For anyone else who was curious about lichens covering "a not insignificant amount" of the earth's surface, a quick google tells me it's about 7% (according to e.g. new york times, scientific american, etc)

Edit: oh and estimating the age of an exposed surface by lichen diameter is called lichenometry. I'm seeing stuff about it being used in geological contexts but it makes sense that it could work for old buildings too

you mean jumping the stark

I came to the comments looking for context, but since nobody has provided it yet, did some googling. I believe this is the reference: https://news.sky.com/story/tyrannosaurus-rex-could-have-been-even-bigger-than-previously-thought-study-suggests-13184470

I was going to say that's actually a G K Chesterton quote, but it turns out it's more complicated than that. Neil Gaiman himself said it was from Chesterton (when quoting it at the start of Coraline), but he wrote it from memory and didn't double check, so the original is worded differently. At least, that's how my quick googling claims the paraphrase happened. The misquote is pithier than the original so... is it now a Gaiman quote, even though it originates as an attempted Chesterton quote?

As far as I can tell, the passage he was thinking of was:

Fairy tales do not give the child his first idea of bogey. What fairy tales give the child is his first clear idea of the possible defeat of bogey. The baby has known the dragon intimately ever since he had an imagination. What the fairy tale provides for him is a St. George to kill the dragon.

• G K Chesterton, Tremendous Trifles (1909)

For those like me who are not familiar with rapper feuds or sex offender locator apps, this is the rapper Drake's house shown as containing many registered sex offenders in an image posted by Kendrick Lamar. Just to save some googling.

For those wondering, this is a reference to the lyrics of A Day In The Life by the Beatles, which starts "I read the news today, oh boy"

this seems like something that would get built in dwarf fortress

I know the joke is that that's literally the same file from windows, and also the person tweeting it probably doesn't live in the golden bay area (near Nelson, New zealand), but people really can just go for a walk and take a photo at that spot. It won't look like this though unless you have a professional camera with a wide angle lens, because the cave isn't very deep and it's hard to get far enough back to get a framing anything like this, especially with the way the roof slopes down at the back. You gotta really crouch and cram yourself back in there, and even then it won't look quite right.

It's Wharariki Beach, specifically.

Apparently this was actually a pretty significant case, as it was publicised at the time and led to the creation of laws setting the minimum age for marriage at 16. Although, wikipedia claims he was 24 rather than 22. I feel like this suggests this wasnt really the norm at the time the way the textbook suggests. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marriage_of_Charlie_Johns_and_Eunice_Winstead

There's a similar story about CS Lewis that's much older. I originally saw it in some print source, but this (unsourced) quick Google copy-paste gives the gist:

One day, Lewis and a friend were walking down the road and came upon a street person who reached out to them for help. While his friend kept walking, Lewis stopped and proceeded to empty his wallet. When they resumed their journey, his friend asked, "What are you doing giving him your money like that? Don't you know he's just going to go squander all that on ale?" Lewis paused and replied, "That's all I was going to do with it."

Obviously it's funnier when a comedian says it, just thought it was interesting that the general idea has been around for a while. Probably as long as there's been booze and beggars tbh.

It's a fictional diary entry, from The Prestige. The next entry is 2 months later, when he's fallen in love with a different woman.

I was curious as to what this implies, so I did some quick/superficial googling. The page in the OP has a Yes next to Intent To Use - this appears to mean they have a good faith intention to make commercial use of the trademark within the next 6 months. If for whatever reason they could not make use of it within that time, they can file extension requests indicating good cause for being unable to do so, for six months at a time, up to 5 times. So, OpenAI ostensibly intends to make available a commercial product named GPT5 within the next 6 months (or up to 36 if there are unforeseen delays). So, probably before mid-january.

I welcome corrections from people with actual knowledge, I just did some quick googling because I was curious and thought I might as well share what I found.