Week 1: Space Camp

How can you have any pudding if you don't eat your meat?

The column on “Education, part 2” was still undergoing revisions at the press deadline. Hopefully it will run next week. Either with the week’s news, or separately.

So this week, there is a Space in our coverage. Check the comments for more.

and now, the week’s news.

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Public Journal: Some thoughts on purchasing stock options. Caveat emptor: this might be a case study for “why you shouldn’t follow stock tips you read on the internet”.

Extra: $TWTR investment

Private Journal: A contributor sent in a link to some thoughts on private journal techniques. You can read those thoughts by clicking the link.

After pondering the content in that link, the Newslettr is considering a separate idea. People expect to have “one email address”. But if you get a lot of email, it is probably a good idea to have separate email accounts for “bills and security alerts”, “personal correspondence” and “periodicals”. the Newslettr is an example of a periodical.

Secret Journal: a Message from a Cypherpunk. «the repo is around 9.5MB in size, including at least 1MB of padding from various Wikipedia articles. first commit dated 2017 Sep 30» The name on the commit is “Alex Power”, but everyone knows that, like “Clark Kent” and “Bruce Wayne”, “Alex Power” is a fake name.

commit 7cdc57fdc2a9f7fb36399cf97c69d00646a6efb

Author: Alex Power <475050@users.noreply>

Date:   Mon Apr 4 15:00:09 2022 -0500

    CHECKPOINT 2022/04/04 2000GMT

    730449 00000000000000000004d7a0f346250657b4e21c3b57f2d63f2dfc7d36320b5

Orban Victory: Viktor Orban won re-election in Hungary by a comfortable margin. The Western media is using the propaganda line that the election result is a “dark day for democracy” and the Grauniad is casting aspersions. Since the 1950s, the position from Washington DC has been “democracy is working only when the candidate who agrees with us wins”. the Newslettr isn’t a fan of Orban either, but we aren’t going to pretend that he is unpopular in Hungary, or that he is somehow “an illegitimate ruler”.

Legal Trouble: a Message from an American Eagle:

I never attended law school, but would like to sit the bar exam. To the best of my knowledge, I cannot do this in any US State. Is it possible to be admitted as a lawyer in a foreign jurisdiction, and then take the bar exam in the United States?

The short answer to our friend’s question is “no”. It might theoretically be possible, but … it would be better to attend law school than to try such a convoluted scheme.

Language Trouble: an eagle-eyed reader has pointed out that 法 (putonghua FA3) can mean both “legal” and “French” in Chinese. We have no idea whether this was deliberately done because French was the language of diplomacy at the time the Chinese discovered France, or if it is just a sound-alike. On the other hand, many English words (“ring”, “call”, “can”) have dozens of different meanings.

Tweet of the Week: the New York Times has seen it fit to print less news than it did before:

Benjamin Hoffman @BenHoffmanNYT

End of an era. Today's paper is the last edition of @NYTSports that will have an agate page. It was almost always the last page to close (and was usually late). And when I was growing up it was almost always the first one I'd read.

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to be continued …