Interesting Links for 02-02-2026

[andrewducker]

1. Vitamin D cuts heart attack risk by 52%. Why?

(tags:vitaminD heart )

2. Democrats flip Texas state Senate seat in shock upset

(tags:politics USA )

3. Evidence beats ideology: What Hampstead Ponds tells us about trans inclusion

(tags:LGBT transgender UK )

4. Who Goes Nazi? (A newspaper article from 1941)

(tags:nazis history viaKenny )

5. Why was the Puppet Masters movie so bad?

(tags:movies heinlein scripts writing )

6. I have no mouth and I must scream at Black people: Scott Adams, 1957-2026

(tags:dilbert history politics obituary )

7. Following the link about a "running a bookshop" holiday, I was recommended the game "Tiny Bookshop"

(tags:games books shops )

8. A Crisis comes to Wordle: Reusing old words! |

(tags:words game doom )

9. Did people drink water in the Middle Ages?

One of the oddest myths about the Middle Ages is that people did not drink water.
(tags:water history )

10. Inside the Salford secondary school where every pupil gets a job when they leave (because they're properly supported)

(tags:school children )

Comments

[jack]

I did a search for "wordl number of words" and the top hit was https://www.reddit.com/r/wordle/comments/t0ao6n/a_thought_wordle_will_be_ruined_as_a_game_if_the/

"Wordle will be ruined as a game if the NYT doesn't start reusing already-played words
There are about 2500 words on the Wordle list. That's enough for there to be a different word every day until about 2027."

I didn't memorise the number but I remember that before Wordl was bought, the word list was publicly in the javascript. And that the number of possible answers was a smaller subset of the set of valid words, choosing sufficiently common ones by some metric. I think he made that up quickly when he first made the game and then didn't want to change it retroactively even when it got really popular.

So I assume NYT are running out of words on the original list, or ones equally common. And the linked article's guess that "recognised by a spell checker" is sufficiently close to "recognisable enough to be in Wordl's word list" is wrong.

I don't know what the best decision would be -- to include less common words, or allow repeats, or to let the list run out and then start over. I know NYT tweaked the list, i don't know if they've changed it more extensively than removing a few words or not.

I agree that the announcement saying "exciting" is wrong about the tone! :)

[simont]

I remember looking at the NYT long list (of acceptable player guesses) carefully, a few years ago. It turned out to be exactly identical to the CSW19 list of legal 5-letter Scrabble words, except for a couple of dozen words removed. Most of the removed words were obviously offensive in some way, but a couple jumped out at me as not obviously so, which if I remember rightly were FIBRE and AGORA.

My theory at the time was that they'd made a mistake with those words: they'd intended to remove them from the short list of things that might be chosen as solutions, on the grounds that they were too obscure (FIBRE presumably because it's the British rather than American spelling). But instead they removed them from the game completely, even as permitted guesses, and that seemed more likely to be an accident than their real intention.

There was also at least one word in the removed list that had two unrelated meanings, one offensive and one not, which likewise seemed a bit harsh to evict from the game completely – again, fair enough not throwing it at the player who might think of the offensive meaning first, but if I have the other meaning in my head and want to use it as a guess, that's not quite the same thing. Indeed this might cause me to learn the offensive sense of the word if I didn't already know it, which seems counterproductive!

[channelpenguin]

Never played Wordle, didn't appeal.

I DO play Squaredle, though :-).

[juan_gandhi]

Thank you so much for these links! Tons of reading. Just finished.

[andrewducker]

Pleasure!

[cmcmck]

Water was often not safe (particularly city or town water) but it very much depended where you were.

Our little town here had a stream running through it (now culverted) but it also had a tannery, a horn works and a butcher's shambles all using that water source, so...........

[andrewducker]

Makes sense that it would be very situational.

[bens_dad]

3. I found the results of this consultation surprising until I checked my recollections/assumptions,
as I had misremembered that nude swimming was common in the ponds.
If that were so this would have been a case where pre-op trans people were particularly visible.

-------------------

The consultation took place 30 September to 25 November 2025
https://www.cityoflondon.gov.uk/things-to-do/green-spaces/hampstead-heath/activities-at-hampstead-heath/swimming-at-hampstead-heath/hampstead-heath-bathing-ponds-consultation

(I note this because Two-thirds had used the ponds within the previous three months.
If that were the current previous three months (Nov, Dec, Jan) I would have been impressed, but July, Aug, Sept is much more reasonable.)