Today I Learned

Aug 2023

Sun Aug 6

The Encyclopedia of Triangle Centers (ETC) is an online list of thousands of points or “centers” associated with the geometry of a triangle.
L’esprit de l’escalier or l’esprit d’escalier is a French term used in English for the predicament of thinking of the perfect reply too late.

Sat Aug 5

Fionn mac Cumhaill, often anglicized Finn McCool or MacCool, is a hero in Irish mythology, as well as in later Scottish and Manx folklore. He is the leader of the Fianna bands of young roving hunter-warriors, as well as being a seer and poet. He is said to have a magic thumb that bestows him with great wisdom. He is often depicted hunting with his hounds Bran and Sceólang, and fighting with his spear and sword.
The Salmon of Knowledge (Irish: An Bradán Feasa) is a creature in the Fenian Cycle of Irish mythology, sometimes identified with Fintan mac Bóchra, who was known as “The Wise” and was once transformed into a salmon.
In Norse mythology, the Poetic Mead or Mead of Poetry, also known as Mead of Suttungr, is a mythical beverage that whoever “drinks becomes a skald or scholar” able to recite any information and solve any question.
Inspired by Boaty McBoatface, other organizations have followed suit in naming vehicles in that style through a public naming poll. Many, but not all follow the formula of Namey McNameface.

Fri Aug 4

A sensitive compartmented information facility (SCIF), in United States military, national security/national defense and intelligence parlance, is an enclosed area within a building that is used to process sensitive compartmented information (SCI) types of classified information.

Thu Aug 3

In mathematics, blowing up or blowup is a type of geometric transformation which replaces a subspace of a given space with all the directions pointing out of that subspace. For example, the blowup of a point in a plane replaces the point with the projectivized tangent space at that point.

Wed Aug 2

A reduced relative clause is a relative clause that is not marked by an explicit relative pronoun or complementizer such as who, which or that. An example is the clause I saw in the English sentence “This is the man I saw.” Unreduced forms of this relative clause would be “This is the man that I saw.” or “…whom I saw.”
Utamakura (歌枕, “poem pillow”) is a rhetorical concept in Japanese poetry.
A kakekotoba (掛詞) or pivot word is a rhetorical device used in the Japanese poetic form waka. This trope uses the phonetic reading of a grouping of kanji (Chinese characters) to suggest several interpretations: first on the literal level (e.g. 松, matsu, meaning “pine tree”), then on subsidiary homophonic levels (e.g. 待つ, matsu, meaning “to wait”).

Tue Aug 1

“The Mother of All Demos” is a name retroactively applied to a landmark computer demonstration, given at the Association for Computing Machinery / Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (ACM/IEEE)—Computer Society’s Fall Joint Computer Conference in San Francisco, by Douglas Engelbart, on December 9, 1968.The live demonstration featured the introduction of a complete computer hardware and software system called the oN-Line System or, more commonly, NLS. The 90-minute presentation demonstrated for the first time many of the fundamental elements of modern personal computing: windows, hypertext, graphics, efficient navigation and command input, video conferencing, the computer mouse, word processing, dynamic file linking, revision control, and a collaborative real-time editor.

July 2023

Mon Jul 31

Signing Exact English (SEE-II, sometimes Signed Exact English) is a system of manual communication that strives to be an exact representation of English language vocabulary and grammar. It is one of a number of such systems in use in English-speaking countries. It is related to Seeing Essential English (SEE-I), a manual sign system created in 1945, based on the morphemes of English words.

Sun Jul 30

Syncretism is the practice of combining different beliefs and various schools of thought. Syncretism involves the merging or assimilation of several originally discrete traditions, especially in the theology and mythology of religion, thus asserting an underlying unity and allowing for an inclusive approach to other faiths.

Sat Jul 29

A musical saw, also called a singing saw, is a hand saw used as a musical instrument.

Fri Jul 28

The Bitches (also known as Bitches and Whelps) are a tidal race and set of rocks between Ramsey Island and the west Welsh coastline near St Davids. They are a popular tourist destination and a playspot for extreme waterboarding enthusiasts such as whitewater kayakers and surfers.
The Embanking of the tidal Thames is the historical process by which the lower River Thames, at one time a broad, shallow waterway winding through malarious marshlands, has been transformed by human intervention into a deep, narrow tidal canal flowing between solid artificial walls, and restrained by these at high tide.

Thu Jul 27

Unobtainium is a term used in fiction, engineering, and common situations for a material ideal for a particular application but impractically hard to get.
Gauge blocks (also known as gage blocks, Johansson gauges, slip gauges, or Jo blocks) are a system for producing precision lengths. The individual gauge block is a metal or ceramic block that has been precision ground and lapped to a specific thickness.

Wed Jul 26

The Almighty Gaylords Nation is a Chicago street gang that was most active during the mid and late 20th century. The original president of the Gaylords selected the name after reading about the Gaylords in the public library (the Gaillards, later anglicized to Gaylord, were people from Normandy who lived near the Château Gaillard, constructed by Richard I).

Tue Jul 25

Several non-standard dates are used in calendars. Some are used sarcastically, some for scientific or mathematical purposes, and some for exceptional or fictional calendars.
Tibb’s Eve refers to both a folk expression for a day which will never arrive, as well as a celebration held on 23 December originating in Newfoundland and Labrador known as Tipp’s Eve.
Undecimber or Undecember is a name for a 13th month in a calendar that normally has 12 months. Duodecimber or Duodecember is similarly a 14th month. Tridecember is the only name for a 15th month.

Mon Jul 24

The Quad Cities is a region of cities in the U.S. states of Iowa and Illinois: Davenport and Bettendorf in southeastern Iowa, and Rock Island, Moline and East Moline in northwestern Illinois. These cities are the center of the Quad Cities metropolitan area, which as of 2013 had a population estimate of 383,781 and a Combined Statistical Area (CSA) population of 474,937, making it the 90th-largest CSA in the nation.

Sun Jul 23

Null Island is the name of an imaginary place located at zero degrees latitude and zero degrees longitude (0°N 0°E), i.e., where the prime meridian and the equator intersect. The fictitious island, usually defined as 1 meter square, is often used in mapping software as a placeholder to help find and correct database entries that have erroneously been assigned the coordinates 0,0. Although Null Island started as a joke within the geospatial community, it has become a useful means of addressing a recurring issue in geographic information science.

Sat Jul 22

List of U.S. state soils. A state soil is a soil that has special significance to a particular state.

Fri Jul 21

A political gaffe is an error in speech made by a politician.
Quotations from individuals pertaining to politics.
“Le bruit et l’odeur” refers to a speech given in 1991 by Jacques Chirac, the Mayor of Paris who later became French president; it translates as “noise and smell.”

Thu Jul 20

In stagecraft, a spike is a marking, usually made with a piece of tape (although some theatres use paint pens), put on or around the stage. This marking is used to show the correct position for set pieces, furniture, actors and other items which move during the course of a performance and are required to stop or be placed in a specific location.

Wed Jul 19

Pressure-sensitive tape, known also in various countries as PSA tape, adhesive tape, self-stick tape, sticky tape, Sellotape, or just tape, is an adhesive tape that will stick with application of pressure, without the need for a solvent (such as water) or heat for activation.

Tue Jul 18

Wacky cake, also called crazy cake, Joe cake, wowie cake, and WW II cake, is a spongy, cocoa-based cake. It is unique in that unlike many pastries and desserts, no eggs, butter or milk are used to make the cake batter.
Three Wolf Moon is a T-shirt featuring three wolves howling at the Moon.

Mon Jul 17

Pele’s hair is a volcanic glass formation produced from cooled lava stretched into thin strands, usually from lava fountains, lava cascades, or vigorous lava flows. It is named after Pele, the Hawaiian goddess of volcanoes.

Sun Jul 16

A portal is an opening in a wall of a building, gate or fortification, especially a grand entrance to an important structure. Doors, metal gates, or portcullis in the opening can be used to control entry or exit.

Sat Jul 15

Plan 9 from Bell Labs is a distributed operating system which originated from the Computing Science Research Center (CSRC) at Bell Labs in the mid-1980s and built on UNIX concepts first developed there in the late 1960s.
The Student Information Processing Board (SIPB) is a student group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) that helps students access computing resources and use them effectively.

Fri Jul 14

In electronics, signal processing, and video, ringing is oscillation of a signal, particularly in the step response (the response to a sudden change in input).

Thu Jul 13

The Helmholtz–Kohlrausch effect (after Hermann von Helmholtz and V. A. Kohlrausch) is a perceptual phenomenon wherein the intense saturation of spectral hue is perceived as part of the color’s luminance.

Sun Jul 9

Let’s kill all the lawyers is a line from William Shakespeare’s Henry VI, Part 2, Act IV, Scene 2. The full quote is: “The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers”. It is among Shakespeare’s most famous lines.

Sat Jul 8

ThinThread was an intelligence gathering project by the United States National Security Agency (NSA) conducted throughout the 1990s. The program involved wiretapping and sophisticated analysis of the resulting data. The program was discontinued three weeks before the September 11, 2001 attacks due to the changes in priorities and the consolidation of U.S. intelligence authority.

Fri Jul 7

A parklet is a sidewalk extension that provides more space and amenities for people using the street.

Thu Jul 6

Wed Jul 5

Using the apostrophus method of roman numerals, 500 is written as IↃ, while 1,000 is written as CIↃ. This system of encasing numbers to denote thousands (imagine the Cs and Ↄs as parentheses) has its origins in Etruscan numeral usage. Each additional set of C and Ↄ surrounding CIↃ raises the value by a factor of ten: CCIↃↃ represents 10,000 and CCCIↃↃↃ represents 100,000. Similarly, each additional Ↄ to the right of IↃ raises the value by a factor of ten: IↃↃ represents 5,000 and IↃↃↃ represents 50,000. Numerals larger than CCCIↃↃↃ do not occur. Sometimes CIↃ is reduced to ↀ for 1,000. Similarly, IↃↃ for 5,000 is sometimes reduced to ↁ; CCIↃↃ for 10,000 to ↂ; IↃↃↃ for 50,000 to ↇ (ↇ); and CCCIↃↃↃ (ↈ) for 100,000 to ↈ.

Tue Jul 4

David Michael Wojnarowicz (September 14, 1954 – July 22, 1992) was an American painter, photographer, writer, filmmaker, performance artist, songwriter/recording artist, and AIDS activist prominent in the East Village art scene. He incorporated personal narratives influenced by his struggle with AIDS as well as his political activism in his art until his death from the disease in 1992.
An epiphyte is a plant or plant-like organism that grows on the surface of another plant and derives its moisture and nutrients from the air, rain, water (in marine environments) or from debris accumulating around it.

Mon Jul 3

Death can occur during sexual intercourse for a number of reasons, generally because of the physical strain of the activity, or because of unusual extenuating circumstances. There are various euphemisms for death during sex, including “dying in the saddle” or the French “la mort d’amour”.

Sun Jul 2

Hamlet and His Problems is an essay written by T.S. Eliot in 1919 that offers a critical reading of Hamlet.

Sat Jul 1

A scream queen (a wordplay on screen queen) is an actress who is prominent and influential in horror films, either through a notable appearance or recurring roles. A scream king is the male equivalent.

June 2023

Fri Jun 30

Miller columns (also known as cascading lists) are a browsing/visualization technique that can be applied to tree structures. The columns allow multiple levels of the hierarchy to be open at once, and provide a visual representation of the current location. It is closely related to techniques used earlier in the Smalltalk browser, but was independently invented by Mark S. Miller in 1980 at Yale University. The technique was then used at Project Xanadu, Datapoint, and NeXT.

Thu Jun 29

The Cincinnati Subway was a partially completed rapid transit system beneath the streets of Cincinnati, Ohio. Although the system only grew to a little over 2 miles (3.2 km) in length, its derelict tunnels and stations make up the largest abandoned subway tunnel system in the United States.

Wed Jun 28

The Erfurt latrine disaster occurred on 26 July 1184, when Henry VI, King of Germany (later Holy Roman Emperor), held a Hoftag (informal assembly) in the Petersberg Citadel in Erfurt. On the morning of 26 July, the combined weight of the assembled nobles caused the wooden second story floor of the building to collapse and most of them fell through into the latrine cesspit below the ground floor, where about 60 of them drowned in liquid excrement.

Tue Jun 27

cis is a mathematical notation defined by cis x = cos x + i sin x, where cos is the cosine function, i is the imaginary unit and sin is the sine function.

Mon Jun 26

Surtitles, also known as supertitles, SurCaps, OpTrans, are translated or transcribed lyrics/dialogue projected above a stage or displayed on a screen, commonly used in opera, theatre or other musical performances.

Sun Jun 25

Gnathology is the study of the masticatory system, including its physiology, functional disturbances, and treatment. Dr Beverly McCollum established the Gnathologic Society in 1926.

Sat Jun 24

The long and short scales are two of several naming systems for integer powers of ten which use some of the same terms for different magnitudes. For whole numbers smaller than 1,000,000,000 (109), such as one thousand or one million, the two scales are identical. For larger numbers, starting with 109, the two systems differ. For identical names, the long scale proceeds by powers of one million, whereas the short scale proceeds by powers of one thousand. For example, in the short scale, “one billion” means one thousand millions (1,000,000,000), whereas in the long scale, it means one million millions (1,000,000,000,000). For interleaved values, the long scale system employs additional terms, typically substituting the word ending -ion for -iard.

Fri Jun 23

Soy curls are a soy based meat alternative, made from boiling and dehydrating soybeans, with a texture similar to chicken. Soy curls are prepared by boiling, baking or frying.
Communition is the reduction of solid materials from one average particle size to a smaller average particle size, by crushing, grinding, cutting, vibrating, or other processes.

