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sun posted: Sun 2025-07-06 20:41:42 tags: n/a
I grew up with a scale in the bathroom so staying with other people and not being able to weigh-in feels weird

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Mrs and I have a long-running in-joke that one of us is the German spy and the other is the Russian spy. En route to Dothan we passed a tattoo parlor and joked about matching his/hers spy agency tattoos. Germany's BND (Bundesnachrichtendienst, "Federal Intelligence Service") has a relatively simple logo, amenable to a neat line-art tat.

The USSR splintered in 1991, whereupon the functions of its notorious KGB (Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti, "Committee for State Security") were reassigned to other agencies under RU's first president, Boris Yeltsin. The core of its power continued on in the constellation of FSB, SVR, and GRU, and the distinctions of authority are somewhat blurry between agencies. ANYhoo, the old KGB logos generally consisted of colorful and more intricate representations with the gold hammer+sickle symbol (industrial and agricultural worker solidarity) centered in the gules five-pointed star (leftist victory in the world's five continents), superimposed over a sword vertically bisecting a shield, sometimes with various mottos around the edges. That's a rather complex image to endure tatting in the name of our in-joke.

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The median elevation in the contiguous U.S. is ~892'. That figure comes from a 2011 NLM (National Library of Medicine) article correlating home elevation with suicide in 2584 U.S. counties. The most central of those county-elevation data points is 892', which is a fair stand-in for "median contiguous U.S. elevation". The point of web-searching that factoid was a couple of thought-experiments about terraforming the U.S., for example to build up threatened coastal areas with earth-mass stripped from higher ground.

According to an alphabet AI crunch, the average contiguous U.S. elevation is more like 2500', which, if correct, is a pretty stark average-vs.-median differential. It doesn't feel quite right and I don't know what to do with that.