I’m back at work, though not working full days, and janni still hasn’t caught it.)

---L.

Subject quote from Elizabeth, George Brandon Saul.

Playing around with links, or maybe links about playing around. Something like that:

An amateur Belgian luthier builds a bass guitar for and with his 6-year-old daughter, who is very sass. Other builds (with occasional daughter commentary) on his channel. (via)

Paku Paku, a one-dimensional, one-button implementation of Pac-Man that is surprisingly addictive. (via)

Flipping a coin is not a 50/50 thing: coins have a 50.8% chance of landing on the same side they started. (via)

Needless to say, this last result is huge.

---L.

Subject quote from Caset at the Bat, Ernest Thayer.

Links of varying importance:

Naomi Klein: “Side with the child over the gun every single time, no matter whose gun and no matter whose child.” (via janni)

(I’ll let that sit there for a moment. If you follow only one of these links, let it be that one.)

Wiktionary has started the important task of building out entries for emoji. Did they get to 🍑 and 🍆 quickly? Of course they did 😂

“The human brain uses one mechanism to assess [the number of items when there are] four or fewer items and a different one for when there are five or more.” (via)

---L.

Subject quote from All Quiet Along the Potomac (aka The Picket Guard), Ethel Lynn Beers.