Thu Jun 22

Shibboleth was the title of a temporary art installation placed by the Colombian artist Doris Salcedo in the Tate Modern in 2007. The work took the form of a long crack in the floor.
The only service animals recognized by the ADA are dogs and miniature horses. Miniature horses are usually used for people who need walking assistance, since they can handle heavier loads
People obsessed with trains are (negatively) called “foamers”

Wed Jun 21

At the company Hormel Foods, which makes canned SPAM, employees are supposed to refer to spam emails as unwanted emails.

Tue Jun 20

In information security, a confused deputy is a computer program that is tricked by another program (with fewer privileges or less rights) into misusing its authority on the system. It is a specific type of privilege escalation. The confused deputy problem is often cited as an example of why capability-based security is important.

Mon Jun 19

The TRAM-EM European Tramdriver Championship is the European championship for competitive tram driving.

Sun Jun 18

Multiple encryption is the process of encrypting an already encrypted message one or more times, either using the same or a different algorithm. It is also known as cascade encryption, cascade ciphering, multiple encryption, and superencipherment. Superencryption refers to the outer-level encryption of a multiple encryption.

Sat Jun 17

The clitellum is a thickened glandular and non-segmented section of the body wall near the head in earthworms and leeches, that secretes a viscid sac in which eggs are stored.
A shit flow diagram (also called excreta flow diagram or SFD) is a high level technical drawing used to display how excreta moves through a location, and functions as a tool to identify where improvements are needed.

Fri Jun 16

The Julian day is the continuous count of days since the beginning of the Julian period, and is used primarily by astronomers, and in software for easily calculating elapsed days between two events (e.g. food production date and sell by date).
The term etymon refers to a word or morpheme from which a later word or morpheme derives. For example, the Latin word candidus, which means “white”, is the etymon of English candid. Relationships are often less transparent, however. English place names such as Winchester, Gloucester, Tadcaster share in different modern forms a suffixed etymon that was once meaningful, Latin castrum ‘fort’.

Thu Jun 15

Techno Viking is an internet phenomenon or meme based on a video from the 2000 Fuckparade in Berlin, Germany.

Wed Jun 14

The Boy or Girl paradox surrounds a set of questions in probability theory, which are also known as The Two Child Problem, Mr. Smith’s Children and the Mrs. Smith Problem. The initial formulation of the question dates back to at least 1959, when Martin Gardner featured it in his October 1959 “Mathematical Games column” in Scientific American. He titled it The Two Children Problem, and phrased the paradox as follows:
- Mr. Jones has two children. The older child is a girl. What is the probability that both children are girls?
- Mr. Smith has two children. At least one of them is a boy. What is the probability that both children are boys?

Tue Jun 13

The Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (CPPCG), or the Genocide Convention, is an international treaty that criminalizes genocide and obligates state parties to pursue the enforcement of its prohibition. It was the first legal instrument to codify genocide as a crime, and the first human rights treaty unanimously adopted by the United Nations General Assembly, on 9 December 1948, during the third session of the United Nations General Assembly. The Convention entered into force on 12 January 1951 and has 152 state parties as of 2022.

Mon Jun 12

Queueing theory is the mathematical study of waiting lines, or queues.

Sun Jun 11

The nut rage incident, also referred to as nutgate (Korean: 땅콩 회항, Ttangkong hoehang), was an air rage incident that occurred on December 5, 2014, at John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York City onboard Korean Air Flight 086. Korean Air vice president Heather Cho (Korean name: Cho Hyun-ah), dissatisfied with the way a flight attendant served nuts on the plane, ordered the aircraft to return to the gate before takeoff.

Sat Jun 10

Exaggeration postcards, also known as tall tale postcards, were postcards popular throughout North America, especially in the Great Plains region, during the early 20th century. These postcards would feature impossibly large animals and crops, often shown being carried by train or wagon, and would usually have some sort of caption to go along with them.

Fri Jun 9

Academic fencing (German: akademisches Fechten) or Mensur is the traditional kind of fencing practiced by some student corporations (Studentenverbindungen) in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Latvia, Estonia, and, to a minor extent, in Belgium, Lithuania, and Poland. It is a traditional, strictly regulated épée fight between two male members of different fraternities with sharp weapons. The German technical term Mensur (from Latin meaning ‘dimension’) in the 16th century referred to the specified distance between each of the fencers.

Thu Jun 8

The term Swabian salute (German: schwäbischer Gruß) is a partly humorous, partly euphemistic reference to the expression Leck mich am Arsch (akin to expression “kiss my arse”, but literally “lick me on the arse”) which is a common profanity.
Gesticulation in Italian

Wed Jun 7

In computer science, pointer swizzling is the conversion of references based on name or position into direct pointer references (memory addresses). It is typically performed during deserialization or loading of a relocatable object from a disk file, such as an executable file or pointer-based data structure.
In cryptography, a sponge function or sponge construction is any of a class of algorithms with finite internal state that take an input bit stream of any length and produce an output bit stream of any desired length.

Tue Jun 6

“Lions led by donkeys” is a phrase popularly used to describe the British infantry of the First World War and to blame the generals who led them. The contention is that the brave soldiers (lions) were sent to their deaths by incompetent and indifferent leaders (donkeys).

Mon Jun 5

The Montreal Protocol is an international treaty designed to protect the ozone layer by phasing out the production of numerous substances that are responsible for ozone depletion.

Sun Jun 4

The Baby Train, or simply Baby Train, is an urban legend told in the United States, United Kingdom and Australia. The legend first appeared in Christopher Morley’s 1939 novel Kitty Foyle. According to the legend, a certain small town had an unusually high birth rate. This was allegedly caused by a freight train passing through the town and blowing its whistle, waking up all the residents. Since it was too late to go back to sleep and too early to get up, couples would have sex. This resulted in a mini-baby boom.

Sat Jun 3

The Tama-Re compound in Putnam County, Georgia (a.k.a. “Kodesh”, “Wahannee”, “The Golden City”, “Al Tamaha”) was an Egyptian-themed set of buildings and monuments established in 1993 on 476 acres near Eatonton.
In aesthetics, the sublime(from the Latin sublīmis) is the quality of greatness, whether physical, moral, intellectual, metaphysical, aesthetic, spiritual, or artistic.

Fri Jun 2

The The La Spezia–Rimini Line (also known as the Massa–Senigallia Line), in the linguistics of the Romance languages, is a line that demarcates a number of important isoglosses that distinguish Romance languages south and east of the line from Romance languages north and west of it.

Thu Jun 1

Mummy brown, also known as Egyptian brown or Caput Mortuum,: 254 is a rich brown bituminous pigment with good transparency, sitting between burnt umber and raw umber in tint. The pigment was made from the flesh of mummies mixed with white pitch and myrrh.

May 2023

Wed May 31

Manualism is the art of playing music by squeezing air through the hands. Because the sound produced has a distinctly flatulent tone, such music is usually presented as a form of musical comedy or parody. The musical performer is called a manualist, who may perform a cappella or with instrumental accompaniment.

Tue May 30

Sick building syndrome (SBS) is a condition in which people develop symptoms of illness or become infected with chronic disease from the building in which they work or reside.The main identifying observation is an increased incidence of complaints of symptoms such as headache, eye, nose, and throat irritation, fatigue, dizziness, and nausea.
Sensational spelling is the deliberate spelling of a word in a non-standard way for special effect.

Mon May 29

In architecture, a parti is an organizing thought or decision behind an architect’s design, presented in the form of a parti diagram, parti sketch, or a simple statement.

Sun May 28

The phrase man bites dog is a shortened version of an aphorism in journalism that describes how an unusual, infrequent event (such as a man biting a dog) is more likely to be reported as news than an ordinary, everyday occurrence with similar consequences, such as a dog biting a man.

Sat May 27

In telecommunications, an atmospheric duct is a horizontal layer in the lower atmosphere in which the vertical refractive index gradients are such that radio signals (and light rays) are guided or ducted, tend to follow the curvature of the Earth, and experience less attenuation in the ducts than they would if the ducts were not present.
Phase-shift keying (PSK) is a digital modulation process which conveys data by changing (modulating) the phase of a constant frequency carrier wave. The modulation is accomplished by varying the sine and cosine inputs at a precise time. It is widely used for wireless LANs, RFID and Bluetooth communication.
Radiation hardening is the process of making electronic components and circuits resistant to damage or malfunction caused by high levels of ionizing radiation (particle radiation and high-energy electromagnetic radiation), especially for environments in outer space (especially beyond the low Earth orbit), around nuclear reactors and particle accelerators, or during nuclear accidents or nuclear warfare.

Fri May 26

The wind phone (風の電話, kaze no denwa) is an unconnected telephone booth in Ōtsuchi, Iwate Prefecture, Japan, where visitors can hold one-way conversations with deceased loved ones.

Thu May 25

A fixer is someone who carries out assignments for or is skillful at solving problems for others. The term has different meanings in different contexts.

Wed May 24

Tue May 23

The Great Resignation, also known as the Big Quit and the Great Reshuffle, is an ongoing economic trend in which employees have voluntarily resigned from their jobs en masse, beginning in early 2021 in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Mon May 22

Sun May 21

The psychology of eating meat is a complex area of study illustrating the confluence of morality, emotions, cognition, and personality characteristics.

Sat May 20

Compton’s Cafeteria riot occurred in August 1966 in the Tenderloin district of San Francisco. The riot was a response to the violent and constant police harassment of drag queens and trans people, particularly trans women. The incident was one of the first LGBT-related riots in United States history, preceding the more famous 1969 Stonewall riots in New York City. It marked the beginning of transgender activism in San Francisco.
The shell’s line-continuation character “\” is “just” escaping the newline that comes next

Fri May 19

The Ganesha drinking milk miracle was a phenomenon which occurred on 21 September 1995, in which statues of the Hindu deity Ganesha were thought to be drinking milk offerings.The news spread very quickly in various Indian and American cities, as Indians everywhere tried to “feed” idols of Ganesha with milk and spread the news through telephones and word of mouth, attracting significant attention in the Indian media. Scientists have described the incident as occurring through capillary action.

Thu May 18

Filk music is a musical culture, genre, and community tied to science fiction, fantasy, and horror fandom and a type of fan labor. The genre has existed since the early 1950s and been played primarily since the mid-1970s.

Wed May 17

Exquisite corpse (from the original French term cadavre exquis, literally exquisite cadaver), is a method by which a collection of words or images is collectively assembled. Each collaborator adds to a composition in sequence, either by following a rule (e.g. “The adjective noun adverb verb the adjective noun.” as in “The green duck sweetly sang the dreadful dirge.”) or by being allowed to see only the end of what the previous person contributed.

Tue May 16

A software protection dongle (commonly known as a dongle or key) is an electronic copy protection and content protection device. When connected to a computer or other electronics, they unlock software functionality or decode content. The hardware key is programmed with a product key or other cryptographic protection mechanism and functions via an electrical connector to an external bus of the computer or appliance.

Mon May 15

John F. Carrington (21 March 1914 – 24 December 1985) was an English missionary and Bible translator who spent a large part of his life in the Belgian Congo. He became fluent in the Kele language and in the related talking drum form of communication, and wrote a book titled The Talking Drums of Africa.

Sun May 14

A drive into deep left field by Castellanos” is a phrase spoken by Thom Brennaman, a play-by-play announcer for the Cincinnati Reds, during a baseball game against Kansas City on August 19, 2020. Brennaman was replaced in the middle of the broadcast for a microphone gaffe in which he described an unnamed location as “one of the fag capitals of the world”. While he apologized to listeners on the air, Reds outfielder Nick Castellanos hit a home run, which caused Brennaman to interrupt himself to deliver a home run call, describing the hit as a “drive into deep left field”, before continuing with his apology.
How to Blow Up a Pipeline: Learning to Fight in a World on Fire is a nonfiction book written by Andreas Malm and published in 2021 by Verso Books. In the book, Malm argues that sabotage is a logical form of climate activism, and criticizes both pacifism within the climate movement and “climate fatalism” outside it.
Farmers used to use barbed wire fences to carry signals

Sat May 13

University City (UC) is a community in San Diego, California, located in the northwestern portion of the city next to the University of California, San Diego.
- On March 10, 1989, a pipe bomb attached to the minivan of a woman exploded while she was driving near the University Towne Center mall. She was the wife of Will C. Rogers III, the captain of the USS Vincennes (CG-49) who gave the order to shoot down Iran Air Flight 655. She escaped the blast.
- The San Diego California Temple of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was completed in 1993. It is the 45th operating temple of the LDS Church in the world.
- On August 1, 2003, arson by the Earth Liberation Front, an eco-terrorism group, destroyed a housing complex under construction at the east side of UTC. It destroyed a 50 million dollar housing sprawl project. Many residents awoke to find popcorn-shaped ashes littering their backyards and streets.
- On December 8, 2008 at approximately 11 AM (PST) a military F/A-18 bound for the nearby military base crashed into several homes destroying them on the southeast corner of Cather Avenue and Huggins Street. The pilot ejected and was not injured. There were four civilians killed on the ground by the impact and fire that followed.

Fri May 12

Thu May 11

A person’s Erdős–Bacon number is the sum of one’s Erdős number—which measures the “collaborative distance” in authoring academic papers between that person and Hungarian mathematician Paul Erdős—and one’s Bacon number—which represents the number of links, through roles in films, by which the person is separated from American actor Kevin Bacon.

Wed May 10

Inedia or breatharianism is the claimed ability for a person to live without consuming food, and in some cases water. It is a pseudoscientific practice and several adherents of these practices have died from starvation or dehydration as not having followed security guidelines (especially forcing change, change too fast).

Tue May 9

Rednex is a Swedish musical group whose style is a mix of American country music and modern Techno, with their appearance and stage names taking inspiration from the American redneck stereotypes.

Mon May 8

A Frit is a ceramic composition that has been fused, quenched, and granulated. Frits form an important part of the batches used in compounding enamels and ceramic glazes; the purpose of this pre-fusion is to render any soluble and/or toxic components insoluble by causing them to combine with silica and other added oxides

Sun May 7

Gas mark is a temperature scale used on gas ovens and cookers in the United Kingdom, Ireland and some Commonwealth of Nations countries.

Sat May 6

List of music considered the worst

Fri May 5

The Barkley Marathons is an ultramarathon trail race held each year in Frozen Head State Park in Morgan County, Tennessee. The course, which varies from year to year, consists of five loops of the 20+ mile, off-trail course for a total of 100 miles (160 km). The race is limited to a 60-hour period from the start of the first loop, and takes place in March or early April of each year. The race is known for its extreme difficulty and many peculiarities.

Thu May 4

In computer architecture 36-bit integers, memory addresses, or other data units are those that are 36 bits (six six-bit characters) wide. Also, 36-bit central processing unit (CPU) and arithmetic logic unit (ALU) architectures are those that are based on registers, address buses, or data buses of that size. 36-bit computers were popular in the early mainframe computer era from the 1950s through the early 1970s.

Wed May 3

A biometric passport (also known as an e-passport or a digital passport) is a traditional passport that has an embedded electronic microprocessor chip which contains biometric information that can be used to authenticate the identity of the passport holder. It uses contactless smart card technology, including a microprocessor chip (computer chip) and antenna (for both power to the chip and communication) embedded in the front or back cover, or centre page, of the passport.

Tue May 2

The eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) has a history of conflict, where various armies, rebel groups, and outside actors have profited from mining while contributing to violence and exploitation during wars in the region. The four main end products of mining in the eastern DRC are tin, tungsten, tantalum, and gold, which are extracted and passed through a variety of intermediaries before being sold to international markets.

Mon May 1

Not invented here is the tendency to avoid using or buying products, research, standards, or knowledge from external origins. It is usually adopted by social, corporate, or institutional cultures. Research illustrates a strong bias against ideas from the outside.

April 2023

Sun Apr 30

Persipan is a material used in confectionery. It is similar to marzipan but, instead of almonds, is made with apricot or peach kernels. Persipan consists of 40% ground kernels and 60% sugar.

Sat Apr 29

The curb cut effect is the phenomenon of disability-friendly features being used and appreciated by a larger group than the people they were designed for.

Fri Apr 28

Pre-production plastic pellets, commonly known as nurdles, are tiny plastic pellets (smaller than 5mm) that are universally used in the plastics industry for the manufacture of plastic products.

Thu Apr 27

Skitching is the act of hitching a ride by holding onto a motor vehicle while riding on a skateboard, roller skates, bicycle, or sneakers when there is snowfall.

Wed Apr 26

“Camera eats first” describes the act of taking a digital or smartphone photograph of a meal before eating, often followed by uploading the image to social media. The expression refers to the photographer metaphorically “feeding” their camera before feeding themselves. Such photos are generally for personal use, such as keeping photographic food diaries, rather than for commercial purposes.

Tue Apr 25

A pen register, or dialed number recorder (DNR), is a device that records all numbers called from a particular telephone line. The term has come to include any device or program that performs similar functions to an original pen register, including programs monitoring Internet communications.
King County was formed out of territory within Thurston County on December 22, 1852, by the Oregon Territory legislature and was named after Alabamian William R. King, who had just been elected Vice President of the United States under President Franklin Pierce. On February 24, 1986, the King County Council approved a motion to rename the county to honor civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. (no relation to William R. King), preserving the name “King County” while changing its namesake. The motion stated, among other reasons for the change, that “William Rufus DeVane King was a slaveowner” who “earned income and maintained his lifestyle by oppressing and exploiting other human beings,” while Martin Luther King’s “contributions are well-documented and celebrated by millions throughout this nation and the world, and embody the attributes for which the citizens of King County can be proud, and claim as their own.”
Franklin County in Ohio shares a name with Franklin County in Kentucky, where Frankfort is located. This makes it one of two pairs of capital cities in counties of the same name, along with Marion Counties in Indiana and Oregon.

Mon Apr 24

The Berlin key (also known as, German, Schließzwangschlüssel, or, in English, forced-locking key) is a key for a type of door lock. It was designed to force people to close and lock their doors, usually a main entrance door or gate leading into a common yard or tenement block.

Sun Apr 23

An artistic language, or artlang, is a constructed language designed for aesthetic and phonetic pleasure. Language can be artistic to the extent that artists use it as a source of creativity in art, poetry, calligraphy or as a metaphor to address themes such as cultural diversity and the vulnerability of the individual in a globalizing world.
Engineered languages are constructed languages devised to test or prove some hypotheses about how languages work or might work. There are at least three subcategories, philosophical languages (or ideal languages), logical languages (sometimes abbreviated as loglangs), and experimental languages.
An international auxiliary language (sometimes acronymized as IAL or contracted as auxlang) is a language meant for communication between people from all different nations, who do not share a common first language.
Europanto is a macaronic language concept with a fluid vocabulary from European languages of the user’s choice or need. It was conceived in 1996 by Diego Marani (a journalist, author and translator for the European Council of Ministers in Brussels) based on the common practice of word-borrowing usage of many European languages.
Macaronic language uses a mixture of languages, particularly bilingual puns or situations in which the languages are otherwise used in the same context (rather than simply discrete segments of a text being in different languages).
Transpiranto is a parody language, a caricature of the international auxiliary language Esperanto. The name contains a play on the Swedish verb transpirera, to perspire.

Sat Apr 22

Survey markers, also called survey marks, survey monuments, or geodetic marks, are objects placed to mark key survey points on the Earth’s surface. They are used in geodetic and land surveying. A benchmark is a type of survey marker that indicates elevation (vertical position). Horizontal position markers used for triangulation are also known as triangulation stations. Benchmarking is the hobby of “hunting” for these marks.
Semantics (from Ancient Greek σημαντικός (sēmantikós) ‘significant’) is the study of reference, meaning, or truth. The term can be used to refer to subfields of several distinct disciplines, including philosophy, linguistics and computer science.
Mr. Ouch is a hazard symbol developed by the US’s National Electrical Manufacturers Association (NEMA) to represent electrical hazards. Unlike other high-voltage warning symbols, Mr. Ouch was specifically designed with young children in mind. Mr. Ouch is similar in name, purpose, and appearance to the UPMC Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh’s “Mr. Yuk” design used to label poisonous substances, although the two symbols were developed independently.

Fri Apr 21

PICTIVE (Plastic Interface for Collaborative Technology Initiative through Video Exploration) is a participatory design method used to develop graphical user interfaces.
The etymology of Jamaica the country, and Jamaica New York are different

Thu Apr 20

Letters rogatory or letters of request are a formal request from a court to a foreign court for some type of judicial assistance. The most common remedies sought by letters rogatory are service of process and taking of evidence.
A skunked term is a word that becomes difficult to use because it is evolving from one meaning to another, perhaps inconsistent or even opposite, usage, or a word that becomes difficult to use due to other controversy surrounding the word.

Wed Apr 19

Erasto Bartholomeo Mpemba (1950–2023) was a Tanzanian game warden who, as a schoolboy, discovered the eponymously named Mpemba effect, a paradoxical phenomenon in which hot water freezes faster than cold water under certain conditions; this effect had been observed previously by Aristotle, Francis Bacon, and René Descartes.
Coca Cola bottles with yellow caps are Kosher (and put out during Passover)

Tue Apr 18

A language-game (German: Sprachspiel) is a philosophical concept developed by Ludwig Wittgenstein, referring to simple examples of language use and the actions into which the language is woven. Wittgenstein argued that a word or even a sentence has meaning only as a result of the “rule” of the “game” being played. Depending on the context, for example, the utterance “Water!” could be an order, the answer to a question, or some other form of communication.

Mon Apr 17

The London Noses or Seven Noses of Soho are an artistic installation found on buildings in London. They are plaster of Paris reproductions of the artist’s nose which protrude from walls in an incongruous and unexpected way. The noses are said to be located at Admiralty Arch, Great Windmill Street, Meard Street, Bateman Street, Dean Street, Endell Street and D’Arblay Street in Central London

Sun Apr 16

A whale fall occurs when the carcass of a whale has fallen onto the ocean floor at a depth greater than 1,000 m (3,300 ft), in the bathyal or abyssal zones. On the sea floor, these carcasses can create complex localized ecosystems that supply sustenance to deep-sea organisms for decades.

Sat Apr 15

Pickles (born 1962 or 1963; died 1967) was a black and white collie dog, known for his role in finding the stolen Jules Rimet Trophy in March 1966, four months before the 1966 FIFA World Cup was scheduled to kick off in England.

Fri Apr 14

Hearts and Minds or winning hearts and minds refers to the strategy and programs used by the governments of Vietnam and the United States during the Vietnam War to win the popular support of the Vietnamese people and to help defeat the Viet Cong insurgency. Pacification is the more formal term for winning hearts and minds. In this case, however, it was also defined as the process of countering the insurgency. Military, political, economic, and social means were used to attempt to establish or reestablish South Vietnamese government control over rural areas and people under the influence of the Viet Cong.

Thu Apr 13

Wed Apr 12

Princess cake is a traditional Swedish layer cake or torte consisting of alternating layers of airy sponge cake, pastry cream, raspberry jam and a thick-domed layer of whipped cream. The cake is covered by a layer of marzipan, giving it a smooth rounded top. The marzipan overlay is usually green, sprinkled with powdered sugar, and often decorated with a pink marzipan rose. The original recipe first appeared in the 1948 Prinsessornas kokbok cookbook, which was published by Jenny Åkerström (1867-1957), teacher of the three daughters of Prince Carl, Duke of Västergötland.

Tue Apr 11

A dashpot also known as a damper, is a mechanical device that resists motion via viscous friction.

Mon Apr 10

Fatwood also known as “fat lighter”, “lighter wood”, “rich lighter”, “pine knot”, “lighter knot”, “heart pine”, “fat stick” or “lighter’d” [sic], is derived from the heartwood of pine trees.

Sun Apr 9

Fog of war is the uncertainty in situational awareness experienced by participants in military operations. The term seeks to capture the uncertainty regarding one’s own capability, adversary capability, and adversary intent during an engagement, operation, or campaign. Military forces try to reduce the fog of war through military intelligence and friendly force tracking systems. The term has become commonly used to define uncertainty mechanics in wargames.

Sat Apr 8

Ronald Clark O’Bryan nicknamed The Candy Man and The Man Who Killed Halloween, was an American man convicted of killing his eight-year-old son Timothy (April 5, 1966 – October 31, 1974) on Halloween 1974 with a potassium cyanide-laced Pixy Stix that was ostensibly collected during a trick or treat outing.

Fri Apr 7

Flipism is a pseudophilosophy under which decisions are made by flipping a coin.

Thu Apr 6

Gadgetbahn is a neologism that refers to a public transport concept or implementation that is touted by its developers and supporters as futuristic or innovative, but in practice is less feasible, reliable, and more expensive than traditional modes such as buses, trams and trains.

Wed Apr 5

Rhythm 0 was a six-hour work of performance art by Serbian artist Marina Abramović in Naples in 1974. The work involved Abramović standing still while the audience was invited to do to her whatever they wished, using one of 72 objects she had placed on a table. These included a rose, feather, perfume, honey, bread, grapes, wine, scissors, a scalpel, nails, a metal bar, a gun, and a bullet.

Tue Apr 4

A squib load, also known as a squib round, pop and no kick, or just a squib, is a firearm malfunction in which a fired projectile does not have enough force behind it to exit the barrel, and thus becomes stuck. This type of malfunction can be extremely dangerous, as failing to notice that the projectile has become stuck in the barrel may result in another round being fired directly into the obstructed barrel, resulting in a catastrophic failure of the weapon’s structural integrity.
Bruceploitation (a portmanteau of “Bruce Lee” and “exploitation”) is an exploitation film subgenre that emerged after the death of martial arts film star Bruce Lee in 1973, during which time filmmakers from Hong Kong, Taiwan and South Korea cast Bruce Lee look-alike actors (“Lee-alikes”) to star in imitation martial arts films, in order to exploit Lee’s sudden international popularity.
A bicycle stairway is a pedestrian stairway which also has a channel alongside it to facilitate walking a bicycle up or down the stairway.The channel itself is also often called a wheeling ramp, push ramp or runnel.
Bicycle lifts are powered mechanical systems for moving bicycles uphill. They are used where the steepness of a slope or other situations like subway crowds make riding uphill difficult.

Mon Apr 3

Bog butter is an ancient waxy substance found buried in peat bogs, particularly in Ireland and Scotland. Likely an old method of making and preserving butter, some tested lumps of bog butter were made of dairy, while others were meat-based.

Sun Apr 2

To ”trip the light fantastic” is to dance nimbly or lightly to music.

Sat Apr 1

Thieves’ cant is a cant, cryptolect, or argot which was formerly used by thieves, beggars, and hustlers of various kinds in Great Britain and to a lesser extent in other English-speaking countries. It is now mostly obsolete and used in literature and fantasy role-playing, although individual terms continue to be used in the criminal subcultures of Britain and the United States.

March 2023

Fri Mar 31

Wild asses are a subgenus of single toed grazing ungulates.

