As there are still too many situations where Unicode characters don't survive being cut and pasted, I use plain ASCII characters in many situations, e.g. plain quotation marks instead of double curly quotes. I don't want anyone to have to see “text” rendered as “text”.

English is one of many languages using a Japanese loanword for such textual corruption: mojibake. From the titles of Wikipedia pages on mojibake, I see that the German and Norwegian terms are compound words for "character salad" and Hungarian's is "letter trash".

The closest Russian equivalent seems to be krakozyabry (кракозя́бры). For its etymology, Wiktionary just says "Onomatopoetic".

I read up on I. M. Pei this week. I was familiar with a few of his buildings but I didn't know that one of his earlier works was Roosevelt Field Mall, a shopping center on the site of what had been an airport near where I grew up on Long Island, which (as I also learned today) was once the largest shopping mall in the world. I still have LP records I bought there in the 1970s. Unlike Pei's more famous buildings, Roosevelt Field Mall is plain and unremarkable. It's just a shopping center; if you've seen one, you've seen a mall. I also learned today that Pei designed a series of air traffic control towers in the 1960s along the lines of the one shown here. Not only is it a clean and elegant design, it's also pentagonal in cross section (more easily seen in an aerial view of the twr at ELP). How cool is that.

This lizard likes this rock enough to hang out on it for hours. Video (some normal speed, some 10x) is available at https://youtu.be/lrFibA04riA (52 seconds), not that he/she does much besides breathe and do push‑ups.

Hillsborough, California is home to what is now called The Flintstone House and which, back when it was painted white, friends of mine used to call the dogshit house (in reference to how dogshit can turn white from sun exposure).

Disaffection for the house led to the founding of an architectural design review board so that (as explained by a previous owner) "there would never ever be another home like that built in Hillsborough."

From the review board's style guidelines:

Many kinds of homes have fallen under the architectural genus "Modernism" and some of these are in Hillsborough. The town has strong, demonstrative examples of this style. However, when this style is designed badly or executed poorly, the results can be dramatic and create impacts that ripple into the neighborhoods in which those buildings are placed.

"Impacts that ripple into the neighborhoods" reminds me of something a math professor told a friend of mine after he'd said something dopey in class: "If you did something like that on a test, the red pen would go wild. It might even carry over into other problems."

"... and some of these are in Hillsborough" strikes me as thinly concealed disdain. It's like they're saying modern homes put the ugh in Hillsborough.

The current version of the Wikipedia page for Hillsborough starts with "Hillsborough (also known as Bedrock)": vandalism that has stood for three weeks—and which I feel no urge to undo.

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Top level chess games seldom end in checkmate. Players usually resign once their position is hopeless. Magnus Carlsen checkmated Peter Svidler today at a tournament in Germany. Commentators complimented Svidler on not resigning because the final position (shown here) had aesthetic appeal. I concur.

Analogies involving socks:

• The Axiom of Choice is necessary to select a set from an infinite number of pairs of socks, but not from an infinite number of pairs of shoes.
  
  
• Quantum entanglement: when you have a pair of socks and you put one of them on your left foot, the other one becomes the "right sock" no matter where it is located in the universe.
  
  
• If g and h are elements of a group, then (gh)^-1 = h^-1 g^-1 .
  You take off socks and shoes in the opposite order that you put them on.

The first is from Bertrand Russell.
The second I came across on Tanya Khovanova's site (under Math Jokes; it's not a serious analogy for entanglement).
The third came from a web search for analogy with socks.

A father and two young sons were hiking in the rocks near were I was climbing today. One of the boys was exploring an area under some rocks which led to a discussion of possible hazards:

boy:	There could be giant snakes in here.
dad:	Maybe even a centipede. I hear they're dangerous.
boy:	Centipede. That was a video game from the 1900s.

I like roads that carry two opposite-direction routes. I am, of course, easily amused. US 36 west and Colorado 119 east coëxist on a stretch of 28th Street in Boulder, Colorado. I think there used to be west/east signs there but I could be wrong (my recollection is from about 35 years ago). Who knows why west/east designations are absent now. Maybe someone deemed the incongruity too confusing or jarring.

A typewriter I used in the 1970s had two keys with interchangeable type elements. The piece shown in the pic was part of a set of math symbols.

Time lapse video of my Joshua tree flowering: