If anything was going to get Newton in trouble with the Church, it would have been his lifelong obsession with alchemy, not his three laws.

Oh, I’m not a historian, that’s actually just a few vaguely informed wikipedia searches. The extent of my education on Islam and Islamic culture is just a world religions class back in HS.

The monkey’s paw comes from a short story of the same name by W.W. Jacobs back in 1902. It seems the genie that grants three wishes dates all the way back to 1697 in “The Ridicuolous Wishes” by Charles Perrault.

In Islamic/pre-Islamic mythology (over simplifying greatly) genies are actually trapped demons forced into servitude long ago by human sorcerers. They must comply with your wish but use any ambiguity they can as a form of malicious compliance. It’s also worth noting that the idea of genies granting 3 wishes is mostly a western invention and is also likely influenced by Christian ideas of “deals with the devil” (see Foust for how that usually works out for the wisher)

Sort of. Each book is usually it’s own self-contained story (the exception being book #2 which is a direct sequel to #1) but many books follow up on characters that were introduced in previous books. You don’t have to have read any of the previous books to understand the story you picked up, but there’s some continuity and references if you have. It’s kind of like several different novel series all set in the same shared universe rather than a true anthology though.

“Do refrigerators still come in big cardboard boxes?” “Yeah, but the rents are outrageous”

FWIW, yt-dlp can do the ffmpeg part for you with the flags -x --audio-format mp3

ligatures are when you join two or more glyphs into a single one. For instance, instead of having the two characters = and > to form => if you had ligature support you would see ⇒. Some terminals have support to recognize sequences like => (and others obviously) and turn them into their corresponding ligatures (only for display though, the actual file contents remain umchanged)

As a native, I can confirm that when you order a three-way (no I’m not kidding, that’s actually what they’re called) they will absolutely murder it with shredded cheese. Sometimes it’s piled up like 3-4 inches high. They do the same with the coneys too but you can only really stack like 2 inches of cheese on a hot dog bun.