The "who knows what it does?" collection

There's an image from I think Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone of Dumbledore's office hosting this collection of mysterious objects. I imagine this assortment of odd clockwork and objects that make no sense scattered all around. There's no telling what anything

Distinguishing abstract lifetimes from concrete lifetimes in Rust

Rust sometimes requires you to parameterize functions and structs to specify lifetimes. Confusingly, these work like type variables rather than types. They are abstract. In fact the concrete lifetime of a value is never explicitly designated. Here's an illustrating example from the Rust book, the function longest() that

Referring to books by author name instead of title

A fun linguistic quirk is that some mathematics books are referenced (on the Internet?) more often by a variant on author name than by title. For example, "Baby Rudin" for Walter Rudin's Principles of Mathematical Analysis as opposed to Walter Rudin's Real and Complex

A terrible LaTeX meme

Probably been done already. I regret nothing.

Idea: Try making every bullet of your outline wrong

I hate outlining stories, but recently I had an idea that seemed like a fun exercise to try. The idea is to write the outline, then make it wrong. I haven't tried it yet. So first you write your outline and let it be garbage. Let it be