Grab Bag (for December 2025).

Here’s a grab bag of random notes.

1. I saw a bumblebee this week (in mid-December).

2. The downside of using a thin-space (technically the NNBSP or narrow no-break space; U+202F) as the thousands separator is that when rendered with a fixed-width typeface it gets effectively replaced by a figure space.

3. One of the things you remember watching something like The American Revolution (or otherwise examining history in detail) is that while the Declaration of Independence was signed in 1776, the war lasted from before that until 1783. We tend to compress our grasp of historical events into a single abstract moment (represented as a year) rather than being spread out over time. I assume the compression follows some mathematical rule with the temporal distance?
4. Why can’t browsers (at least Firefox) make a more robust no-autoplay system? Or is it that they won’t?

5. Speaking of browsers, I wonder how hard it would be to make all borders between sibling elements (e.g., a sidebar and main area) able to be dragged/resized? I know you could do that with frames.

6. I wonder if drafting one random voter per state as members of the House (with other apportionment changes to account for the proper seat numbers) would tend to encourage or discourage voting? It would obviously do some of both (“I don’t want to risk becoming the random rep!” versus “There’s a small chance I could end up the random rep!”), but I wonder which would be more prevalent in-fact. (Versus in-name, as some non-voters would pick that up as their new excuse, and some voters might do likewise.)

7. There needs to be a name for the internet-enabled phenomenon of thinking of something novel and doing a search to confirm someone else thought of it. Maybe prior-art search? (In this case, the iceskateboard—yes, do a search people have done it.)

8. I started listening to more internet radio, even though I could stream music or listen to my local collection. It’s low-effort to get access to more variety than streaming tends to offer. Main downside is that for broadcast stations, they don’t play music with swears, which excludes a lot of really good music.

9. Some people still confuse slash and backslash in URLs. I wonder if that will ever not be the case? Could we nickname slashes as path (or maybe pat) like we call periods dot?

10. It feels like schools could be the perfect ground to conduct some simple experiments about all kinds of facets of humanity. You have grades and classes which make mostly easy groupings for experimental groups and control groups, as they stay mostly fixed over the years (except some new students, some departing students).

    Nothing too serious, but things like listening to music at lunch, or standing during exams, or whatever.

11. Remembering forgotten media from your childhood is nearly like remembering a dream. In this case it was the 1982 film The Electric Grandmother

12. The main problem I have with this sort of post (including link grab bags and weeknotes) is that the titles never really tell you what’s in the post. So you have no way of triaging in the feed reader. So you have to sort of hope they got good stuff or decide you’re not in the mood and skip it.

Only one week until Christmas, so I figured I’d keep it light.