“The Fell Types took their name from John Fell, a Bishop of Oxford in the seventeenth-​​century. Not only he cre­ated an unique col­lec­tion of print­ing types but he started one of the most impor­tant adven­tures in the his­tory of typog­ra­phy. You will find here a non-​​exhaustive his­tory and a mod­ern dig­i­tal­iza­tion of some of them.”

“At the moment, any of us who use web appli­ca­tions tend to spend a lot of time and effort pop­u­lat­ing appli­ca­tion data­bases to make them use­ful to us. But when we do so, we tend to lose con­trol of our data. They go into a pri­vate data­base schema, and what access we have to that depends entirely on what the appli­ca­tion allows us to do. Some­times there are rea­son­able ways to get the data back out (some kind of an XML dump per­haps), some­times not. But always the appli­ca­tion is in con­trol. And link­ing data across appli­ca­tions is, in gen­eral, some­where between hard and impossible.

Flu­idDB can change all that by leav­ing the user in con­trol of his or her data, grant­ing the appli­ca­tion only such per­mis­sions as nec­es­sary or desired, and ensur­ing that the user retains flex­a­bil­ity and control.”

“I clas­sify loop­ing and iter­at­ing in Ruby into two dis­tinct buckets:

sim­ple ways to loop/​iterate – this is where we loop over ele­ments and work with each ele­ment as we iter­ate over it, but we basi­cally don’t need to retain any knowl­edge of what we did to a par­tic­u­lar ele­ment once we move on to the next unless we explic­itly decide to store some info (this is how the basic loops and iter­a­tors oper­ate)
com­plex ways to loop/​iterate – this is where in addi­tion to iter­at­ing over ele­ments we trans­form the ele­ments we are iter­at­ing over in some way and retain this infor­ma­tion when we com­plete the loop (this is how more com­plex iterator-​​style meth­ods such as map, col­lect etc. work)”

“When heli­copters pass through dust storms, con­tact of the par­ti­cles with the rotat­ing blades pro­duces either sparks or sta­tic elec­tric­ity. The phe­nom­e­non has been observed dur­ing com­bat oper­a­tions in Afghanistan; Michael Yon has doc­u­mented the effect, and has named it after two U.K. sol­diers who died there.”