In Pale Fire, Nabokov coins a couple of great collective nouns when he writes "... an anthology of poets and a brocken of their wives ..."
The Brocken is the highest peak in the Harz mountains of Germany and is where witches are said to gather on Walpurgis Night. So it was quite a subtle dig.
These specs and the discussion about them at the time really are from a different era of the web. The Syndication Protocol fully embraced REST which was also white hot then. There was a real feeling that with a good format and a standardized way to consume and interact with the resources, it would allow for easier sharing of not just blog posts but other data as well.
As intense as the discussion was around the development of RFC-5023, it was basically ignored from the moment it was released and even the main spec author declared it basically dead not very long afterward:
There were more stuff thought of, as far as I recall, and I bookmarked a lot of them. But on Delicious. Somewhere in some backup there must be my archive.
Scientific American during this period was a great magazine with fantastic graphics. I used to really look forward to each issue. Sometime in the 90s they made a decision to make the magazine more “accessible” to the general public. The style of graphics became much more cartoony and the articles themselves somewhat more simplistic.
The layout and graphic design of SciAm in that era was clean, crisp, austere and gorgeous. I’ll never forget the issue - 1985, I believe - with stereograms of DNA and RNA. 3D images, delivered in a magazine!
Not to mention the pulleys and joists reasonably belong to the flagpole, not the flag or the rope (not to mention the rope doesn't belong to the flag, either)
If you happen to know the address of where the individual lived, you can make a much more targeted search if you know the census enumeration district. With the ED in hand, just looking up by last name may be sufficient, but you can also just step through the individual sheets.
This site has a way to look up the ED by street address:
Depending on the street, there will be 1 or more districts; e.g.: "9-27", etc. Just enter that string in the "Enumeration District" search field. I knew the addresses of several relatives based on the 1940 census and it made looking them up in the 1950 census very easy.
At one time you could group Wikipedia articles in “books” that you could have printed. I had collected all the islands listed in the book mentioned above into a sort of companion:
This is going back many years, but I seem to recall that one of the arguments against primordial black holes is that - assuming Hawking radiation is correct - we should see evidence of black holes evaporating if they are of the correct size, but that hasn't been seen.
I believe there is a reference to this law in the movie “No Country for Old Men”.
The movie was set in 1980. In the famous coin toss scene Anton Chigurh explicitly states that the date on the quarter is 1958 and that it had been traveling for 22 years. That means it was a silver coin. The US Coin Act of 1965 changed the make up of coins from 90% silver to cladded nickel and zinc. The old silver coins very quickly disappeared from circulation. Any remaining ones were snatched up especially when the price of silver skyrocketed when the Hunt Brothers in Texas tried to corner the silver market in 1980, right in the time period when the movie was set.
So basically Chigurh had no business having a 1958 silver quarter in his pocket.
I think Cormac McCarthy was implicitly showing Chigurh was a dispassionate force of evil driving out the good.
Ive interpreted Chigurh as an agent of chaos much like the Joker. We've given our lives all this order and civilization but underneath is ultimately chaos.
I've seen people mention putting some sort of "use it or lose it" time limit on the money, so that people are motivate to inject it directly into the economy instead of just sitting on it.
I'm not sure how feasible such a thing is or if it would hurt the cause of keeping the economy moving.
I just don't know how you would enforce this and even if this money "only" helps a family with some means have a cushion to worry a bit less so they can continue as they were it would be productive for markets.
Say you send a prepaid Visa card (this would be terrible because of fees but go with it) to everyone with an expiration date, it'd be easy to parlay that into vehicles that were not "spending" (gift cards, other pre-paid cards, etc) and regulating that is a nightmare.
Once you get into qualifiers and enforcement regimes you're slowing things down and adding percent costs to each dollar provided. I'd say keep it simple.
The Brocken is the highest peak in the Harz mountains of Germany and is where witches are said to gather on Walpurgis Night. So it was quite a subtle dig.