There was also a plan to explode nuclear bombs on shorelines to create artificial harbors, and of course the infamous Project Orion, a manned interstellar spaceship powered by exploding hydrogen bombs. Doing unhinged shit with nukes was all the rage back then I guess

The doomsday clock is symbolic with the minutes (or seconds) to midnight symbolizing how close we are to doomsday. Traditionally, that has meant nuclear war, but I believe more recently, they’ve factored in climate change

Don’t forget your lesson… Never. Forget. Your. Lesson.

Fun fact: it’s pretty much impossible to get those bodies down and there’s not really anywhere to bury them on the mountain so they’re literally laying pretty much wherever they died. They call that section of the mountain “Rainbow road” because of the multi-colored winter coats of the corpses you have to walk past to get to the summit.

If anything was going to get Newton in trouble with the Church, it would have been his lifelong obsession with alchemy, not his three laws.

Oh, I’m not a historian, that’s actually just a few vaguely informed wikipedia searches. The extent of my education on Islam and Islamic culture is just a world religions class back in HS.

The monkey’s paw comes from a short story of the same name by W.W. Jacobs back in 1902. It seems the genie that grants three wishes dates all the way back to 1697 in “The Ridicuolous Wishes” by Charles Perrault.

In Islamic/pre-Islamic mythology (over simplifying greatly) genies are actually trapped demons forced into servitude long ago by human sorcerers. They must comply with your wish but use any ambiguity they can as a form of malicious compliance. It’s also worth noting that the idea of genies granting 3 wishes is mostly a western invention and is also likely influenced by Christian ideas of “deals with the devil” (see Foust for how that usually works out for the wisher)

Sort of. Each book is usually it’s own self-contained story (the exception being book #2 which is a direct sequel to #1) but many books follow up on characters that were introduced in previous books. You don’t have to have read any of the previous books to understand the story you picked up, but there’s some continuity and references if you have. It’s kind of like several different novel series all set in the same shared universe rather than a true anthology though.

Malloc is a C function and wouldn’t come around for another 15 years or so. They likely wrote memory allocation code directly in machine code/assembly which could and would just access raw memory directly.

“Do refrigerators still come in big cardboard boxes?” “Yeah, but the rents are outrageous”

they’re saying that if the student was any dumber they’d be a houseplant

FWIW, yt-dlp can do the ffmpeg part for you with the flags -x --audio-format mp3

ligatures are when you join two or more glyphs into a single one. For instance, instead of having the two characters = and > to form => if you had ligature support you would see ⇒. Some terminals have support to recognize sequences like => (and others obviously) and turn them into their corresponding ligatures (only for display though, the actual file contents remain umchanged)

As a native, I can confirm that when you order a three-way (no I’m not kidding, that’s actually what they’re called) they will absolutely murder it with shredded cheese. Sometimes it’s piled up like 3-4 inches high. They do the same with the coneys too but you can only really stack like 2 inches of cheese on a hot dog bun.

JSON is a serialization format based on js syntax. It’s not the same as JavaScript, it’s usually stricter. Those stricter rules are designed to make it easier to parse. In actual js, trailing commas are just fine (although i think some versions of internet explorer parsed them as nulls for some reason.)

Bioshock came out in 2007, Bitcoin didn’t start until 2009. It’s not in the game because it didn’t exist when the game was published. Even if it had, the game is set in an alternate universe version of the 60’s. I don’t think cryptocurrency would really fit the aesthetic.

Yes, and they have for a while: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Page_Visibility_API

It’s meant as a way to optimize the page when not in use but a sufficiently motivated entity could easily use it to measure your attentiveness to the content. I don’t personally know of any extensions that disable this but it does require JS, so noscript would stop it (but likely also break most of the web for you)