I classified a lentil curry recipe on my website as "easy" and a friend of mind disagreed, pointing to the chopping it required and it never occurred to me that the necessity of chopping would disqualify a recipe from being easy, but here we are. And I guess that makes sense?

Pistachios. The clams of the nut world.

In 1931, a book was published in German under the title "100 Authors Against Einstein", attempting to refute the Theory of Relativity. By some accounts, when Einstein was confronted with this book, he is reported to have said something along the lines of:

Why a hundred? If I were wrong, one would have been enough."

I think I need to read some of this person's stuff. She apparently recreated Around the World in Eighty Days with 8 days to spare.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nellie_Bly

I just read a quote that said that the brain is "a machine for jumping to conclusions" and I don't know why but this feels so true.

I did a zoom presentation today and one of the audience took a screenshot of me talking. I looked pretty crazed. I'd be fucking terrified of me.

Does anyone else imagine that the earworm currently ringing in their head as they walk on the sidewalk is actually part of the soundtrack in the movie of their life?

I was under the impression that a subpoena meant you... had to do something? Or be arrested? Trump is, apparently proving me wrong here.

I'm enjoying #Sandman so far, but I do wonder what people will make of it so haven't read the source material

A while back I started going through a phase where I would buy any reasonably well-reviewed bottle of Italian amaro I could find at my local liquor store, in a halfhearted and somewhat misguided attempt to reconnect with my Italian roots (my mother is from Sicily). I can't honestly say that it worked (what would that even look like? I already talk with my hands, I don't need to do it more) but it did result, as you might expect, in a small collection of Italian amari being added to my home bar.

TIL that there is actually no abortion law in Canada, i.e. there's no law which explicitly allows or disallows an abortion. It's treated simply as a medical procedure, like a hip replacement (no law for that either) and is legal in the same sense.

Fifteen years ago today, I published my first blog post and I wanted to mark the occasion with - you guessed it! - a blog post. I didn't really have a strong sense of what I wanted to say but, anniversaries being a chance to reminisce, I found myself revisiting what I've written over the years.

Ha! https://williamkennedy.ninja/javascript/2022/05/03/in-defence-of-the-single-page-application/

I don't believe I'm a person with seasonal depression or anything but I have to admit that my mood is better with the warm weather.

This is truly fascinating. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3O28uSZxyEw

TIL that the term "through-composed" refers to a piece of music with no repeated parts (no refrains, etc.)

It always amazes me to think that Prohibition in the U.S. was implemented via a Constitutional amendment, as was its repeal.

In my head I think of a Constitution as a country's legal axioms - the foundation of its law system. From this perspective it makes sense that the prohibition of alcohol, having no Constitutional basis, had to be passed by adding another axiom. And when people realized that this was just a bad idea, it makes sense that getting rid of it required adding yet another axiom. It's funny, when you think about it, like a big legal "oops!" that you can't erase.

Quite the shit show in the US today

Webmentions are the way people have conversations on the Indieweb, but integrating them - or, indeed, any kind of dynamic content - into a static site can be a little tricky. Luckily, many people have run into this issue before and so there wasn't much for me to do but steal.

Out and about. Griffintown has changed a lot.

I'm a pretty big fan of TypeScript, probably best described as a statically typed language that transpiles to standard JavaScript. I've written about it before.

People who have worked with me in the past may be surprised at my admiration, given the rancour I occasionally direct at something like the Google Web Toolkit (GWT), a Java-to-JavaScript transpiler, which to the casual eye seems to be in a similar vein.

I'm not religious, but I occasionally think that for some people, their purpose in life is to be a cautionary tale, and that makes me sad.

Pagination in Eleventy is bit strange. Out of the box, Eleventy comes with support for something the developers call "pagination", but it might not be the sort of pagination you're used to.

As you probably already know, Eleventy is a static site generator. It generates output HTML files from input template files. In the simplest case, one HTML file is generated for each (non-layout) input template.

After some consideration I've decided to remove the articles from my "Posts" feed and rename it to "Notes". It now contains just my notes and photos (and videos if I ever start posting those). As before, my articles are available in my "Blog" feed.

Initially, my reason for mixing articles, notes and photos into one "posts" feed was that I suspected at least some of my readers would want a feed just for "original content", and the "posts" feed provided that. I still think this is true, but some other insights have led me to reconsider the approach.

Recent interactions on Twitter have led me to clarify the purpose of all my feeds with descriptions, so hopefully people will have a better idea of what they are in for :-)