It is one thing to lose your keys or your iPhone, even the love of your life, but to lose an entire town? Yet that is what just happened in upstate New York. Last week, Google did something it almost never does — it wiped a town off its maps.
Don’t blame Google. The town’s provenance was suspect.
How, Agloe, a speck of a hamlet in the western Catskills, wound up on maps 90 years ago remains a cartographic enigma. How it persevered is an existential riddle.
Star Wars Day is celebrated on May the 4th every year because of a simple play on words: “May the Force be with you,” becomes “May the 4th be with you.” Its origins can be traced all the way back to 1979, but Star Wars Day has only really been a thing in more recent years thanks to its legend spreading via Star Wars geeks using the Internet and social media.
IT may sound as if I’m exaggerating when I say that a high-tech, heated, warm-water-spraying bidet toilet seat ruined me for regular toilets, but I’m not. I don’t know how you guys do it. I look at your normal toilets, the ones with seats that are as cold as ice, the ones that don’t spray and buff your nethers with a soothing shower of cleansing H2O, and I shake my head. I look at your dry-wiping ways, and I wonder how your mom raised you. Don’t you want to be clean? Don’t you ever feel … not so fresh?
Microsoft Edge is the all-new Windows 10 browser built to give you a better web experience. Write directly on webpages and share your mark-ups with others. Read online articles free of distraction or use the offline reading feature for greater convenience. Microsoft Edge is the new browser that works the way you do.
You may have heard that dollar bills harbor trace amounts of drugs. ut those greenbacks in your wallet are hiding far more than cocaine and the flu. They’re teeming with life.
Each dollar bill carries about 3,000 types of bacteria on its surface, scientists have found. Most are harmless. But cash also has DNA from drug-resistant microbes. And your wad of dough may even have a smudge of anthrax and diphtheria.
Rome’s rich literary and visual culture can also provide clues. Petronius’ over-the-top Satyricon (late 1st century) is probably the inspiration for our imagined decadent banquet. Poets like Horace (65 – 8 BC) and Juvenal (1st – 2nd century) leave clues. A 10 volume cookbook, Apicius’ De re coquinaria (4th – 5th centuries AD) survives and Pliny the Elder’s great Natural History (c77 AD) is a fine source on edible plants.
