This morning I dreamt that a friend and I were visiting Richard Feynman. I said to my friend that as Feynman is by all accounts dead, what we were experiencing wasn't real. "It's very nice, though," I said.

It was the first dream I can remember in which I used a cell phone. With dreams being what they are, the phone didn't behave like my real‑life phone does.

Feynman asked me if I read Paragraph magazine. I said no (never heard of it). There is (was? their latest article is from February) a real‑life Paragraph, described thusly:

Paragraph Magazine is a creative home for curators, tastemakers, and deep thinkers.

the phrasing of which makes me want to run in the other direction.

I planted this tree around 20 years ago for its fall color. About this species¹, a well‑known gardening guide² said, "Only tree to color scarlet in desert."

My neighborhood has caliche, a hard layer of mineral deposits around one‑half meter under the surface. It's the bane of many a tree's existence. Before planting this tree I spent hours chopping at the caliche with a 6‑foot steel spike and drilling into it. I never got through. I had already bought the tree and planted (and irrigated) it anyway.

It grew for about six years and then hit the wall. It looked unhappy and got no larger from year to year. I deemed the experiment a failure and cut the tree down.

A few years later, despite getting no irrigation, a shoot came up from the roots. I thought, if you want to grow that badly, you have my support and restored its irrigation line. It's taller now than it was when I cut down its first incarnation and it's still growing.

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When you look up a word at dictionary.com, it lists 'nearby words' which can simulate the experience of using a physical dictionary and coming across other words that catch your eye.

Also, there is entertainment value in juxtapositions that are wildly unrelated in meaning, e.g. how nearby words for druthers include 'dry adiabatic lapse rate'. What mystifies me, though, is what kind of bug in their software would screw up the link for dry adiabatic lapse rate and direct it instead to the definition for delta. Screenshot here in case it gets fixed.

Sackur:	Is the word thinking ever applicable in the world of artificial intelligence?
Russell:	It depends which philosopher you ask. Is the word 'swimming' applicable to submarines? In English, no, we don't say that. In other languages, I think in Russian, they do use the word swim for submarines.

How I would prefer the Encino article to read: Although I suspect such an edit would be reverted, if for no other reason because the Galleria is in Sherman Oaks, just barely outside of Encino.

A math problem I found on Mind Your Clickbait Decisions (where it is credited to the United Kingdom Mathematics Trust). A semicircle is inscribed in a quarter circle as shown in the diagram. What fraction of the quarter circle is contained in the semicircle (shaded in red)? It's not that difficult. The fun is in trying to guess the answer first.