Thu Mar 30

The world wonders is a phrase which rose to notoriety following its use during World War II when it appeared as part of a decoded message sent by Fleet Admiral Chester Nimitz, Commander in Chief, U.S. Pacific Fleet, to Admiral William Halsey Jr. at the height of the Battle of Leyte Gulf on October 25, 1944. The words, intended to be without meaning, were added as security padding in an encrypted message to hinder Japanese attempts at cryptanalysis, but were mistakenly included in the decoded text given to Halsey. Halsey interpreted the phrase as a harsh and sarcastic rebuke, and as a consequence dropped his futile pursuit of a decoy Japanese carrier task force, and, belatedly, reversed some of his ships in a fruitless effort to aid United States forces in the Battle off Samar.

Wed Mar 29

Naukograd (Russian: наукогра́д, IPA: [nəʊkɐˈgrat], also technopole), meaning “science city”, is a formal term for towns with high concentrations of research and development facilities in Russia and the Soviet Union, some specifically built by the Soviet Union for these purposes.

Tue Mar 28

Medjed is a minor deity mentioned in certain copies of the Book of the Dead. While not much is known about the deity, his ghost-like depiction in the Greenfield papyrus has earned him popularity in modern Japanese culture, and he has appeared as a character in video games and anime.

Mon Mar 27

“You aren’t gonna need it” (YAGNI) is a principle which arose from extreme programming (XP) that states a programmer should not add functionality until deemed necessary. Other forms of the phrase include “You aren’t going to need it” (YAGTNI) and “You ain’t gonna need it”.Ron Jeffries, a co-founder of XP, explained the philosophy: “Always implement things when you actually need them, never when you just foresee that you [will] need them.”

Sun Mar 26

The Real Book is a musicians’ fake book – a compilation of lead sheets for jazz standards. Fake books had been around at least since the late 1920s, but their organization was haphazard, and their content did not always keep pace with contemporary musical styles.
Milü (Chinese: 密率; pinyin: mìlǜ; “close ratio”), also known as Zulü (Zu’s ratio), is the name given to an approximation to π (pi) found by Chinese mathematician and astronomer Zu Chongzhi in the 5th century.

Sat Mar 25

In morphology and syntax, a clitic is a morpheme that has syntactic characteristics of a word, but depends phonologically on another word or phrase.
In linguistics, clitic doubling, or pronominal reduplication is a phenomenon by which clitic pronouns appear in verb phrases together with the full noun phrases that they refer to (as opposed to the cases where such pronouns and full noun phrases are in complementary distribution).

Fri Mar 24

The Hang is a type of musical instrument called a handpan, fitting into the idiophone class and based on the Caribbean steelpan instrument.

Thu Mar 23

The Deceased Wife’s Sister’s Marriage Act 1907 was an Act of the Parliament of the United Kingdom, allowing a man to marry his dead wife’s sister, which had previously been forbidden. This prohibition had derived from a doctrine of canon law whereby those who were connected by marriage were regarded as being related to each other in a way which made marriage between them improper.

Wed Mar 22

[[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abscissa_and_ordinate][In common usage, the abscissa refers to the (x) coordinate and the ordinate refers to the (y) coordinate of a standard two-dimensional graph.

Tue Mar 21

A pretendian (portmanteau of pretend and Indian) is a person who has falsely claimed Indigenous identity by claiming to be a citizen of a Native American or Indigenous Canadian tribal nation, or to be descended from Native ancestors.

Mon Mar 20

The Barnum effect, also called the Forer effect or, less commonly, the Barnum–Forer effect, is a common psychological phenomenon whereby individuals give high accuracy ratings to descriptions of their personality that supposedly are tailored specifically to them, yet which are in fact vague and general enough to apply to a wide range of people.

Sun Mar 19

Cats That Look Like Hitler is a satirical website featuring photographs of cats resembling Adolf Hitler, the Ultranationalist dictator of Germany from 1933 to 1945.

Sat Mar 18

The term ethnic Mennonite refers to Mennonites of Central European ancestry and culture who are considered to be members of a Mennonite ethnic or ethnoreligious group. The term is also used for aspects of their culture, such as language, dress, and Mennonite food.
Mennonite cuisine is food that is unique to and/or commonly associated with Mennonites, a Christian denomination that came out of sixteenth century Protestant Reformation in Switzerland and The Netherlands.

Fri Mar 17

The common raccoon dog (Nyctereutes procyonoides), also called the Chinese or Asian raccoon dog to distinguish it from the Japanese raccoon dog, is a small, heavy-set, fox-like canid native to East Asia. Named for its raccoon-like face markings, it is most closely related to foxes.

Thu Mar 16

A transit village is a pedestrian-friendly mixed-use district or neighborhood oriented around the station of a high-quality transit system, such as rail or B.R.T.

Wed Mar 15

The Forgotten Winchester is a Winchester Model 1873 lever-action centerfire rifle that archaeologists discovered in 2014 leaning against a Juniper tree in Great Basin National Park in Nevada. The gun was manufactured in 1882, but nothing is known of its abandonment.

Tue Mar 14

The Latin term characteristica universalis, commonly interpreted as universal characteristic, or universal character in English, is a universal and formal language imagined by Gottfried Leibniz able to express mathematical, scientific, and metaphysical concepts. Leibniz thus hoped to create a language usable within the framework of a universal logical calculation or calculus ratiocinator.

Mon Mar 13

Cookie Puss is an ice cream cake character created by Carvel in the 1970s as an expansion of its line of freshly made exclusive products, along with Hug Me the Bear and Fudgie the Whale.
Fudgie the Whale is a type of ice cream cake produced and sold by Carvel in its franchise stores. It was developed by Carvel in the 1970s as an expansion of its line of freshly made products, along with Hug Me the Bear and Cookie Puss.

Sun Mar 12

sinecure - a position requiring little or no work but giving the holder status or financial benefit.

Sat Mar 11

A panty tree (or bra tree or bra/panty tree) is a tree underneath a ski lift decorated with bras, panties, and Mardi Gras beads cast off by skiers riding the chair lift.

Fri Mar 10

Endurance art is a kind of performance art involving some form of hardship, such as pain, solitude or exhaustion. Performances that focus on the passage of long periods of time are also known as durational art or durational performances.

Thu Mar 9

Xylobands are wristbands that contain light-emitting diodes and radio frequency receivers, they were launched by RB Concepts Ltd, a company set up by entrepreneur Clive Banks with inventor Jason Regler. The lights inside the wristband can be controlled by a software program, which sends signals to the wristband, instructing it to light up or blink, for example.

Wed Mar 8

The Taco Liberty Bell was an April Fool’s Day joke played by fast food restaurant chain Taco Bell on April 1, 1996. Taco Bell took out a full-page advertisement in seven leading U.S. newspapers announcing that the company had purchased the Liberty Bell to “reduce the country’s debt” and renamed it the “Taco Liberty Bell”.

Tue Mar 7

A gag-a-day comic strip is the style of writing comic cartoons such that every installment of a strip delivers a complete joke or some other kind of artistic statement. It is opposed to story or continuity strips, which rely on the development of a story line across a sequence of the installments. Most syndicated comics are of this type.

Mon Mar 6

Damnatio memoriae is a modern Latin phrase meaning “condemnation of memory”, indicating that a person is to be excluded from official accounts.
On Usenet, the Usenet Death Penalty (UDP) is a final penalty that may be issued against Internet service providers or single users who produce too much spam or fail to adhere to Usenet standards. It is named after the death penalty (the state-sanctioned killing of a person as punishment for a crime), as it causes the banned user or provider to be unable to use Usenet, essentially “killing” their service.
Kill file (also killfile, bozo bin or twit list) is a file used by some Usenet reading programs to discard articles matching some unwanted patterns of subject, author, or other header lines. Adding a person or subject to one’s kill file means that person or topic will be ignored by one’s newsreader in the future. By extension, the term may be used for a decision to ignore the person or subject in other media.

Sun Mar 5

[[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mormonism_and_violence][Mormons have both used and been subjected to significant violence throughout much of the religion’s history. In the early history of the United States, violence was used as a form of control. Mormons were violently persecuted and pushed from Ohio to Missouri, from Missouri to Illinois and from Illinois, they were pushed west to the Utah Territory. There were incidents of massacre, home burning and pillaging, followed by the death of their prophet, Joseph Smith. Smith died from multiple gunshot wounds from a lynch mob at a jail in Carthage, Illinois; Smith had defended himself with a small pistol smuggled to him by church leader Cyrus Wheelock and he was then shot while trying to flee from a window. There were also notable incidents in which Mormons perpetrated violence. Under the direction of Mormon prophets and apostles, the Mormon burned and looted Davies County, attacked and killed a member of the Missouri state militia, and carried out an extermination order on the Timpanogos. Other Mormon leaders led the Mountain Meadows Massacre, Battle Creek massacre, and Circleville Massacre. Mormons have also been a major part in several wars, including the 1838 Mormon War, Walker War and Black Hawk War.

The memory of this violence has affected both the history and the doctrines of the Latter Day Saint movement.]]

Sat Mar 4

The dirty protest (also called the no wash protest) was part of a five-year protest during the Troubles by Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA) and Irish National Liberation Army (INLA) prisoners held in the Maze Prison (also known as “Long Kesh”) and a protest at Armagh Women’s Prison in Northern Ireland.
The blanket protest was part of a five-year protest during the Troubles by Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA) and Irish National Liberation Army (INLA) prisoners held in the Maze prison (also known as “Long Kesh”) in Northern Ireland. The republican prisoners’ status as political prisoners, known as Special Category Status, had begun to be phased out in 1976. Among other things, this meant that they would now be required to wear prison uniforms like ordinary convicts. The prisoners refused to accept that they had been administratively designated as ordinary criminals, and refused to wear the prison uniform.

Fri Mar 3

This list consists of albums or songs that have been considered the worst music ever made by various combinations of music critics, television broadcasters (such as MTV and VH1), radio stations, composers and public polls.

Thu Mar 2

Intonarumori are experimental musical instruments invented and built by the Italian futurist Luigi Russolo between roughly 1910 and 1930. There were 27 varieties of intonarumori built in total, with different names.
Wall Poems (Dutch: Muurgedichten, alternatively Gedichten op muren or Dicht op de Muur) is a project in which more than 110 poems in many different languages were painted on the exterior walls of buildings in the city of Leiden, The Netherlands.

Wed Mar 1

flak: from German, abbreviation of Fliegerabwehrkanone, literally ‘aviator-defense gun’.
The dangerous bend or caution symbol ☡ (U+2621 ☡ CAUTION SIGN) was created by the Nicolas Bourbaki group of mathematicians and appears in the margins of mathematics books written by the group. It resembles a road sign that indicates a “dangerous bend” in the road ahead, and is used to mark passages tricky on a first reading or with an especially difficult argument.

February 2023

Tue Feb 28

An abugida, sometimes known as alphasyllabary, neosyllabary or pseudo-alphabet, is a segmental writing system in which consonant–vowel sequences are written as units; each unit is based on a consonant letter, and vowel notation is secondary.
An abjad is a writing system in which only consonants are represented, leaving vowel sounds to be inferred by the reader. This contrasts with alphabets, which provide graphemes for both consonants and vowels.
In the linguistic study of written languages, a syllabary is a set of written symbols that represent the syllables or (more frequently) moras which make up words.
List of writing systems

Mon Feb 27

The word mesmerize comes from the last name of 18th century German physician Franz Mesmer, who believed that all people and objects are pulled together by a strong magnetic force, later called mesmerism.
The five techniques, also known as deep interrogation, are a group of interrogation methods developed by the United Kingdom during the 20th century and are currently regarded as a form of torture.
The jetliner position, also known as the captain’s chair, is a form of physical torment used in cases where the tormentor is unable or unwilling to inflict corporal punishment on the subject. The recipient is made to put their back against a wall or pole and place their feet eighteen inches or so from the base of the object. The feet are usually kept close together. The subject must then slide down the wall or pole until their thighs are parallel to the ground, so that their profile is of someone sitting in a chair. They may also be required to slide their feet back until their shins and thighs are at right-angles to each other, which makes the stresses upon the knee joints and thigh muscles much greater.

Sun Feb 26

A flatulist, fartist, professional farter or simply farter is an entertainer often associated with flatulence-related humor, whose routine consists solely or primarily of passing gas in a creative, musical, or amusing manner.

Sat Feb 25

The Military Reaction Force, Military Reconnaissance Force or Mobile Reconnaissance Force (MRF) was a covert intelligence-gathering and counterinsurgency unit of the British Army active in Northern Ireland during the Troubles.
A shebeen (Irish: síbín, “home-made whiskey”) was originally an illicit bar or club where accessible alcoholic beverages were sold without a license.

Fri Feb 24

-30- has been traditionally used by journalists in North America to indicate the end of a story or article that is submitted for editing and typesetting. It is commonly employed when writing on deadline and sending bits of the story at a time, via telegraphy, teletype, electronic transmission, or paper copy, as a necessary way to indicate the end of the article. It is also found at the end of press releases.

Thu Feb 23

A sniglet is an often humorous word made up to describe something for which no dictionary word exists.
Buca di Beppo is an American restaurant chain specializing in Italian-American food. The name roughly translates as “Joe’s small place” from Italian (buca, which literally means “hole” or “pit”, can be a dialectal word in Tuscany for a small room or place, and Beppo is a diminutive of the name Giuseppe).

Wed Feb 22

This is a list of incidents when an incorrect national anthem was accidentally played, sung or performed, including playing the anthem of the wrong country, playing an outdated anthem, and playing a non-anthem piece in place of a national anthem.

