- A surprising number of early New England lighthouse keepers were either three-limbed men or widows. The Lighthouse Handbook New England has the tragic details.
- Two things about bicycles in the 1890s:
- The fear of something called “bicycle face.”
- The fear that bicycles would lead to female depravity: “If there is any object on earth which makes jubilee in the realm of unclean spirits, it is a ‘society woman’ in masculine habiliments, straddling a bicycle and prepared to make an exhibition of her immodesty on the thoroughfares of a great city.”
- (Compound) assignment operators: I knew about
+=and-=, but there are many, many more (JavaScript, PHP, Ruby). - Fun with operator names:
->in PHP is called the “object operator” and is used to access the property of an instance of an object or to call a method of an instance of an object.=>doesn’t have an official name, but serves as the separator for associative arrays and is used to assign a value to a key.::is called the “scope resolution operator” but also the “paamayim nekudotayim,” which means “double colon” in Hebrew. It’s used to access static or constant properties or methods of a class.- (I wasted far too much time last semester trying to tell students when they should use the “dash plus the right arrow” or the “equals sign followed by the greater than sign.” Glad to have names for these, though I’m not sure “use the paamayim nekudotayim” will be much better.)
- Fun with floating point math: “While floating-point addition and multiplication are both commutative (a + b = b + a and a×b = b×a), they are not necessarily associative. That is, (a + b) + c is not necessarily equal to a + (b + c). They are also not necessarily distributive. That is, (a + b) ×c may not be the same as a×c + b×c.”
- Advice from GitHub on writing the perfect pull request, plus ThoughtBot’s guide to code review.