A tale of two trade shows. Supercomm Dallas, maybe 1996. No air conditioning in the main hall of the convention center during load-in and setup. It was over 110F inside. I saw people pass out. Design Automation Conference, Las Vegas 1980s. Union shop. It was necessary to ask before doing some physical booth work, but the drayage and setup people moved rapidly and safely, the air conditioning was on, and nobody was passing out.

It took only 50 years to write up what my investigator told me as a young research assistant. Next week: the scandal of page charges and the looming spectre of Science Citation Index.

Austin, Texas installed "moonlight towers" beginning in 1894. I wonder if anyone ever looked into bird behavior around these. Moonlight towers

I am frequently awakened just before dawn by crow wars, some directly in my backyard. All I can do is laugh. There is a rooster on remnant rural property around 300 m away that I can hear through double paned windows. It doesn't wake me up, but if I happen to be awake, I laugh, remembering my grandma "up with the chickens". Until a few years ago, someone nearby kept geese, which for some reason would sound off around midnight. It was comforting illusion of living in not quite suburbia.

s/free market/flea market/g

Is it tomato-meter or toma-tometer?

I liked windows on polar route flights for the possibility of seeing aurora. On one flight to Germany, there was a very good aurora display. I let 3 nearby people know about it. One young German woman got up to look out a door window, and thanked me. One middle aged German woman fulfilled stereotype and was annoyed. One elderly man reading from a Qur'an got up, looked out the door window for a long time, and thanked me profusely, with praise to this wonder bestowed by Allah.

Then there was the time on a flight to Asia, where I noticed liquid streaming from an access port on the wing, and quietly notified crew. Our refueling stop in Incheon after this, ended up taking a couple of hours.

Exactly this. Don't mention this again, because they might notice and start charging even more for wall seats than for windows.

The market is like that Star Trek episode where wars are carried out by computer simulation, then actual beings are periodically rounded up and killed to match the machine tallies.

In certain regions, notably the California coast, trees precipitate (apology) fog drip from recurrent coastal fog, which forms a substantial fraction of the tree's water supply.

When I lived in NJ, the mob reputedly dropped bodies right into the local creek.

We will need a charity to provide homes for retrained affectionate but raced-out "AI" platforms.

You're mad as hell, and you're not going to take it anymore.

I especially liked the day that it delivered, in the same email, Vivek Ramaswamy and Snoop Dogg as suggested follows.

Pay double to close them in bad weather.