Tue Feb 21

A Beowulf cluster is a computer cluster of what are normally identical, commodity-grade computers networked into a small local area network with libraries and programs installed which allow processing to be shared among them. The result is a high-performance parallel computing cluster from inexpensive personal computer hardware.
Stone Soup is a European folk story in which hungry strangers convince the people of a town to each share a small amount of their food in order to make a meal that everyone enjoys, and exists as a moral regarding the value of sharing.
The Stone Soupercomputer was a Beowulf-style computer cluster built at the US Oak Ridge National Laboratory in the late 1990s.

Mon Feb 20

Las Patronas is a group of volunteer women of La Patrona community, from the town of Guadalupe in the municipality of Amatlán de los Reyes, Veracruz. Since 1995 the group has provided food and assistance to migrants on their way north through Veracruz.

Sun Feb 19

A claque is an organized body of professional applauders in French theatres and opera houses. Members of a claque are called claqueurs.
Character amnesia is a phenomenon whereby experienced speakers of some East Asian languages forget how to write Chinese characters previously well known to them.

Sat Feb 18

There have been many notable instances of unruly behaviour at classical music concerts, often at the premiere of a new work or production.

Fri Feb 17

Polari (from Italian parlare ‘to talk’) is a form of slang or cant used in Britain by some actors, circus and fairground showmen, professional wrestlers, merchant navy sailors, criminals, sex workers and, particularly, the gay subculture. There is some debate about its origins, but it can be traced back to at least the 19th century and possibly as far as the 16th century. There is a long-standing connection with Punch and Judy street puppet performers, who traditionally used Polari to converse.

Thu Feb 16

Stargazy pie is a Cornish dish made of baked pilchards (sardines), along with eggs and potatoes, covered with a pastry crust. Although there are a few variations using other types of fish, the unique feature of stargazy pie is fish heads (and sometimes tails) protruding through the crust, so that they appear to be gazing to the stars.

Wed Feb 15

Hidden mother photography is a genre of photography common in the Victorian era in which young children were photographed with their mother present but hidden in the photograph. It arose from the need to keep children still while the photograph was taken due to the long exposure times of early cameras.
This is a list of non-human apes of encyclopedic interest. It includes individual chimpanzees, gorillas, orangutans, bonobos, and gibbons that are in some way famous or notable.

Tue Feb 14

Fish intelligence is the resultant of the process of acquiring, storing in memory, retrieving, combining, comparing, and using in new contexts information and conceptual skills” as it applies to fish.

Mon Feb 13

US error coins are error coins produced by the US government. There are three categories of error coins as provided by the American Numismatic Association. Metal usage and striking errors referred to widely as planchet errors, die errors, and mint striking errors. This does not include the varieties that the US Mint has issued over the years.

Sun Feb 12

Window tax was a property tax based on the number of windows in a house. It was a significant social, cultural, and architectural force in England, France, and Ireland during the 18th and 19th centuries. To avoid the tax, some houses from the period can be seen to have bricked-up window-spaces (ready to be glazed or reglazed at a later date).

Sat Feb 11

The paradox of tolerance states that if a society is tolerant without limit, its ability to be tolerant is eventually ceased or destroyed by the intolerant. Karl Popper described it as the seemingly self-contradictory idea that in order to maintain a tolerant society, the society must retain the right to be intolerant of intolerance.

Fri Feb 10

Pico y placa (literally Peak and Plate, Spanish for peak [hour] and [license] plate) is a driving restriction policy aimed to mitigate traffic congestion. The scheme was initially set in place in Bogotá, Colombia, in 1998, by then mayor Enrique Peñalosa to help regulate traffic during rush hours. The system restricts traffic access into a pre-established urban area for vehicles with license plate numbers ending in certain digits on pre-established days and during certain hours.
Transistor is a hybrid is “varistor” and “transconductance”
Alan Turing went to Bell Labs in 1943 and talked with Claude Shannon
Morse and Vail came withing 15% of the optimal arrangement for telegraphing the English language when they created Morse Code (John R. Pierce, An Introduction to Information Theory: Symbols, Signals and Noise)

Thu Feb 9

The third man factor or third man syndrome refers to the reported situations where an unseen presence, such as a spirit, provides comfort or support during traumatic experiences.

Wed Feb 8

In linguistics, a nonce word—also called an occasionalism—is any word (lexeme), or any sequence of sounds or letters (phonemes or graphemes), created for a single occasion or utterance but not otherwise understood or recognized as a word within a given language.
In linguistics, a protologism is a newly used or coined word, a nonce word, that has been repeated but not gained acceptance beyond its original users or been published independently of the coiners.

Tue Feb 7

In the English language, banq and banc are coined words pronounced identically to the word “bank”. Both terms have been adopted by financial services companies and others to satisfy legal restrictions on the usage of the word bank. The compound bancorp (banc/bank + corp[oration]) is often used in the names of bank holding companies.

Mon Feb 6

“Like Father, Like Son”, also known as I learned it by watching you!, was a large-scale United States anti-narcotics campaign by Partnership for a Drug-Free America. The PSA features a father confronting his son (Reid MacLean) in his bedroom after finding a box containing an unspecified controlled substance and drug paraphernalia. After his father angrily asks him how he learned to use drugs, the son shouts, “You, alright?! I learned it by watching you!” As the father recoils from realizing the error of his own ways, a narrator then intones, “Parents who use drugs, have children who use drugs.”

Sun Feb 5

The American Egg Board (AEB) is a United States checkoff marketing organization, which focuses on marketing and promotion of eggs for human consumption. The AEB is best known for its long-running slogan, “The Incredible, Edible Egg”, and the Just Mayo scandal.
This Is Your Brain on Drugs was a large-scale US anti-narcotics campaign by Partnership for a Drug-Free America (PDFA) launched in 1987, that used three televised public service announcements (PSAs) and a related poster campaign.
“The Incredible, Edible Egg” is a marketing slogan for the American Egg Board.

Sat Feb 4

A metasyntactic variable is a specific word or set of words identified as a placeholder in computer science and specifically computer programming.

Fri Feb 3

Google Images was created to answer “the most popular search query” Google had seen to date: the green Versace dress of Jennifer Lopez worn in February 2000.

Thu Feb 2

Tsundoku refers to the phenomenon of acquiring reading materials but letting them pile up in one’s home without reading them. It is also used to refer to books ready for reading later when they are on a bookshelf.
The Crash at Crush was a one-day publicity stunt in the U.S. state of Texas that took place on September 15, 1896, in which two uncrewed locomotives were crashed into each other head-on at high speed. Unexpectedly, the impact caused both engine boilers to explode, resulting in a shower of flying debris that killed two people and caused numerous injuries among the spectators.

Wed Feb 1

Dark cuisine or hei an liao li is a Chinese neologism referring to a culinary style built around foods or food combinations that sound bizarre or even disgusting but which often are tastier than anticipated.

January 2023

Tue Jan 31

“Fnord” is a word coined in 1965 by Kerry Thornley and Greg Hill in the Discordian religious text Principia Discordia. It entered into popular culture after appearing in The Illuminatus! Trilogy (1975) of novels written by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson. Here, the interjection “fnord” is given hypnotic power over the unenlightened, and children in grade school are taught to be unable to see the word consciously. For the rest of their lives, every appearance of the word subconsciously generates a feeling of unease and confusion which prevents rational consideration of the text in which it appears.

Mon Jan 30

Mas-wrestling is the international name used for the Yakut ethnosport derived from the traditional stick pulling game mas tard’yhyy (мас тардыhыы, ‘stick tugging’). Reminiscent of the Eskimo Stick Pull featured at the World Eskimo Indian Olympics, Norwegian kjevletrekk, Finnish kartunveto or väkikapulan veto, as well as the Highland test of strength The Swingle Tree (played with a shepherd’s crook), participants taking part in mas-wrestling competitions sit in front of each other, prop their feet against the board that divides the competition area and tug on a wooden stick (mas), making sure to keep it parallel to the propping board. Mas-wrestling demands great muscular strength from the hands, legs, back, and abdominals.

Sun Jan 29

Lemon sticks are a type of stick candy. They are similar to candy canes and peppermint sticks except lemon oil and acids are used for the flavoring.

Sat Jan 28

Flipism, sometimes spelled “flippism”, is a pseudophilosophy under which decisions are made by flipping a coin.

Fri Jan 27

The 2008 Chinese milk scandal was a significant food safety incident in China. The scandal involved Sanlu Group’s milk and infant formula along with other food materials and components being adulterated with the chemical melamine, which resulted in kidney stones and other kidney damage in infants. The chemical was used to increase the nitrogen content of diluted milk, giving it the appearance of higher protein content in order to pass quality control testing. 300,000 affected children were identified, among which 54,000 were hospitalized, according to the latest report in January 2009. The deaths of six babies were officially concluded to be related to the contaminated milk.
The Chicago Tylenol murders were a series of poisoning deaths resulting from drug tampering in the Chicago metropolitan area in 1982. The victims consumed Tylenol-branded acetaminophen capsules that had been laced with potassium cyanide. Seven people died in the original poisonings, and there were several more deaths in subsequent copycat crimes.

No suspect has been charged or convicted of the poisonings, but New York City resident James William Lewis was convicted of extortion for sending a letter to Tylenol’s manufacturer, Johnson & Johnson, that took responsibility for the deaths and demanded $1 million to stop them.

The paraquat murders were a series of indiscriminate poisonings carried out in Japan in 1985. Police were unable to gather any evidence about the murders, and the case remains unsolved. All the beverages were poisoned with the herbicide paraquat except for one which was poisoned with diquat, placed in or near the vending machine, where the victim would consume the beverage.

Thu Jan 26

A friend-to-friend (or F2F) computer network is a type of peer-to-peer network in which users only make direct connections with people they know. Passwords or digital signatures can be used for authentication.
Sneakernet, also called sneaker net, is an informal term for the transfer of electronic information by physically moving media such as magnetic tape, floppy disks, optical discs, USB flash drives or external hard drives between computers, rather than transmitting it over a computer network. The term, a tongue-in-cheek play on net(work) as in Internet or Ethernet, refers to walking in sneakers as the transport mechanism. Alternative terms may be floppy net, train net, or pigeon net.

Wed Jan 25

Microsoft has a Toaster example device
The New Tube for London (NTfL) is a London Underground train being built by Siemens Mobility at its facilities in Vienna, Austria, and Goole, England.

Tue Jan 24

Ligne claire (French for “clear line”) is a style of drawing created and pioneered by Hergé, the Belgian cartoonist and creator of The Adventures of Tintin. It uses clear strong lines sometimes of varied width and no hatching, while contrast is downplayed as well.

Mon Jan 23

The clown alley in a circus is a backstage area, usually very near the animal pens, where clowns change into their costumes and apply makeup.

Sun Jan 22

Crown shyness (also canopy disengagement, canopy shyness, or inter-crown spacing) is a feature observed in some tree species, in which the crowns of fully stocked trees do not touch each other, instead forming a canopy with channel-like gaps.

Sat Jan 21

In rhetoric, zeugma (from the Ancient Greek ζεῦγμα, zeûgma, lit. “a yoking together”) and syllepsis (from the Ancient Greek σύλληψις, sullēpsis, lit. “a taking together”) are figures of speech in which a single phrase or word joins different parts of a sentence.

Fri Jan 20

The erhu is a Chinese two-stringed bowed musical instrument, more specifically a spike fiddle, which may also be called a Southern Fiddle, and is sometimes known in the Western world as the Chinese violin or a Chinese two-stringed fiddle.

Thu Jan 19

Parasitic capacitance is an unavoidable and usually unwanted capacitance that exists between the parts of an electronic component or circuit simply because of their proximity to each other. When two electrical conductors at different voltages are close together, the electric field between them causes electric charge to be stored on them; this effect is capacitance.

Wed Jan 18

In Ohio folklore, the Loveland frog (also known as the Loveland frogman or Loveland lizard) is a legendary humanoid frog described as standing roughly 4 feet (1.2 m) tall, allegedly spotted in Loveland, Ohio. In 1972, the Loveland frog legend gained renewed attention when a Loveland police officer reported to a colleague that he had seen an animal consistent with descriptions of the frogman. After a reported sighting in 2016, the second officer called a news station to report that he had shot and killed the same creature some weeks after the 1972 incident and had identified it as a large iguana that was missing its tail.
Abraham Lincoln’s patent relates to an invention to buoy and lift boats over shoals and obstructions in a river. Abraham Lincoln conceived the invention when on two occasions the boat on which he traveled got hung up on obstructions. Lincoln’s device was composed of large bellows attached to the sides of a boat that were expandable due to air chambers. Filed on March 10, 1849, Lincoln’s patent was issued as Patent No. 6,469 later that year, on May 22. His successful patent application led to his drafting and delivering two lectures on the subject of patents while he was president.

Tue Jan 17

The University of Farmington was a fake university set up in 2015 in Michigan by the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) to expose student visa fraud in the United States. The sting operation, which was code-named “Paper Chase”, was overseen by the United States Department of Homeland Security. Over 600 individuals were identified in the operation, many of whom face deportation from the United States for visa violations.
The University of Northern New Jersey was a fake university created and maintained by the United States Department of Homeland Security from 2013 to 2016 to investigate student visa fraud.

Mon Jan 16

Mother of vinegar is a biofilm composed of a form of cellulose, yeast, and bacteria that sometimes develops on fermenting alcoholic liquids during the process that turns alcohol into acetic acid with the help of oxygen from the air and acetic acid bacteria (AAB). It is similar to the symbiotic culture of bacteria and yeast (SCOBY) mostly known from production of kombucha, but develops to a much lesser extent due to lesser availability of yeast, which is often no longer present in wine/cider at this stage, and a different population of bacteria. Mother of vinegar is often added to wine, cider, or other alcoholic liquids to produce vinegar at home, although only the bacteria is required, but historically has also been used in large scale production.

