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Many of the things you mention, crossing out, circling, I do not think of as actively engaging with the material, which a quick skim of the underlying research pointed out in the TFA (or maybe an earlier 2017 paper of theirs) requires using the fine motor control of actually writing. Writing marginalia is good for the brain; if you disagree, write out why, if you agree, write your reaction. Highlighting, circling, crossing out are mere consumption and only useful for finding passages later, not engaging your brain.

Wow, I'd just like to say I'd never heard of the word "marginalia" before, but I love it :)

Oh boy do I have a website for you!

I love browsing https://www.themarginalian.org whenever I have a few hours to kill. It's a bit like TVTropes, but much more "literary" for lack of a better word.

The author has spent decades building a digital commonplace book of everything she's ever read, and hyperlinked everything together in a way that you can get lost in her notes for hours on end and never surface. It's one of my favorite websites on the internet, and the best example of the power of marginalia and hypertext.


Those are called commonplace books.

People keep saying that Microsoft invested in Apple to defeat anti-trust measures. They did not. They lost the Video for Windows lawsuit (Apple v San Francisco Canyon Company, Microsoft, Intel). Buying the non-voting stock was part of the remedy. Microsoft would gladly become a monopoly if they could get away with it.


I thought the use of the eta in ΣΗΜΙΟΙ ΔΙ to be later, like the late fifth century, at least in Athens, than the eighth century implied by the text. Before that, they would have been writing ΣΕΜΙΟΙ ΔΙ with what is now called simple E, epsilon.


What got acquired?


A portfiolio of PR.


I think you mean romance? A romance used to be a Roman-style long narrative fictional work that described extraordinary deeds, soap opera plots. Novels were more concerned with realistic narratives describing the nitty gritty of everyday life.


Not with that attitude you won’t! But dip your toe in, _Pride and prejudice_ is pretty light and breezy while having some depth to it.


I don't know. All I remember from school is absolutely hating being forced to read, and understand/interpret, thing like shakespeare and Jane Austin. But then again I now like a lot of the vegetables I used to hate as a kid...

My daughter loves the classics, me, science fiction and fantasy.


Just read Treasure Island. It's a classic but one that is easy to comprehend and also timeless.


_Pride and prejudice_ hits for me similar notes as those for fantasy and historical fiction, though of course it is commenting on contemporary issues with no magic (except the magic of love), alas. It’s like entering a foreign society where you may have to infer why people are acting the way they do. Now that you’re not in school, no one is forcing you to write essays on what you read, or even to understand or interpret what is going on in the narrative! Cool, huh?


I do not know about TFA and the egg cooker, but I usually boil the water first so I can pull the eggs out at a specific time (6:30 to 7:00) so the yolk is gooey. When I put an egg into boiling water without putting a hole through to the air sac, I think there's a higher chance that the egg will crack and spew albumen throughout the boiling water.


This was part of Steve Baker’s (“Omniverous Hexapod”, sic) extensions to a long-standing Usenet FAQ about graphics programming, put out by “Carniverous Hexapod” (sic). It’s at least two decades old, and the FAQ from which he it on may be from the 1990s? I have the niggling recollection that the Carniverous name may have been based on Vernor Vinge’s _Fire upon the deep_ aliens.

He did not invent it, but he probably had to deal with aspiring graphics programmers who were not very math-savvy.


In the 1990s Microsoft “invested” in Apple because Steve Jobs allowed them to save face by giving them the option to settle their part of Apple v San Francisco Canyon Co by calling part of it—$150 M—a stock purchase that only lasted a few years. I do not know how much the total cash settlement from Microsoft was, but industry rumors went up to $1B.


The first time yes, the last time, there would be no Apple Silicon to talk about today.


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