Open Thread #Potato

Seems like it’s a good time for an open thread. I cannot remember what number we’re up to, so it’s “Potato”. I just had french fries for lunch and ate the longest french fry I have ever seen.¹ I should have taken a photo, but I was in consumption mode and not attention mode. My apologies for the oversight.

Anyhoo, I’ve been working on the site a lot this week (did you see Prometheus?)² and have some cool stuff coming up. But I need to take a tiny step back to do some life admin and email³ today, so the site will be a little slower than usual. A fall summer Friday, if you will.

What’s going on in your world? I know the onset of dark & cold in the northern hemisphere makes life challenging for some of you this time of year; I hope you’re hanging in there. I’ve been thinking about what home means, taking long baths, walking a lot, and reading three books, listening to one book, and watching two TV shows, trying to keep everything straight.

And here’s a couple of photos I took of some really cool engravings on a sword at the Tokyo National Museum.

1. How many individual french fries do you think you’ve seen/eaten in your life? 10,000? 100,000? 1M? (This is a good Fermi problem.) ↩

2. Oh, and have you noticed that typos have been much better recently? I built a spellchecker for my post editor, so I’ve been able to more easily spot them. (Cue incident of Muphry’s Law in this post…) ↩

3. If you’ve emailed me in the past ~3-4 months and have not gotten a reply, I apologize. I have been preoccupied with other things (moving, Tokyo, website) and my inbox has become a nightmare (I’m getting 10-20 additional emails per day with people writing in with their new projects, most of them written by AI (You posted X so I thought I’d send you Y. I’m proud of this project. Free, no signup, no tracking, no ads. Etc. Etc.) It’s like spam but sort of not?) I’ve been largely ignoring it and it’s time I get more of a handle on it. ↩

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