Featured Links - September 26, 2022

Links to things I found interesting but didn't want to do a full blog post about.

Fall flowers 

• The Big Bang should have made cracks in spacetime—why haven’t we found them? "Cosmic strings' greatest power? Their ability to confound physicists." Me too. I have never felt comfortable with string theory. Maybe we haven't found them because they're not there?
• GTA VI hack emphasizes how the video game industry is far too secretive. "Companies routinely treat game development like some nebulous process, and it only adds to the general lack of knowledge regarding how it all works."
• This miracle plant was eaten into extinction 2,000 years ago—or was it? "Silphion cured diseases and made food tasty, but Emperor Nero allegedly consumed the last stalk. Now, a Turkish researcher thinks he’s found a botanical survivor."
• Shock! Horror! It's a Shaggy Dog Story. "The September update to the OED features revised entries for SHOCK and related words, including an intriguing "group of words for dogs dating back to the early modern period."
• Astronomers unveil new—and puzzling—features of mysterious fast radio bursts. "Fast radio bursts (FRBs) are millisecond-long cosmic explosions that each produce the energy equivalent to the sun's annual output. More than 15 years after the deep-space pulses of electromagnetic radio waves were first discovered, their perplexing nature continues to surprise scientists—and newly published research only deepens the mystery surrounding them."
• Long COVID Experts and Advocates Say the Government Is Ignoring 'the Greatest Mass-Disabling Event in Human History'. I am seeing more articles about Long COVID, so maybe people are finally starting to take notice.
• Stick A Note — It’s life-changing! No, really … life-changing. A sticky note program that might actually be useful.