Sun Jan 15

The boogaloo movement, whose adherents are often referred to as boogaloo boys or boogaloo bois, is a loosely organized far-right anti-government extremist movement in the United States.
Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo is a 1984 American dance musical film directed by Sam Firstenberg. It is a sequel to the 1984 breakdancing film Breakin’.

Sat Jan 14

English has many pairs of words where ‘-th’ was once added to make a noun out of the other, like ‘width’ and ‘wide’.
- ‘mirth’ and ‘merry’
- ‘drought’ and ‘dry’
- ‘filth’ and ‘foul’
- ‘sloth’ and ‘slow’

Nutellagate was a controversy at Columbia University surrounding allegations of widespread student theft of dining hall Nutella. Columbia first began serving Nutella in its dining halls in February 2013. Within a month, future Pulitzer Prize winner Cecilia Reyes reported in the Columbia Daily Spectator that high demand for the spread was costing the university $5,000 per week, a figure reportedly calculated by Executive Director of Dining Services Vicki Dunn, as students were consuming up to 100 pounds of Nutella per day. In a school-wide email, Dunn accused students of filling cups with Nutella and stealing full jars from John Jay Dining Hall. It was estimated that at that rate, Nutella consumption would cost the university $250,000 a year, enough to buy seven jars for every undergraduate student. The high volume of Nutella consumption raised questions around food waste, dining hall meal plan costs, exorbitant tuition rates, and consumerism.The story quickly garnered national attention, and was reported the next day in The New York Times. The student blog Bwog calculated based on the original figure from the Spectator—$5,000 per week for 100 pounds per day—that unless the Spectator had misreported the numbers, the university was being charged 70% more for its Nutella than prices offered by local distributors. Two days after the Spectator article, the university clarified in a statement titled “NUTELLA-GATE EXPOSED: It’s a Smear!” that the weekly cost of Nutella was actually less than one-tenth the reported amount, and that while in the first week the university spent $2,500 on Nutella, the cost had actually fallen to around $450 in following weeks.

Fri Jan 13

Buttons were invented 3,000 years ago for decoration, but the buttonhole was invented 2,300 years later. Before that, clothes were tied or toggled
Humans walked on the moon before we made practical wheeled luggage!
The watching-eye effect says that people behave more altruistically and exhibit less antisocial behavior in the presence of images that depict eyes, because these images insinuate that they are being watched.

Thu Jan 12

Pinkwashing, also known as rainbow-washing, is the strategy of promoting LGBT rights protections as evidence of liberalism and democracy, especially to distract from or legitimize violence against other countries or communities.

Wed Jan 11

Mornington Crescent (programming language)

Tue Jan 10

A coup d’état was launched in Burkina Faso on 23 January 2022.

Mon Jan 9

The Luxor Sky Beam in Vegas is the brightest light in the world
An equestrian statue is a statue of a rider mounted on a horse, from the Latin eques, meaning ‘knight’, deriving from equus, meaning ‘horse’. A statue of a riderless horse is strictly an equine statue. A full-sized equestrian statue is a difficult and expensive object for any culture to produce, and figures have typically been portraits of rulers or, in the Renaissance and more recently, military commanders.

Sun Jan 8

The RNA Tie Club was an informal scientific club, meant partly to be humorous, of select scientists who were interested in how proteins were synthesised from genes, specifically the genetic code. It was created by George Gamow upon the suggestion by James Watson in 1954, at the time the relationship between nucleic acids and amino acids in genetic information was unknown. The club consisted of 20 full members, each representing an amino acid, and four honorary members, representing the four nucleotides. The functions of the club members were to think up possible solutions and share in writing the other members.

Sat Jan 7

Chopped and screwed (also called screwed and chopped or slowed and throwed) is a music genre and technique of remixing music that involves slowing down the tempo and deejaying. It developed in the Houston hip hop scene in the early 1990s by DJ Screw. The screwed technique involves slowing the tempo of a song down to 60 and 70 quarter-note beats per minute and applying techniques such as skipping beats, record scratching, stop-time and affecting portions of the original composition to create a “chopped-up” version of the song.
Nixtamalization is a process for the preparation of corn, or other grain, in which the grain is soaked and cooked in an alkaline solution, usually limewater (but sometimes aqueous alkali metal carbonates), washed, and then hulled.
Maxwell’s demon is a thought experiment that would hypothetically violate the second law of thermodynamics. It was proposed by the physicist James Clerk Maxwell in 1867. In his first letter, Maxwell referred to the entity as a “finite being” or a “being who can play a game of skill with the molecules”. Lord Kelvin would later call it a “demon”.In the thought experiment, a demon controls a small massless door between two chambers of gas. As individual gas molecules (or atoms) approach the door, the demon quickly opens and closes the door to allow only fast-moving molecules to pass through in one direction, and only slow-moving molecules to pass through in the other. Because the kinetic temperature of a gas depends on the velocities of its constituent molecules, the demon’s actions cause one chamber to warm up and the other to cool down. This would decrease the total entropy of the system, without applying any work, thereby violating the second law of thermodynamics.

Fri Jan 6

“No Russian” is a mission in the 2009 video game Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 and its remastered version, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 Campaign Remastered. In the level, the player participates in a mass shooting at a Russian airport, although the player is not forced or told by the game itself to shoot any civilians and may skip the level altogether without penalty. “No Russian” is noticeably more graphic than any other level in the game.

Thu Jan 5

Jeonse, also known as chŏnse, key money deposit or key money, is a type of lease or deposit common in the South Korean real estate market. Instead of paying monthly rent, a renter will make a lump-sum deposit on a rental space, at anywhere from 50% to 80% of the market value, which is then returned at the end of the lease term.

Wed Jan 4

The Posse Comitatus Act is a United States federal law (18 U.S.C. § 1385, original at 20 Stat. 152) signed on June 18, 1878, by President Rutherford B. Hayes which limits the powers of the federal government in the use of federal military personnel to enforce domestic policies within the United States.
The posse comitatus (from the Latin for “power of the county/community/guard”), frequently shortened to posse, is in common law a group of people mobilized by the conservator of peace – typically a reeve, sheriff, chief, or another special/regional designee like an officer of the peace potentially accompanied by or with the direction of a justice or ajudged parajudicial process given the imminence of actual damage – to suppress lawlessness, defend the people, or otherwise protect the place, property, and public welfare (see also ethical law enforcement (police by consent, etc.)).
In common law, a hue and cry is a process by which bystanders are summoned to assist in the apprehension of a criminal who has been witnessed in the act of committing a crime.

Tue Jan 3

A female cattle is cow. A castrated male is a steer. A male is a bull. And an ox can be any of the above, although most usually, it’s a castrated male.

Mon Jan 2

Rotation Curation, also #RotationCuration, is the concept of rotating the spokesperson on a broad scoped social media account. Such a scope can be a location, a country, an organization, a group, and so on.

Sun Jan 1

In architecture, a transom is a transverse horizontal structural beam or bar, or a crosspiece separating a door from a window above it. This contrasts with a mullion, a vertical structural member.

December 2023

Sat Dec 31

Mornington Crescentis an improvisational comedy game featured in the BBC Radio 4 comedy panel show I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue (ISIHAC), a series that satirises panel games.The game consists of each panellist in turn announcing a landmark or street, most often a tube station on the London Underground system. The ostensible aim is to be the first to announce “Mornington Crescent”, a station on the Northern line. Interspersed with the turns is humorous discussion amongst the panellists and host regarding the rules and legality of each move, as well as the strategy the panellists are using. The actual aim of the game is to entertain the other participants and listeners with amusing discussion of the fictional rules and strategies.

Fri Dec 30

A dead key is a special kind of modifier key on a mechanical typewriter, or computer keyboard, that is typically used to attach a specific diacritic to a base letter. The dead key does not generate a (complete) character by itself, but modifies the character generated by the key struck immediately after. Thus, a dedicated key is not needed for each possible combination of a diacritic and a letter, but rather only one dead key for each diacritic is needed, in addition to the normal base letter keys.
The radiotelephony message PAN-PAN is the international standard urgency signal that someone aboard a boat, ship, aircraft, or other vehicle uses to declare that they need help and that the situation is urgent, but for the time being, does not pose an immediate danger to anyone’s life or to the vessel itself. This is referred to as a state of “urgency”. This is distinct from a mayday call (distress signal), which means that there is imminent danger to life or to the continued viability of the vessel itself. Radioing “pan-pan” informs potential rescuers (including emergency services and other craft in the area) that an urgent problem exists, whereas “mayday” calls on them to drop all other activities and immediately begin a rescue.

Thu Dec 29

The Crystal Palace Dinosaurs are a series of sculptures of dinosaurs and other extinct animals, incorrect by modern standards, in the London borough of Bromley’s Crystal Palace Park.

Wed Dec 28

An impeller or impellor is a driven rotor used to increase the pressure and flow of a fluid. It is the opposite of a turbine, which extracts energy from, and reduces the pressure of, a flowing fluid.

Tue Dec 27

A Musikalisches Würfelspiel (German for “musical dice game”) was a system for using dice to randomly generate music from precomposed options. These games were quite popular throughout Western Europe in the 18th century. Several different games were devised, some that did not require dice, but merely choosing a random number.

Mon Dec 26

Sharpening a knife removes small particles of the knife, honing it just reshapes the blade to be straight

Sun Dec 25

A starch mogul is a machine that makes shaped candies or candy centers from syrups or gels, such as gummi candy. These softer candies and centers are made by filling a tray with cornstarch, stamping the desired shape into the starch, and then pouring the filling or gel into the holes made by the stamp. When the candies have set, they are removed from the trays and the starch is recycled.
A candy pumpkin is a small, pumpkin-shaped, mellow crème confection primarily made from corn syrup, honey, carnauba wax, chocolate, and sugar.

Sat Dec 24

In moral philosophy, instrumental and intrinsic value are the distinction between what is a means to an end and what is as an end in itself. Things are deemed to have instrumental value if they help one achieve a particular end; intrinsic values, by contrast, are understood to be desirable in and of themselves.

Fri Dec 23

The 1984 Anti-Sikh Riots, also known as the 1984 Sikh Massacre, was a series of organised pogroms against Sikhs in India following the assassination of Indira Gandhi by her Sikh bodyguards. Government estimates project that about 2,800 Sikhs were killed in Delhi and 3,350 nationwide, whilst independent sources estimate the number of deaths at about 8,000–17,000.
Caleb Lawrence McGillvary (born September 3, 1988), also referred to as Kai, is a Canadian man who first became known from the internet viral video “Kai the Hatchet-Wielding Hitchhiker”, which featured him recounting a crime he witnessed while hitchhiking. McGillvary subsequently received national attention in the press. In 2019, McGillvary was convicted of first-degree murder in New Jersey. He cited the fallout from the video as part of his defense against the homicide charge.

Thu Dec 22

“Salad days” is a Shakespearean idiom referring to a period of carefree innocence, idealism, and pleasure associated with youth. The modern use, chiefly in the United States, describes a heyday, when a person is/was at the peak of their abilities, while not necessarily a youth.

Wed Dec 21

Marion Marguerite Stokes was a Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, access television producer, civil rights demonstrator, activist, librarian, and prolific archivist, especially known for her compulsive hoarding and archiving of hundreds of thousands of hours of television news footage spanning 35 years, from 1977 until her death in 2012, at which time she operated nine properties and three storage units. According to The Los Angeles Review of Books’s review of the 2019 documentary film Recorder, Stokes’s massive project of recording the 24-hour news cycle “makes a compelling case for the significance of guerrilla archiving.”

Tue Dec 20

There were 146 medalists in the art competitions that were part of the Olympic Games from 1912 until 1948. These art competitions were considered an integral part of the movement by International Olympic Committee (IOC) founder Pierre de Coubertin and necessary to recapture the complete essence of the Ancient Olympic Games.

Mon Dec 19

A quincunx is a geometric pattern consisting of five points arranged in a cross, with four of them forming a square or rectangle and a fifth at its center.

Sun Dec 18

Bump and run is a technique for passing mainly used in stock car and touring car racing, which eventually inspired the police PIT maneuver.
The PIT maneuver (precision immobilization technique) or TVI (tactical vehicle intervention) is a pursuit tactic in which a pursuing vehicle forces a fleeing vehicle to turn sideways abruptly, causing the driver to lose control and stop.

Sat Dec 17

Black cabs (in London) can use bus lanes

Fri Dec 16

Inflatable rats, or union rats, are giant inflatables in the shape of cartoon rats, commonly used in the United States by protesting or striking trade unions. They serve as a sign of opposition against employers or nonunion contractors, and are intended to call public attention to companies employing nonunion labor.
Fowling is a hybrid game that combines the equipment of American football and bowling into one sport with a similar layout as horseshoes and cornhole.
The Roman Catholic Diocese of Condom was a French bishopric based in Condom from 1317 to 1801. It comprised four archdeaconries : Condom itself, Bruilhois, Villefranche and Nérac. In 1763 these totaled circa 140 parishes.

Thu Dec 15

“Weißwurstäquator” (lit. ’white sausage equator’) is a humorous term describing the supposed cultural boundary separating Southern Germany from the northern parts, especially Bavaria from Central Germany.
Röstigraben (literally “Rösti ditch” or “Rösti trench” also transcribed Röschtigraben in order to reflect the Swiss German pronunciation [ˈrøːʃtiˌɡrabə]) is a term used to refer to the cultural boundary between German-speaking and French-speaking parts of Switzerland, the latter known in French as the Suisse romande.

Wed Dec 14

Lionize: give a lot of public attention and approval to (someone); treat as a celebrity.

