The 2018 Ig Nobel prizes are out. It’s hard to pick favorites this time, but here are some of the winners:

ANTHROPOLOGY PRIZE [SWEDEN, ROMANIA, DENMARK, THE NETHERLANDS, GERMANY, UK, INDONESIA, ITALY] — Tomas Persson, Gabriela-Alina Sauciuc, and Elainie Madsen, for collecting evidence, in a zoo, that chimpanzees imitate humans about as often, and about as well, as humans imitate chimpanzees.

CHEMISTRY PRIZE [PORTUGAL] — Paula Romão, Adília Alarcão and the late César Viana, for measuring the degree to which human saliva is a good cleaning agent for dirty surfaces.

NUTRITION PRIZE [ZIMBABWE, TANZANIA, UK] — James Cole, for calculating that the caloric intake from a human-cannibalism diet is significantly lower than the caloric intake from most other traditional meat diets.

Seems like just yesterday: How a tax form kludge gifted the world 25 joyous years of PDF

watchOs 5 debuts with health and fitness tweaks

For communication, there’s a new “Walkie Talkie” mode, which works basically like the old-school push-to-talk functionality from Sprint cell phones but on a watch. Pick which friend you want to talk to, and if they approve the one-time Walkie Talkie permission, you’ll be able to do instant voice communication.

No video, so it isn’t a Dick Tracey two-way wrist TV yet.

Some interesting history: The tech you’re reading these words on – you have two Dundee uni boffins to thank for that

I revisit the page I wrote three years ago.

This is something that’s been bothering me for a while. I’ve tried googling a solution, but none of the keywords I’ve thought to try have led anywhere close. So I’m going to describe the problem here in the off chance that someone who knows the answer sees it and tells me the solution.

I use the macOS “Terminal” command a lot. I almost always have at least two windows open, and often have more. In the preferences I’ve set their width (for almost all my profiles) to 80 characters, as Herman Hollerith intended.

My MacBook Pro has a 2880×1800 Retina display. If I understand how these things work, the “Retina” part means macOS scales things at a 2-to-1 ratio, so that it acts like a super-sharp 1440×900 display. In my office I have an external Dell 2009W display that I connect to the MacBook Pro whenever I’m at work. Its resolution is 1680×1050. (If I’m wrong about how the Retina display works, I at least know for sure that a window that fills the laptop monitor does not fill the external display.) I have the displays arranged side-by-side (not mirrored) so I can use all the screen real estate possible. I also use Mission Control, with “Displays have separate Spaces” selected in the System Preferences. Terminal is assigned to a Desktop that appears on the external monitor when it’s connected.

Very annoyingly, usually when I connect to the external monitor, the width of my Terminal windows are increased by one or two (or occasionally more) characters. When I disconnect the monitor, correspondingly, the width is decreased. It’s not consistent, though; sometimes the widths don’t change, and sometimes they change by seven or more characters. The vertical size doesn’t change (unless I’ve increased it while on the external monitor so it won’t fit on the laptop display.) I really want these windows to always be 80 characters wide, regardless of which monitor they appear on. Does anyone know of a way to fix this?

A walk down memory lane: The First Web Apps: 5 Apps That Shaped the Internet as We Know It. For those that weren’t around, I started working on webAgent 1 in June 1995 and we stood up our first webAgent application in September of that year. (We actually had a couple of web apps written in a mixture of Perl and Natural running before I started on webAgent.)

Adam has thoughts about Goal Odysseys, and I agree with what he says. If anyone can save the ASMP/Workday project, it’s Dana, but I also have doubts about it being salvageable.

Some day I’d like to hear a good explanation of why we’re doing this. If anyone could do that, we might be able to figure out what we should be doing.

If you love your email standards, SMTP your feet: 35 years later

This month marks the 35th anniversary of the sign-off of RFC 821, the first definition of the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol, that everyday staple of email comms.

So, about a month after the release of E.T.: The Extraterrestrial and a few months before I got married.

I’m preparing to teach a section on programming languages for SY 101 next week. Too bad I don’t have enough time to talk about INTERCAL.