My main backups are on rsync.net, though.

Maybe Yelp's codebase was otherwise clean, but aside from golang projects (and the Linux kernel) I've come to associate tabs with unreadable slop code. Maybe your experience is different.

I don't remember it being made of wood, but I remember it being narrow and slanted downwards and kind of scary. Come to think of it, the station in general was very run down and a bit frightening to ~5yo me.

This would have been in the early to mid eighties.

I don't know what the precise rules or patterns actually might be. But one fact that jumped out at me is that -mal and -nal start with nasal consonants and three of the "exceptions" end in -val.

You're right that there are big regulatory issues still.

I didn't understand this part, specifically how you could beat today's air freight. Why wouldn't airships be subject to the same (ahem) overhead at either end?

Competitive enough on speed while being less expensive makes sense, though.

If I were were to teach a class about programming in the medium (as opposed to in the small or in the large), I think I'd assign my students an essay comparing and contrasting these suggestions. Each has something to teach us, and maybe they're not as contradictory as it may seem at first.

  Thirteen days have November
  April, May, and December.
  All the rest have thirty nine
  except for February when the weather is fine.

I chased a few references and found the following:

The Iliad: https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Hom.+Il.+3.16&...

Hyginus, in Latin: https://www.hs-augsburg.de/~harsch/Chronologia/Lspost02/Hygi...

I assume there's more.

The characters used to write Αλεξανδρος (no accents back then!) are interesting to me. I associated that style of script with much later times. Shows what I know.

Very interesting. It sounds a bit like what happened with the term "Hungarian notation".

I imagine it as a competition between myself and an adversary with an uncooperative attitude, one who's prepared to act smarter, dumber, better informed and more ignorant than I am in order to to find gaps, inaccuracies, or ambiguities in the docs I write.

It doesn't hurt that it improves my understanding of whatever it is that I'm documenting -- and where it could be improved.