Tue Dec 13

David Phillips is an American civil engineer best known for accumulating frequent flyer miles by taking advantage of a promotion by Healthy Choice Foods in 1999. He is the Associate Vice President of Energy and Sustainability at University of California Office of the President, who calculated while grocery shopping that the value of a mail-in promotion for frequent flyer miles exceeded the cost of the pudding on which it was offered. In May 1999, Phillips received 1,253,000 frequent flyer miles.

Mon Dec 12

Dual naming is the adoption of an official place name that combines two earlier names, or uses both names, often to resolve a disagreement over which of the two individual names is more appropriate. In some cases, the reasons are political.

Sun Dec 11

Sat Dec 10

The holy grail is a web page layout which has multiple equal-height columns that are defined with style sheets. It is commonly desired and implemented, but for many years, the various ways in which it could be implemented with available technologies all had drawbacks. Because of this, finding an optimal implementation was likened to searching for the elusive Holy Grail.

Fri Dec 9

Pepsi Stuff was a major loyalty program launched by PepsiCo, first in North America on March 28, 1996 and then around the world, featuring premiums — such as T-shirts, hats, denim and leather jackets, bags, and mountain bikes — that could be purchased with Pepsi Points through the Pepsi Stuff Catalog or online.
Aadhaar (Hindi: आधार, lit. ’base, foundation’; sometimes informally called UIDAI ID or UIDAI Number) is a 12-digit unique identity number that can be obtained voluntarily by the citizens of India and resident foreign nationals who have spent over 182 days in twelve months immediately preceding the date of application for enrolment, based on their biometric and demographic data.

Thu Dec 8

In computer programming, homoiconicity (from the Greek words homo- meaning “the same” and icon meaning “representation”) is a property of some programming languages. A language is homoiconic if a program written in it can be manipulated as data using the language, and thus the program’s internal representation can be inferred just by reading the program itself.

Wed Dec 7

Kunststuecken = trickery, kunst stuecken = pieces of art
Funnel ball is a playground game where a ball is thrown into a funnel with multiple exit holes.

Tue Dec 6

The Berry paradox is a self-referential paradox arising from an expression like “The smallest positive integer not definable in under sixty letters” (a phrase with fifty-seven letters).

Mon Dec 5

In American vernacular architecture, a witch window (also known as a Vermont window, among other names) is a window (usually a double-hung sash window, occasionally a single-sided casement window) placed in the gable-end wall of a house and rotated approximately 1/8 of a turn (45 degrees) from the vertical, leaving it diagonal, with its long edge parallel to the roof slope.

Sun Dec 4

A paracosm is a detailed imaginary world thought generally to originate in childhood. The creator of a paracosm has a complex and deeply felt relationship with this subjective universe, which may incorporate real-world or imaginary characters and conventions.

Sat Dec 3

The McArabia is a pita bread sandwich available at all McDonald’s outlets in Arab countries and Pakistan. It is known as the Grilled Chicken foldover in Singapore, Malaysia and South Africa, as McOriental in Spain, France and Holland, the McTurco in Turkey, Greek Mac in Greece and Cyprus, and as the McKebab in Israel.
ZAP! Lightning, Gods, and Mushrooms

Fri Dec 2

United States v. One Tyrannosaurus Bataar Skeleton (1:13−cv−00857) is a 2013 United States District Court for the Southern District of New York judgment regarding a requested order from the United States government to seize an imported Mongolian Tarbosaurus (referred to as a Tyrannosaurus bataar in the case title) skeleton related to smuggling law and the applicability of Mongolian law in the United States.The form of the styling of this case—the defendant being an object, rather than a legal person—is because this is a jurisdiction in rem (power over objects) case, rather than the more familiar in personam (over persons) case.

Thu Dec 1

The McDonald’s Monopoly game is a sales promotion run by fast food restaurant chain McDonald’s, with a theme based on the Hasbro board game Monopoly. The game first ran in the U.S. in 1987 and has since been used worldwide.
List of television series canceled after one episode
List of television series before airing an episode
Heil Honey I’m Home! is a British sitcom, written by Geoff Atkinson and produced in 1990, which was cancelled after one episode. It centres on Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun, who live next door to a Jewish couple, Arny and Rosa Goldenstein. The show spoofs elements of mid-20th century American sitcoms and is driven by Hitler’s inability to get along with his neighbours. It caused controversy when broadcast and has been called “perhaps the world’s most tasteless situation comedy”.

November 2023

Wed Nov 30

A campus novel, also known as an academic novel, is a novel whose main action is set in and around the campus of a university. The genre in its current form dates back to the early 1950s.

Tue Nov 29

A rough ride is a form of police brutality in which a handcuffed prisoner is placed in a police van or other patrol vehicle without a seatbelt, and is thrown violently about as the vehicle is driven erratically.

Mon Nov 28

Gresham College is an institution of higher learning located at Barnard’s Inn Hall off Holborn in Central London, England. It does not enrol students or award degrees. It was founded in 1597 under the will of Sir Thomas Gresham, and hosts over 140 free public lectures every year. Since 2001, all lectures have also been made available online.

Sun Nov 27

Angelica Ross (born November 28, 1980) is an American actress, businesswoman, and transgender rights advocate. A self-taught computer programmer, she went on to become founder and CEO of TransTech Social Enterprises, a firm that helps employ transgender people in the tech industry.
A logbook (ship’s logs or simply log) is a record of important events in the management, operation, and navigation of a ship. It is essential to traditional navigation, and must be filled in at least daily.The term originally referred to a book for recording readings from the chip log that was used to estimate a ship’s speed through the water.
A chip log, also called common log, ship log, or just log, is a navigation tool mariners use to estimate the speed of a vessel through water. The word knot, to mean nautical mile per hour, derives from this measurement method.

Sat Nov 26

Placenta cake is a dish from ancient Greece and Rome consisting of many dough layers interspersed with a mixture of cheese and honey and flavored with bay leaves, baked and then covered in honey. The dessert is mentioned in classical texts such as the Greek poems of Archestratos and Antiphanes, as well as the De agri cultura of Cato the Elder.
Pykrete is a frozen ice composite, originally made of approximately 14% sawdust or some other form of wood pulp (such as paper) and 86% ice by weight (6 to 1 by weight).
Flirty Fishing (FFing) is a form of evangelism by sexual intimacy practised from around 1974 to 1987 by the cult Children of God, currently known as Family International (TFI). Female members of Children of God, or “fisherwomen” would apply their sex appeal on “fish”, men from outside the cult (often but not always having sex), using the occasion to proselytize for Jesus and seek donations.

Fri Nov 25

A thagomizer is the distinctive arrangement of four spikes on the tails of stegosaurine dinosaurs. These spikes are believed to have been a defensive measure against predators. The arrangement of spikes originally had no distinct name. Cartoonist Gary Larson invented the name “thagomizer” in 1982 as a joke in his comic strip The Far Side, and it was gradually adopted as an informal term sometimes used within scientific circles, research, and education.

Thu Nov 24

The areas of a kitchen work triangle is a concept used to determine efficient kitchen layouts that are both aesthetically pleasing and functional. The primary tasks in a home kitchen are carried out between the cook top, the sink and the refrigerator.
Amelio Robles Ávila (3 November 1889 – 9 December 1984) was a colonel during the Mexican Revolution. Assigned female at birth with the name Amelia Robles Ávila, Robles fought in the Mexican Revolution, rose to the rank of colonel, and lived openly as a man from age 24 until his death at age 95.
Albert D. J. Cashier (December 25, 1843 – October 10, 1915), born Jennie Irene Hodgers, was an American soldier who served in the Union Army during the American Civil War. Cashier adopted the identity of a man before enlisting, and maintained it until death. Cashier became famous as one of a number of women soldiers who served as men during the Civil War, although the consistent and long-term (at least 53 years) commitment to a male identity has prompted some contemporary scholars to suggest that Cashier was a trans man.
Ralph Kerwineo (April 1876 - 1932) was an American who became notable after a 1914 incident in which Mamie White, the woman who had lived as Kerwineo’s wife for over ten years, revealed to the local police Kerwineo’s “true sex” (female). It was supposedly in retaliation to a legal marriage of Kerwineo and twenty-one-year-old Dorothy Kleinowski, and resulted in a police arrest and trial for disorderly conduct.

Wed Nov 23

Fouquieria columnaris, the Boojum tree or cirio (American Spanish: [ˈsiɾjo]) is a tree in the ocotillo family, whose other members include the ocotillos. Some taxonomists place it in the separate genus Idria. It is nearly endemic to the Baja California Peninsula (both the northern and southern states), with only a small population in the Sierra Bacha of Sonora, Mexico. The plant’s English name, Boojum, was given by Godfrey Sykes of the Desert Laboratory in Tucson, Arizona and is taken from Lewis Carroll’s poem “The Hunting of the Snark”.

Tue Nov 22

In the mathematical field of graph theory, a snark is an undirected graph with exactly three edges per vertex whose edges cannot be colored with only three colors. In order to avoid trivial cases, snarks are often restricted to have additional requirements on their connectivity and on the length of their cycles.

Mon Nov 21

Sonic hedgehog protein (SHH) is encoded for by the SHH gene. The protein is named after the character Sonic the Hedgehog.

Sun Nov 20

In the United Kingdom, death by misadventure is the recorded manner of death for an accidental death caused by a risk taken voluntarily. Misadventure in English law, as recorded by coroners and on death certificates and associated documents, is a death that is primarily attributed to an accident that occurred due to a risk that was taken voluntarily.
Evidence-based policy is a concept in public policy that advocates for policy decisions to be grounded on, or influenced by, rigorously established objective evidence.
In public relations and politics, spin is a form of propaganda, achieved through knowingly providing a biased interpretation of an event or campaigning to influence public opinion about some organization or public figure.
“Alien space bats” (“ASBs”) is a neologism for plot devices used in alternate history to mean an implausible point of divergence.
The Schmilblick is an imaginary object first described in a nonsense prose by the French humorist Pierre Dac during the 1950s. According to its creator, the Schmilblick can be used in almost any occasion, therefore being strictly indispensable.

Sat Nov 19

During WW II, fighter pilots would drop matchbooks with seditious instructions for how German soldiers could fake illnesses in hopes of being released from military service. According to Sergeant Major Herbert A. Friedman, the instructions could be as specific as: To induce artificial skin inflammation, “Take three times daily…one teaspoonful of a 10% solution of iodine potassium in a glass of water…until a scarlet-like affection of the skin results…Iodine potassium is a completely harmless medicine.” To simulate a heart condition, “Smoke 20 to 30 cigarettes a day. But if you normally smoke as much, then you might double that number…Take four [digitalis] tablets daily for one or two weeks…Report to the doctor with the following complaints: You do not feel well and are short of breath after exertions…Occasionally you have attacks of pain in the heart region…There was cold sweat on your forehead during the attack and you had a feeling as though you were going to die.”

Fri Nov 18

In the London Underground, rear cab clear plungers are buttons that drivers hit at the end of the line when they leave their cab to indicate to the new driver (now at the other end) that they have left the cab.
- The Tube’s only multi-language roundel is in Southall - in English and in the Punjabi Gurmukhi script (aka Sikh script)
The World Clock (German: Weltzeituhr), also known as the Urania World Clock (German: Urania-Weltzeituhr), is a large turret-style world clock located in the public square of Alexanderplatz in Mitte, Berlin. By reading the markings on its metal rotunda, the current time in 148 major cities from around the world can be determined.
Company scrip is scrip (a substitute for government-issued legal tender or currency) issued by a company to pay its employees. It can only be exchanged in company stores owned by the employers. In the United Kingdom, such truck systems have long been formally outlawed under the Truck Acts. In the United States, payment in scrip became illegal in 1938 as part of the Fair Labor Standards Act.

Thu Nov 17

Michael George Goodspaceguy Nelson (born Michael George Nelson) is an American perennial candidate from Washington state.
A human microphone, also known as the people’s microphone, is a means for delivering a speech to a large group of people, wherein persons gathered around the speaker repeat what the speaker says, thus “amplifying” the voice of the speaker without the need for amplification equipment.
Formulaic language (previously known as automatic speech or embolalia) is a linguistic term for verbal expressions that are fixed in form, often non-literal in meaning with attitudinal nuances, and closely related to communicative-pragmatic context. Along with idioms, expletives and proverbs, formulaic language includes pause fillers (e.g., “Like”, “Er” or “Uhm”) and conversational speech formulas (e.g., “You’ve got to be kidding,” “Excuse me?” or “Hang on a minute”).

Wed Nov 16

During his tenure as the 41st president of the United States, George H. W. Bush frequently mentioned his distaste for broccoli, famously saying: “I do not like broccoli. And I haven’t liked it since I was a little kid. And my mother made me eat it. Now I’m president of the United States. And I’m not gonna eat any more broccoli!” Bush’s views on broccoli were seen as out of touch with Americans, as broccoli was becoming more popular and was referred to as the “vegetable of the 80s”.

Tue Nov 15

A reference designator unambiguously identifies the location of an component within an electrical schematic or on a printed circuit board. The reference designator usually consists of one or two letters followed by a number, e.g. R13, C1002. The number is sometimes followed by a letter, indicating that components are grouped or matched with each other, e.g. R17A, R17B.

Mon Nov 14

“Lamb to the Slaughter” is a 1953 short story by Roald Dahl. It was initially rejected, along with four other stories, by The New Yorker, but was published in Harper’s Magazine in September 1953. “Lamb to the Slaughter” demonstrates Dahl’s fascination with horror (with elements of black comedy), which is seen in both his adult fiction and his stories for children. The story was suggested to Dahl by his friend Ian Fleming: “Why don’t you have someone murder their husband with a frozen leg of mutton which she then serves to the detectives who come to investigate the murder?”
An optical telegraph is a line of stations, typically towers, for the purpose of conveying textual information by means of visual signals. There are two main types of such systems; the semaphore telegraph which uses pivoted indicator arms and conveys information according to the direction the indicators point, and the shutter telegraph which uses panels that can be rotated to block or pass the light from the sky behind to convey information.

