> The U.N.'s report highlighted what areas are expected to be the next megacities and surpass the 10 million mark, including:

> [...]

> - Hajipur, India.

Estimated population of Hajipur in 2025 is 213k people. Not sure why it's on the list. Throws the rest of the article into question for me.

I have sent an email to the contacts listed in the press release regarding this. Let's see what they say.

I believe you are correct. They have made a mistake in the report. Hajipur is a small town near Patna, Bihar which is much bigger than it is.

This is the response I received.

>Thanks for your email. In our online FAQ for the DEGURBA methodology (https://population.un.org/wup/faqs), you'll see:

Does DEGURBA combine too many cities into a single conurbation?

In countries where population data were only available at relatively coarse resolution and densities are generally high, these estimates may include conurbation that are too large. For example, the DEGURBA-defined city that includes Hajipur in India appears to aggregate multiple distinct cities and towns. Using finer grained population data or even better a population grid based on a geo-coded census may lead to this conurbation shrinking and turning into a multitude of individual cities and towns.

The following online portal provides you more details: https://human-settlement.emergency.copernicus.eu/raster.php - Based on this methodology, Hajipur corresponds to the whole red urban centre combining multiple contiguous urban units. If you zoom on the interactive map you'll see the name of smaller urban places included. For the most recent periods, the initial units of analysis for the population grid were the 5,967 Sub-districts/Tehsils/Cercles of the 2011 census of India projected using the 2001-2011 censuses. Population distribution is downscaled using estimates of building volume from the GHSL, which you can see here: https://human-settlement.emergency.copernicus.eu/visualisati...

You can see that Patna is the larger/closest urban area, but it is not physically connected to the rest of the urban area due to the river in between. SO Patna appears as distinct urban area.

USPS is awful from a privacy perspective. USPS will email photos of your incoming mail to anyone who files a change-of-address form with your address as the new address. They don't require any sort of confirmation.

I know this because after I moved out of a place and started traveling for a while, I set up forwarding to my parents' address, and after clicking the "informed delivery" checkbox I immediately started getting photos of all my parents' mail.

Is your parents address your credit card billing address?

I played for a while and didn't get a single "I" piece.

Amazing work. How much did it end up costing?

A list of "pairs of non-synonymous phrases where the words in one phrase are each synonyms of the words in the other".

It's the BBC -- why don't they denote the title of a short story with quotations? It's written throughout without any quotes.

Correct. A later year is actually a weaker claim to the copyright.

I don't think I'll ever get tired of seeing cool new things people build in Conway's Life.

Many years ago I had the privilege of witnessing open heart surgery on an infant, from within the operating room. (This was only possible because I had an indirect connection to the director of the hospital, and because I was in India. I was a student at the time. It was a respectable hospital in a major city.)

The surgery lasted for hours. At one point, the power went out, for maybe a minute or so. The surgeon immediately started singing to himself. I assumed it was for some combination of calming himself and keeping track of the time. It was a strange and beautiful experience I'll never forget, standing in the dark with the nurses, all the machines quiet, baby on the table with its chest pried open, listening to the surgeon's gentle humming of a lullaby.

Looking at the document, it seems like they make pretty strong judgments about the numbers they found even though they don't compare those numbers to any alternatives.

For example, who's to say that 59 minutes/day looking up knowledge isn't the cutting edge of what's possible, for the type and size of organization they consider? Probably far better than cabinets of paper archives.