I am copying a previous comment of mine[-2] below. But first let me estimate the cost of food for one day in Diocletian's empire. I do not feel like solving a linear programming problem with ancient food so I…
And here is an emoji from 1913 [0], accompanied with a footnote: "The author felt the need to enrich the Polish spelling with a new symbol, which he dares name wink. This symbol, whose absence was till now sorely felt,…
Oh, and another example from Ukraine, this time in 2020: threatened by the International Monetary Fund with being denied loans in the midst of the pandemic, the Ukrainian parliament allowed the sale of the largest asset…
Let me copy a previous comment of mine [0]. One quasi-actionable lesson of history the governments can try to remember is: do not sacrifice your strategic goals for a short-term gain, or "avoid hotfixes in production".…
Here is to the company Dariusz Jakubowski x'; DROP TABLE users; SELECT '1 that ran in Poland from 2014 to 2019 [0]. [0] https://prod.ceidg.gov.pl/CEIDG/ceidg.public.ui/SearchDetail... (check the reCAPTCHA and click…
Everyone and their dog have a pet theory on the fall of the Western Roman Empire. Let me copy a previous comment of mine.[0] My dream is a book/blog explaining historic processes with Ishikawa cause-and-effect fishbone…
> the book again disappeared until nearly a decade ago, when it was auctioned off at Christie’s. "Disappeared" is a Newspeak euphemism for "was stolen"[0]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archimedes_Palimpsest#Modern
Yeah, I got to know Benedyktowicz at the end of a long and winding experience that led me to read on the beginnings of the Krakow Chess Club (he was a founder). Depending on your outlook, it happened either by chance or…
He also coded quite a few interactive Google doodles[0]. [0] https://medium.com/@mwichary/stanislaw-lem-on-google-s-homep...
Ludomir Benedyktowicz (1844–1926) got his both hands chopped off at the age of 18 while fighting in a Polish uprising against Russia. This did not deter him from becoming a painter. You can see his low-tech prosthesis…
Fun fact: The US declaration of war against Austria-Hungary, for a change, was justified by the sinking of the US ship Marguerite by a submarine whose officer "spoke Austrian"[0]. As the saying goes in my part of…
Well, I suppose Napier presaged the concept of a single source of truth. Aren't other log-trig tables a waste of paper if you can look up log(cos x) under log(sin(90°−x)) and quickly calculate log(tan x) as log(sin…
> In 1614, John Napier introduced logarithms. > Napier’s main motivation was to find an easier way to do multiplication and division. > Next, mathematicians decided to combine these tables. If you wanted to multiply…
While I upvoted your native insight regarding present-day language and I agree that the name is stupid, I can nitpickingly Ctrl+F "дроворуб", explained already in the 19th century as an obsolete or Siberian word, in the…
There is also the Bonerowski Palace hotel in Krakow, formerly known as the Boner Palace.
In 1995, Polish Scientific Publishers PWN, a long-time publisher of dictionaries, sued Kurpisz, a new publishing house, for plagiarizing their large dictionary of Polish. The case was closed in favor of PWN in 2005,…
One of most peculiar tourist attractions in the Wieliczka salt mine near Krakow are signs with a shaft symbol that is not in Unicode. It looks like a # with a · in the middle and appears in texts instead of the word…
See also Google's 2011 interactive doodle inspired by The Cyberiad,[1] in particular by the machine that could create anything starting with n.[2] [1] https://www.google.com/doodles/60th-anniversary-of-stanislaw... [2]…
Let me rephrase: assigning any military importance to the de jure status of a land is pretty weird.
> The country was ultimately liberated by the Americans in Greenland [...] Hmm. "On 8 April 1941, the United States occupied Greenland to defend it against a possible invasion by Germany."[1] So, first, there never were…
The Gates of Paradise by Jerzy Andrzejewski was published in 1960. It consists of 40,000 words in two sentences. The second sentence is "And they marched all night" [1]. [1]…
Back when I worked at Google, a friend of mine got an unpleasant email from r@ because his Python script had a bug: it sent alerts to the individual characters of my-friend@google.com
I wonder if IR imaging can be used to read the books burned in 1944 by the German army at the Krasiński Library in Warsaw [1]. Many manuscripts among them were never reproduced. A random example: Jan Ostroróg's chess…
Fun fact: the city of Krakow banned any signboards protruding perpendicular to the walls back in 1892 [1]. Although the ban has never been formally lifted, it got forgotten after 1918. Now the entire city including the…
FYI чэрвень comes from the Slavic name of Polish cochineal, an insect harvested in June and used to produce red dye until Mexican cochineal pushed it out of the market.…
I am copying a previous comment of mine[-2] below. But first let me estimate the cost of food for one day in Diocletian's empire. I do not feel like solving a linear programming problem with ancient food so I…
And here is an emoji from 1913 [0], accompanied with a footnote: "The author felt the need to enrich the Polish spelling with a new symbol, which he dares name wink. This symbol, whose absence was till now sorely felt,…
Oh, and another example from Ukraine, this time in 2020: threatened by the International Monetary Fund with being denied loans in the midst of the pandemic, the Ukrainian parliament allowed the sale of the largest asset…
Let me copy a previous comment of mine [0]. One quasi-actionable lesson of history the governments can try to remember is: do not sacrifice your strategic goals for a short-term gain, or "avoid hotfixes in production".…
Here is to the company Dariusz Jakubowski x'; DROP TABLE users; SELECT '1 that ran in Poland from 2014 to 2019 [0]. [0] https://prod.ceidg.gov.pl/CEIDG/ceidg.public.ui/SearchDetail... (check the reCAPTCHA and click…
Everyone and their dog have a pet theory on the fall of the Western Roman Empire. Let me copy a previous comment of mine.[0] My dream is a book/blog explaining historic processes with Ishikawa cause-and-effect fishbone…
> the book again disappeared until nearly a decade ago, when it was auctioned off at Christie’s. "Disappeared" is a Newspeak euphemism for "was stolen"[0]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archimedes_Palimpsest#Modern
Yeah, I got to know Benedyktowicz at the end of a long and winding experience that led me to read on the beginnings of the Krakow Chess Club (he was a founder). Depending on your outlook, it happened either by chance or…
He also coded quite a few interactive Google doodles[0]. [0] https://medium.com/@mwichary/stanislaw-lem-on-google-s-homep...
Ludomir Benedyktowicz (1844–1926) got his both hands chopped off at the age of 18 while fighting in a Polish uprising against Russia. This did not deter him from becoming a painter. You can see his low-tech prosthesis…
Fun fact: The US declaration of war against Austria-Hungary, for a change, was justified by the sinking of the US ship Marguerite by a submarine whose officer "spoke Austrian"[0]. As the saying goes in my part of…
Well, I suppose Napier presaged the concept of a single source of truth. Aren't other log-trig tables a waste of paper if you can look up log(cos x) under log(sin(90°−x)) and quickly calculate log(tan x) as log(sin…
> In 1614, John Napier introduced logarithms. > Napier’s main motivation was to find an easier way to do multiplication and division. > Next, mathematicians decided to combine these tables. If you wanted to multiply…
While I upvoted your native insight regarding present-day language and I agree that the name is stupid, I can nitpickingly Ctrl+F "дроворуб", explained already in the 19th century as an obsolete or Siberian word, in the…
There is also the Bonerowski Palace hotel in Krakow, formerly known as the Boner Palace.
In 1995, Polish Scientific Publishers PWN, a long-time publisher of dictionaries, sued Kurpisz, a new publishing house, for plagiarizing their large dictionary of Polish. The case was closed in favor of PWN in 2005,…
One of most peculiar tourist attractions in the Wieliczka salt mine near Krakow are signs with a shaft symbol that is not in Unicode. It looks like a # with a · in the middle and appears in texts instead of the word…
See also Google's 2011 interactive doodle inspired by The Cyberiad,[1] in particular by the machine that could create anything starting with n.[2] [1] https://www.google.com/doodles/60th-anniversary-of-stanislaw... [2]…
Let me rephrase: assigning any military importance to the de jure status of a land is pretty weird.
> The country was ultimately liberated by the Americans in Greenland [...] Hmm. "On 8 April 1941, the United States occupied Greenland to defend it against a possible invasion by Germany."[1] So, first, there never were…
The Gates of Paradise by Jerzy Andrzejewski was published in 1960. It consists of 40,000 words in two sentences. The second sentence is "And they marched all night" [1]. [1]…
Back when I worked at Google, a friend of mine got an unpleasant email from r@ because his Python script had a bug: it sent alerts to the individual characters of my-friend@google.com
I wonder if IR imaging can be used to read the books burned in 1944 by the German army at the Krasiński Library in Warsaw [1]. Many manuscripts among them were never reproduced. A random example: Jan Ostroróg's chess…
Fun fact: the city of Krakow banned any signboards protruding perpendicular to the walls back in 1892 [1]. Although the ban has never been formally lifted, it got forgotten after 1918. Now the entire city including the…
FYI чэрвень comes from the Slavic name of Polish cochineal, an insect harvested in June and used to produce red dye until Mexican cochineal pushed it out of the market.…