I recently learned about the fact that Sichuan peppercorns are actually related to citrus, so was looking for where the connection is... As it turns out[1], there is a "citrus family" (Rutaceae[2]) and a citrus genus (Citrus[3], in that family). The Sichuan plant is a member of the family, but not the genus (that would be Zanthoxylum[4]). Confusing!

  [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47248319
  [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rutaceae
  [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citrus
  [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zanthoxylum

A bit of an aside...

From the article:

  MetaPost is written in literate programming language WEB, then generating
  Pascal code from it. Hence the tooling and developer experience around
  it is quite suboptimal. Extending it is also almost impossible.

Does anyone know a google-able term for split keyboards that have doubled keys down the middle column (B/N, G/H, T/Y, 6/7)?

I see one instance on this page of a keyboard with double "B" key ("Alice layout"), but not the others.

I've been interested in trying a split keyboard, but I like to type those middle keys with either left or right hand depending on the moment, so all the split keyboards I've tried have ended up somewhat annoying, for that reason.

I didn't see it on the feature list, but it might be nice to allow it to run as a cron job and send email for reminders. These days, most mobile phones have an associated email like your-phone-number@vztext.com (depending on carrier), so you can send yourself text messages about chores and whatnot.

Or, perhaps just as good, have a way for it to dump out data as json, and could be consumed by some other send-the-email tool. There is the "-json" sqlite option, of course, but I'm not sure if your schema is meant to be stable.

I have a perl script for reminders like this that has been super handy over the 10+ years I've been using it. Never bit the bullet to put it in a nice UI or have a backing DB like this project, though.

I went down this rabbit hole a while back — there's a fascinating history of various scientists' investigations into the blue sky, across many decades, with some back-and-forth between Russia and Europe. Einstein eventually made a connection between it and the seemingly-unrelated issue of "critical opalescence," by showing that the fluctuations of densities is responsible for the scattering, not just a simple "individual molecules floating in space" analysis that Rayleigh originally performed. But funnily, for an ideal gas (such as our atmosphere), the formula works out to be the same.

So, "Rayleigh scattering" is the common term still used today, but there is a deeper reason for the formula being correct — it remains correct even when molecules are relatively close together, such as in the lower layers of our atmosphere.

I found this nice paper[1] giving an overview of the timeline, various discoveries, etc: http://users.df.uba.ar/bragas/Web%20roberto/Papers/sobelman%...