Anyone with kids (or who eats lunch):

Wirecutter says Bentgo Fresh is the 2nd best lunchbox (after a soft LL Bean one that comes with its own risks). Ayone have any relevant experience or recommendations?

Product managers, app developers, artists, and appreciators of irony: enjoy this project of No Comercial Value.

Dan Formosa tests some kitchen tools.

Perspectives on kitchen tools that I didn’t have until watching this video:

1. The left-handed oil test.
2. “I wouldn’t buy this for someone I don’t like.”
3. There’s more than one way to slice corn kernels off the cob.
4. Use different colored Sharpies to make your point.
5. Arthritis is the “accessibility” of the kitchen.

The upshot? Buy the pineapple slicer and the strawberry corer, and maybe the apple slicer/corer. Skip the rest.

And use a bundt pan.

It’s probably time for states like mine (North Carolina) to adopt a mini-Brooks Act for web & mapping services - maybe for IT services, generally.

Anyone use M.b for any commerce-related hosting? Or use any embedded services like YouTube/Vimeo or Google Forms/ Typeforms?

ZHU’s 2016 Generationwhy. So good.

From Neal Stephenson’s latest novel, Fall:

But one of the [Internet]’s perversities was that it made otherwise sane people like him—people who had better things they could have been doing—devote energy to arguing with completely random fuckwits, many of whom probably didn’t even believe in their own arguments, some of whom weren’t even humans.

How long until the acronym ‘CRF’ starts to see regular use?

📚

Any medical / healthcare people around? I have a child with some medical stuff coming up and would like to understand the institution better.

National Bourbon Day, infographically.

Global peace levels, mapped by country, from Statista Charts. (Thanks to @simongerman for the link.)

Todd Snider at the Lincoln Theatre.

¿Seriously?

Así, en 1610 la Inquisición de Lima prohibió esta “sugestión clara del demonio”, y en Asunción se impusieron penas de 100 latigazos para los indígenas y 100 pesos de multa para los españoles que consumieran o traficaran yerba, cuenta el argentino Jerónimo Lagier en el libro “La aventura de la yerba mate”.

It’s been a long time since I’ve been CPR certified. Pretty grateful to have an employer who thinks it’s worth paying both me and the Red Cross instructor.

Why Are Employees Resistant to Using Internal Networks? Because they try to solve corporate, not employee problems. I’ll bet those employees are in plenty of private Slack groups. That’s why tools like SharePoint and Teams have to be marketed at executives and IT middle-managers.

The remnants of a Pokémon battle with the Bucket. Even with his constant advice about my next moves, he CRUSHED me.

I’m at the NCGIS conference, so this story was pretty apropos: Here’s a silly Google Maps origin story about how “Satellite” was almost named “Bird Mode”.

Places not to shop: anywhere they’re Creeping on You in the Cold Drinks Aisle

People sure can do some clever things with JavaScript, like this labyrinth. Humans and their tools!

Thank you, Stack Overflow: apm update: error: unable to get local issuer certificate.

apm config set strict-ssl false
cd packages
apm install language-markdown

… and I finally have a reliable Markdown editor on Windows 10.

Anybody subscribe to Medium?

Is Millennial socialism a straw man? Kinda up in the air, so far, but open to perspectives.

Atheists, historians, Orthodox agree: Christians, like most subcultures, are very insular, and aren’t really paying attention to whatever intellectual fad has captured the popular imagination. But we live in Internet Times, so communicating anything you can learn from books is really only of the moment if you can communicate that same thing less well, but using hyperlinks.

In this particular case, the date for Christmas came up in another forum. (A Slack, since you didn’t ask.) To save myself the trouble of typing this out again, should the occasion arise, I’m posting it here on the Internet, where I can be sure it will last forever. (Things on the internet are permanent, right?)

Pagan festivals had zero influence on the date for Christmas.

Mic drop.

No, but seriously: if you’re wondering why we celebrate Christmas on December 25th, it is based on the date for the Crucifixion. Tradition holds that Christ was crucified on the date that, in English, is identified as March 25th. (It’s actually a day in a month called “Nisan” in another language, but when you translate it into our calendar, it’s March 25th.)

(Another side note, here: the ancients, and especially Christians, didn’t really care about birthdays. This is a Germanic custom, like Christmas trees, that is charming and fun, but also wholly outside the scope of traditional & historical Christianity.)

According to an ancient tradition, a perfect life, or the life of a perfect man, begins and ends on the same day. Since the Crucifixion happened on March 25th, then Christ must have been conceived on the same day. No one knew for sure, and there are ancient notes that indicate that few people thought Christ was actually born in December. But the date wasn’t chosen to celebrate a birth, but to anchor the commemoration in a yearly cycle of commemorations.

If you check the dates of other births and conceptions on the church calendar, you’ll see that those dates are all off from a “perfect” 9 months by just 1 day. For example, the Orthodox & Roman Catholics commemorate the conception of the Theotokos / Mary by her mother, “the righteous Anna,” on December 9th, and commemorate the birth of the Theotokos / Mary on September 8th, 9 months less 1 day later.

Similarly, the conception by St. Elizabeth of the “Prophet, Forerunner, and Baptist” John, and his birth are separated on the church calendar by 9 months plus 1 day.

But the date for this event, the Crucifixion, is why the Annunciation (where a messenger from God tells the Theotokos / Mary that she is going to bear the Christ) is celebrated on March 25th, too - because of that ancient belief about a perfect life beginning and ending on the same day. And it’s why, a perfect 9 months later, we celebrate the Liturgy of the “Nativity in the Flesh of Our Lord, God, and Savior, Jesus Christ” - the Christ Mass, or, in the vernacular, “Christmas”.

Please note that none of the foregoing is meant to claim (or even imply) that Christians did not borrow, in some cases wholesale, from pagan religions. Of course they did. Lots of those practices and customs are really cool. Other practices participate in the underlying truth (“logos”) of the human experience in meaningful and important ways. Frequently, those practices are both cool and meaningful.

But borrowing a date from someone else because you’re jealous of them?

Ain’t nobody got time for that.

Rainy day: the Bear, programming a new game on Scratch.