❮❮prevnext❯❯

I was a little late to the whole "computers with built in memory card readers" thing but now that I have a desktop and a laptop that can just directly take the card my camera uses, it's a great shortcut.

The first 3-card reader I saw was at a DIY photo print device at a camera store... it seemed weird at the time, because each card format seemed rather proprietary, and all in all it was kind of a throwback to that brief time when computers were coming with built-in Zip drives. But now I just recognize it as a small but meaningful convenience, relative to digging up the appropriate cable.

---

Link of the Moment
Slate had a good piece on How Do Spelling Contests Work in Other Countries? Especially the ones that don't draw from like 10 other languages so that there's some large measure of spelling consistency? Grammer dictation and dictionary lookups for pictographic languages were two of the surprising answers.

---

Fact of the Moment

--from a 1931 Modern Mechanics article on Flat-Earthers. The magazine stated a "well-known fact" I hadn't heard before: the ratio of curve of the earth is about "eight inches to one mile".