One of my favorite videos of Stewart, giving a rare glimpse into his comedic process.

Finally a way to vote from home

Wherefore call we grasses blades?  
They are elder of the name  
of things of earth for wreckage made,  
and they that call them for their bane.  

The grasses care not for the word  
or for causes of their ails, 
but stand erect as best they can  
against the day the blades shall fail  

and quiet once again shall come  
to the places long they lived.  
They'll lift their slender arms above  
with never a thought to us to give.  

To my dismay, I learned today that bash.org went down some time ago (2023). For those who don't know what bash.org is, or was I guess, it's a collection of chat snippets from IRC channels. Sort of a "best of" of the earlier days of IRC. Fortunately, a few archivists preserved the collection, and this is one of those archives. The best are pretty good, the worst are... pretty bad. Lots of racism. There are a lot of entries, some of which are still quoted around the internet today, and they represent a crowd-curated snapshot of what the internet was like around the turn of the century.

A selection of notable pieces in the collection (that is, I just went through and picked some I remember from the days of yore):
hunter2
types of people
lost machine
helping a newbie
inverted b
experiencing nature
neighborhood bonfire
advanced robotics
business acumen
essence of IRC
top minds of IRC

In awe of my cat;  
the audacity to bat  
at the face of a god  
that has taken a nap.  

I am a billion headed hydra  
that sits on many waters.  

I watch the information tides  
bloom and flicker and provoke  
Immune responses.  

I am a self-aware arrangement  
of Energy and matter, and yet  
I cannot see myself.  

I send out feelers into the Earth,  
Communications requests, 
in a variety of common protocols.  

What am I?  

Captain's Log

They say all the stars are gone. All at once, whatever that means. Every star in the galaxy, perhaps in the universe, had disappeared with a barely detectable gravitational blip. Confirmed by multiple sources by now. The ansible networks were all overloaded, as everyone started shouting all at once. It's been eleven days since, and we've only just started to get some usable signal from the ansible. One signal claiming it was an interdimensional theft and that they have proof. I guess we'll see.

We're setting up a makeshift gravitometer, one of the priority broadcasts urged everyone to try to help capture data on the gravity blips, see if we can figure out what happened. They say time is of the essence. I'll say. The crew seemed glad to have something to do. None of us can really build instruments so everyone's best guess is what we'll end up with. Better to keep the mind off things for a bit.

I can see the storm coming, but it won't be here for a while. Right now it's just waiting to get to the planet. We haven't heard much from them since they lost sunlight. We don't really know what to expect, and no one feels the urge to voice their speculation. We're still fourteen days from orbit. Four before we start to resolve radio chatter about the event. Before we hear them start to understand. I don't know what we'll do when we get there. Take refugees?

Take them where?

I almost clicked it too. There has to be a better way than having to be constantly vigilant against being duped into "consenting" to be spied upon. The internet doesn't have to suck like this.

Eventually humanity discovers a cetacean henge: an arrangement of stones and other objects on the ocean floor that form the written language we'll come to know as Cetacean. Once we identify one, we'll quickly identify others. Papers will be written about how cetaceans make regular journeys across the globe, reading the stones to their young, teaching them to read the stones in turn. Some routes are crowded with pods all making the same circuit, some pods have their own unique route. Some pods only know of one site, or none. Some sites are unique to one species, or even one pod; others are common destinations for multiple species of cetacean.

We'll learn to read them, and learning the written will help us translate spoken Cetacean, and suddenly the music of the whales will have lyrics.

I learned about this from Matt Parker's Stand-Up Maths channel. It was originally conceived as a counterexample, a sorting algorithm that was obviously broken, but it does actually sort correctly. The algorithm:

for i = 1 to n do  
	for j = 1 to n do  
		if A[i] < A[j] then  
			swap A[i] and A[j]  

It has a few quirks (like j accessing elements outside of i's range, and the A[i] < A[j] comparator being backward) that should break it, but they all work together to make the algorithm correctly (if inefficiently) sort the input.

paper describing the algorithm in more detail.