When I first got my driving licence they'd just opened a bypass that ran parallel to the railway, we used to go up there of an evening and race our cars against the trains...generally the car was faster from a standing start but the train soon caught up and pulled away
Raspberry Pi computers are meant to be much cheaper than $70. But there is a huge shortage of them because of the wider semi-conductor problem, so their prices are much higher than usual. When there is supply of them, people buy them in bulk, and when it runs out again, they re-sell them for a stupidly high price. I'm still stuck with the Raspberry Pi Zero because of this problem. I really want a more recent one.
My beloved Star, gone almost two years now, was a quarterhorse. For the first quarter mile, a quarterhorse is the fastest horse in the world, with one clocked at 44 mph. Even in her twenties, Star could whip a turn on a dime and turn on the speed. When her previous owner gave her to me, he mentioned this and said, "Just hang on and try not to fall off." I thought he was kidding until the first time she spun one of those turns. I hung on and didn't fall off, but it was a close thing. It's my honor to share this county (and sometimes my garden plums) with pronghorns, colloquially known as antelope or speed goats. They can make short dashes of 55 mph (almost equal to a cheetah's 60 mph) but the true wonder of a speed goat is its ability to travel at 35 mph for several miles. Occasionally I've been lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time with the right bachelor herd, and enjoyed a truck v. pronghorn race, or (even better) a motorcyle v. pronghorn race.
have you tried the banana pi which is the Chinese knock off… they’re a lot cheaper about 25 dollars… I’ve got three of the things mostly being used as media players or timers
When I used to ride a bike everywhere I liked to race buses. I would ride on the sidewalk as long as nobody was walking there, and if a bus was pulling away from a stop I'd stay beside it as long as I could, because a bus is a moving wall—a shield that no car can penetrate. If I'm beside a bus I don't need to check carefully for cars at every side street. As they picked up speed I'd stand up and pedal hard to keep up, until we were doing whatever speed the bus driver decided (usually it seemed a little above the 35 MPH limit). I couldn't keep it up for long though, it was just about my upper limit. But it always felt amazing to race the bus for a few blocks. Often people on the bus would cheer me on.
Today marks the first day that the earlier version of Mickey Mouse (from Steamboat Willie) has gone public domain Mickey Mouse: Disney loses copyright of early version of cartoon character featured in Steamboat Willie No time is being wasted using the image - here it is used for a horror video game Horror Video Game Featuring Mickey Mouse Announced After ‘Steamboat Willie’ Enters Public Domain
The median family income was $10,500 in 1974. In January 1973, the median sales price of a new home sold in the U.S. was $29,900. The national household median income rose to $74,580 in 2022. The median sales price of new homes sold in November 2023 was $434,700, with the average sales price being $488,900.
The Cray-1 could manage 80 MIPS (million instructions per second). The Pi 3 clocks in at 2451 MIPS - over 30 times the speed, although not all instructions are directly comparable.
The Wiki article says gambling revenue in Macau is seven times as much as in Las Vegas. And that it was under Portuguese rule until 1999 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macau
103,000 Buicks were sold in 2022 in the US. Buick's biggest market by far is China, where it has a partnership with SAIC Motor, China's biggest carmaker. The partnership sold 653,000 Chinese Buicks in 2022.
Some strange and unique emotional states—discovered on Pinterest: No way would I try to use the names for them, but these are some good emotional states to use in a story. Here's another one, with some overlap:
Good finds! Thanks for sharing. Some of those words are so evocative - and I admit I can relate to a couple of them!
I'm not sure what language some of them are. A few are German. But I think the original concepts probably came from Latin, which had extremely specific names for like everything in existence. I remember when I was doing a home course in rhetoric that was based on the orignal Roman model called the Progymnasmata, part of each assignment was to write an essay using several of these kinds of ideas, each with its own very specific word. Here's an example, though actually it gets far more detailed and specific than this: 11. Impersonation Impersonation (Ethopoeia or personification) is an imitation of the ethos of a person chosen to be portrayed. Aphthonius uses ethos in the Aristotelian sense of the character of a speaker, including presentation of moral choice embodied in words and arguments. “Imitation” means that the exercise takes a dramatic form whereby one or more characters is imagined as speaking. There are three forms: eidolopoeia is a speech attributed to the ghost of a known person; in prosopopoeia, used by Theon for the exercise as a whole, the character of the speaker is a creation of the writer, for example a mythological figure; in ethopoeia narrowly defined, the third form, the speaker has an historical or traditional character, but is imagined in some situation where the writer has freedom in imagining what he would say. An example given by Aphthonius is a speech for Heracles in reply to Eurystheus when the latter imposes the labors on him the divisions of ethopoeia as whole are pathetical, ethical, and mixed. The “characters” of style to be applied to ethopoeia are, according to Aphthonius, clarity, brevity, floridity, lack of finish, and absence of figures; this terminology is not that of Hermogenes on style, indicating that his work was not yet the standard authority. Instead of headings there are to be divisions into past, present, and future time. Source
Here we go—this is what I was really looking for: Specific Kinds of Description: topographia Description of a place. astrothesia A vivid description of stars prosopographia The vivid description of someone's face or character; or, the description of feigned or imaginary characters. ethopoeia The description and portrayal of a character (natural propensities, manners and affections, etc.) pragmatographia Description of an action; a reported narrative. chronographia Vivid representation of a certain historical or recurring time (such as a season) characterismus Description of a person's character. effictio A verbal depiction of someone's body, often from head to toe. icon A figure which paints the likeness of a person by imagery. peristasis A description of attendant circumstances. chorographia The description of a particular nation. geographia Vivid representation of the earth. anemographia Description of the wind. dendrographia Description of a tree. topothesia Description of an imaginary place hydrographia Description of water. Source
Today I learned some slang terms for sex in the 16th through 19th centuries: “Fadoodling,” “horizontal refreshment,” “shot twixt wind and water,” “play at couch quail,” “join giblets,” “have your corn ground,” and “ride a dragon upon St. George.”
TITANIC - build cost. At the US enquiry into the sinking, Bruce Ismay stated that the cost of building the TITANIC was $7,500,000 (£1,500,000 sterling). Exchange rate at the time: $5 to £1. Building the Titanic - All About The Construction • Titanic Facts
