"come closer, my child, I must feel your bumps and measure your cranium"

Mosquito nets are still an effective intervention against malaria, not least as "there's a vaccine" is a very, very long way from "everyone is vaccinated" especially as really useful interventions such as draining marshland where A. falciparum breeds or attempting to eradicate it with insecticide are substantially harder and, also, take time. Given that half of all deaths from malaria are in children under 5 and that the malaria parasite is not transmitted between humans but from mosquitos to humans the herd immunity effect doesn't really exist if people are still getting bitten. (FWIW, my dad literally wrote a book called "Malaria")

EAs are wrong about a lot of stuff but they're not wrong about malaria eradication being about more than vaccines.

Knuth should have a special Nobel Prize for Being Donald Motherfuckin' Knuth.

Ooh, I know! I'd not exactly call it a moral panic but there were people who were convinced that people would be driving off cliffs or getting lost in the mountains because they didn't have the skills to read a paper map properly. Wasn't very convincing, especially as if people are determined to be stupid enough to drive off a cliff without noticing they're going to find a way to do that even if there's a big sign in front of them saying "Cliff, do not drive off".

In much of the world online mapping services still aren't anywhere near the standard of a proper topological map and there's really no substitute for (say) an Ordnance Survey map if you're climbing in the Cuillins, but that's not the fault of GPS.

Definitely that. "It's all covfefe to me"

relatedly, a somewhat common phrase around this side of the world is/was “it’s greek to me”. I don’t know the history of why it came into public lexicon around here (whether it was imported or grew locally), but been curious.

Wikipedia has quite a comprehensive list of similar idioms from a lot of different languages. Chinese gets a lot of mentions, but so do Greek and Spanish. Plus Turkish and Hebrew. As far as I can tell the Chinese describe any incomprehensible language as "Martian". But "It's Greek to me" goes right back to the Romans.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_to_me

I can only assume the 88 is a coincidence. it's just a coincidence, right? right?

"Babe, you're looking Haplogroup I-M437 tonight. No. Not M-437. Damn, girl, you're an M-438."

Frickin' laser beams or GTFO. A gunbot with a metal-projectile weapon taped to its arm is like something out of a dystopian sci-fi movie where they've lost all the knowledge needed to build new tech.

Claim to fame! Aleister Crowley was born a short walk from the house where I grew up, although then he was plain old Edward Crowley. My home town isn't that keen to be associated with him, largely because of the above - at a superficial level he was a harmless crank, a rich kid who decided to start his own religion and dress up in robes, but once you dig down into the history he was a pretty unpleasant, exploitative man - a classic cult leader.

"sponsored content, but only very smol bean sponsored content, pls not be mad thx"

I vaguely remember his original car crash on Wogan after he went loopy and it was barely veiled antisemitism even then - lizard people and the like