Sun Nov 13

Neerja Bhanot (7 September 1963 – 5 September 1986) was an Indian purser who died while saving passengers on Pan Am Flight 73 which had been hijacked by terrorists from a terrorist organization during a stopover in Karachi, Pakistan, on 5 September 1986, just two days before her 23rd birthday. Posthumously, she became the first female recipient and, until 2003, the youngest recipient of India’s highest peacetime gallantry award, the Ashoka Chakra, as well as several other accolades from the governments of Pakistan and the United States.

Sat Nov 12

In telecommunications, quadruple play or quad play is a marketing term combining the triple play service of broadband Internet access, television and telephone with wireless service provisions. This service set is also sometimes referred to as “The Fantastic Four”.

Fri Nov 11

Currah was a British computer peripheral manufacturer, famous mainly for the speech synthesis ROM cartridges it designed for the ZX Spectrum, Commodore 64, and other 8-bit home computers of the 1980s.

Thu Nov 10

Key disclosure laws, also known as mandatory key disclosure, is legislation that requires individuals to surrender cryptographic keys to law enforcement. The purpose is to allow access to material for confiscation or digital forensics purposes and use it either as evidence in a court of law or to enforce national security interests.
Commonplace books (or commonplaces) are a way to compile knowledge, usually by writing information into books. They have been kept from antiquity, and were kept particularly during the Renaissance and in the nineteenth century. Such books are similar to scrapbooks filled with items of many kinds: sententiae (often with the compiler’s responses), notes, proverbs, adages, aphorisms, maxims, quotes, letters, poems, tables of weights and measures, prayers, legal formulas, and recipes.

Wed Nov 9

The phrase ”world famous in New Zealand” is a commonly used phrase within New Zealand and the slogan of Lemon & Paeroa soft drink. It is used to describe items that though famous within New Zealand are unknown in the rest of the world, whereas similar items and people in larger countries would have a far higher media profile and would therefore be famous worldwide.

Tue Nov 8

Bioswales are channels designed to concentrate and convey stormwater runoff while removing debris and pollution. Bioswales can also be beneficial in recharging groundwater.

Mon Nov 7

Jorkyball is a format of two vs two football. It is played in a 10 m (33 ft) by 5 m (16 ft) cage on artificial turf with the possibility of using the walls to pass, dribble, and score. As in football it is played only with the feet and use of hands is forbidden. The objective is to score goals into a net. As in squash and paddle, the sport is played in a four-walled court and all of them can be used including the net above, i.e. there is no outside.
Underwater hockey (also known as Octopush in the United Kingdom) is a globally played limited-contact sport in which two teams compete to manoeuvre a puck across the bottom of a swimming pool into the opposing team’s goal by propelling it with a hockey stick (or pusher).
Gateball is a mallet team sport inspired by croquet. It is a fast-paced, non-contact, highly strategic team game, which can be played by anyone regardless of age or gender.

Sun Nov 6

A “button down” shirt is technically one where the collar can literally be buttoned down to the shirt. Otherwise it is a “button front” or “button up” shirt

Sat Nov 5

Wiener = from Vienna, frankfurter = from Frankfurt, hamburger = from Hamburg

Fri Nov 4

In London, anyone requiring use of accessible toilets can use the NKS/RADAR key to open any of them
Ongar is a London train station. Until its closure as such in 1994, it was the easternmost point of the Central line and the eastern buffers remain the point from which all distances on the London Underground are measured.

Thu Nov 3

Nee is the feminine version, ne is the masculine version

Wed Nov 2

Jimmy Eat World’s name came from a crayon drawing made after an incident between Linton’s younger brothers, Jim and Ed Linton, who fought frequently. Jim usually won, but Ed sought revenge by drawing a picture of Jim shoving the earth into his mouth; the picture bore the caption “Jimmy eat world”.

Tue Nov 1

Missouri Executive Order 44 (known as the Mormon Extermination Order) was a state executive order issued by Missouri Governor Lilburn Boggs on October 27, 1838, in the aftermath of the Battle of Crooked River – a clash between members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and a unit of the state militia in northern Ray County during the 1838 Mormon War. Claiming that church members had committed open and avowed defiance of the law and had made war upon the people of Missouri, Governor Boggs directed that “the Mormons must be treated as enemies, and must be exterminated or driven from the State if necessary for the public peace—their outrages are beyond all description”.
The 1838 Mormon War, also known as the Missouri Mormon War, was a conflict between Mormons and non-Mormons in Missouri from August to November 1838, the first of the three “Mormon Wars”.

October 2022

Mon Oct 31

In linguistics, mutual intelligibility is a relationship between languages or dialects in which speakers of different but related varieties can readily understand each other without prior familiarity or special effort. It is sometimes used as an important criterion for distinguishing languages from dialects, although sociolinguistic factors are often also used.
In historical linguistics, sister languages are cognate languages; that is, languages that descend from a common ancestral language, their so-called proto-language. Every language in a language family that descends from the same language as the others is a sister to them.
In historical linguistics, a daughter language, also known as descendant language, is a language descended from another language, its mother language, through a process of genetic descent. If more than one language has developed from the same proto-language, or ‘mother language’, those languages are said to be sister languages, members of the same language family.
Dialect levelling or leveling (in American English) is the process of an overall reduction in the variation or diversity of features between two or more dialects.
In linguistics, a koiné language, koiné dialect, or simply koiné (Ancient Greek κοινή, “common [language]”) is a standard or common language or dialect that has arisen as a result of the contact, mixing, and often simplification of two or more mutually intelligible varieties of the same language.
In linguistics, lexical similarity is a measure of the degree to which the word sets of two given languages are similar. A lexical similarity of 1 (or 100%) would mean a total overlap between vocabularies, whereas 0 means there are no common words.

Sun Oct 30

Gerald Anderson Lawson (December 1, 1940 – April 9, 2011) was an American electronic engineer. He is known for his work in designing the Fairchild Channel F video game console as well as leading the team that pioneered the commercial video game cartridge. He was thus dubbed the “father of the videogame cartridge” according to Black Enterprise magazine in 1982. He eventually left Fairchild and founded the game company Video-Soft.

Sat Oct 29

WeiweiCam is a self-surveillance project by artist Ai Weiwei, in China, that went live on April 3, 2012, exactly one year after the artist’s detention by Chinese officials at Beijing Airport. At least fifteen surveillance cameras monitor his house in Beijing which, according to Ai, makes it the most-watched spot of the city.
Caochangdi (simplified Chinese: 草场地; traditional Chinese: 草場地; pinyin: Cǎochǎngdì) was an urban village and renowned arts district located in the Chaoyang District of northeast Beijing at the intersection of the 5th Ring Road and Airport Expressway. Translated as “grasslands” in Mandarin, Caochangdi was home to a diverse group of residents, including migrant workers, farmers, students and artists, most notably, Ai Weiwei.

Fri Oct 28

British people call rutabagas “swedes”

Thu Oct 27

The Mundaneum was an institution which aimed to gather together all the world’s knowledge and classify it according to a system called the Universal Decimal Classification. It was developed at the turn of the 20th century by Belgian lawyers Paul Otlet and Henri La Fontaine. The Mundaneum has been identified as a milestone in the history of data collection and management, and (somewhat more tenuously) as a precursor to the Internet.

Wed Oct 26

Christopher Johnson McCandless pseudonym “Alexander Supertramp”, was an American adventurer who sought an increasingly nomadic lifestyle as he grew up. After graduating from Emory University in Georgia in 1990, McCandless traveled across North America and eventually hitchhiked to Alaska in April 1992. There, he entered the Alaskan bush with minimal supplies, hoping to live simply off the land. On the eastern bank of the Sushana River, McCandless found an abandoned bus, Fairbanks Bus 142, which he used as a makeshift shelter until his death. In September, his decomposing body, weighing only 67 pounds (30 kg), was found inside the bus by a hunter.

Tue Oct 25

The spoon theory is a metaphor describing the amount of physical and/or mental energy that a person has available for daily activities and tasks, and how it can become limited. It was coined by writer and blogger Christine Miserandino in 2003 as a way to express how it felt to have lupus; explaining the viewpoint in a diner, she gave her friend a handful of spoons and described them as units of energy to be spent performing everyday actions, representing how chronic illness forced her to plan out days and actions in advance so as to not run out of energy.

Mon Oct 24

The U.S. state of Idaho is covered by two time zones, as described below. All locations observe daylight saving time.

Sun Oct 23

Ken Allen was a Bornean orangutan at the San Diego Zoo. He became one of the most popular animals in the history of the zoo because of his many successful escapes from his enclosures. He was nicknamed “the Hairy Houdini”. In 1985, he gained worldwide attention for a series of three escapes from his enclosure, which had been thought to be escape-proof. During some of his escapes, his female companions joined him. Ken Allen’s ability to outwit his keepers, as well as his docile demeanor during his escapes, resulted in fame. He had his own fan club, and was the subject of T-shirts and bumper stickers (most reading “Free Ken Allen”). A song, “The Ballad of Ken Allen”, was written about him. Zoo officials eventually hired experienced rock climbers to find every finger-, toe- and foothold within the enclosure, spending $40,000 to eliminate the identified holds.

Sat Oct 22

Line 21 was once the standard for closed captioning for NTSC TV broadcasts in the United States, Canada and Mexico. It was developed by the Electronic Industries Alliance and required by law to be implemented in most television receivers made in the United States.

Fri Oct 21

Chitting is a method of preparing potatoes or other tubers for planting. The seed potatoes are placed in a tray (often in egg cartons) in a light and cool place but shielded from direct sunlight.

Thu Oct 20

-It was legal to kill Basques in Iceland until 2015

Wed Oct 19

Kitsch is a term applied to art and design that is perceived as naïve imitation, overly eccentric, gratuitous or of banal taste. The modern avant garde traditionally opposed kitsch for its melodramatic tendencies, its superficial relationship with the human condition and its naturalistic standards of beauty. In the first half of the 20th century, kitsch was used in reference to mass-produced, pop-cultural products that lacked the conceptual depth of fine art. However, since the emergence of Pop Art in the 1950s, kitsch has taken on newfound highbrow appeal, often wielded in knowingly ironic, humorous or earnest manners.

Tue Oct 18

Condom also known as Condom-en-Armagnac, is a commune in southwestern France in the department of Gers, of which it is a subprefecture. It has gained international interest in the English speaking world for its unfortunate naming.

Mon Oct 17

Moquette derived from the French word for carpet, is a type of woven pile fabric in which cut or uncut threads form a short dense cut or loop pile. As well as giving it a distinctive velvet-like feel, the pile construction is particularly durable, and ideally suited to applications such as public transport.

Sun Oct 16

Julia Robinson was an American mathematician noted for her contributions to the fields of computability theory and computational complexity theory—most notably in decision problems. Her work on Hilbert’s tenth problem (now known as Matiyasevich’s theorem or the MRDP theorem) played a crucial role in its ultimate resolution. Robinson was a 1983 MacArthur Fellow.

Sat Oct 15

Albert Einstein was offered the presidency of Israel (but obviously turned it down)

Fri Oct 14

The Stanford band is banned from a bunch of places
- In 1970 on September 12 at the Stanford-Arkansas football game, the band dropped their pants during the nationally televised halftime show.
- In 1986, the University suspended the band from traveling to the UCLA football game scheduled on November 8, 1986 after incidents in previous games that season. First, on October 11, 1986, an infamous incident of public urination happened following the home football game against the Washington Huskies. Second, during the halftime show of the home USC game on October 25, 1986, the band spelled out “NO BALLZ” and formed male genitalia. Finally, they performed an anagram show and spelled out an anagram of a four-letter word (“NCUT”). After the UCLA game suspension was served, the band appeared at the Cal game wearing angel halos in an attempt to apologize and get invited to travel with the football team to a bowl game.

Thu Oct 13

The founder of Atari also made Chuck E Cheese

Wed Oct 12

94% of people speak 6% of the languages on Earth (and vice versa)
The most common plural of opus in English is opuses. Some people use the Latin plural, opera.
You’re supposed to watch operas with the libretto to understand the words

Tue Oct 11

Zzzzzzz later just Z, was a dial-a-joke service active in the 1970s and early 1980s. Started by Bob Bilkiss of West Los Angeles in 1970, it operated from the 213 area code and was named so to appear last in the Los Angeles telephone directory. Emerging from a wave of dial-a-joke numbers in Los Angeles in the turn of the 1970s, Zzzzzz enjoyed a high level of popularity in its day. For several years, it was the busiest residential telephone number in the United States, if not the world.

Mon Oct 10

The stoat also known as the Eurasian ermine, Beringian ermine and ermine, is a mustelid native to Eurasia and the northern portions of North America. Because of its wide circumpolar distribution, it is listed as Least Concern on the IUCN Red List. It is distinct from the long-tailed weasel (Neogale frenata), also known as the “masked ermine”, or “big stoat”; the two species are visually similar, especially the black tail tip.

Sun Oct 09

Bald-hairy is a common joke in Russian political discourse, referring to the empirical rule of the state leaders’ succession defined as a change of a bald or balding leader to a hairy one and vice versa.

Sat Oct 08

A scute is a bony external plate or scale overlaid with horn, as on the shell of a turtle, the skin of crocodilians, and the feet of birds.

Fri Oct 07

hotCRP = hot Conference Review Package

Thu Oct 06

The Hollywood Freeway chickens are a colony of feral chickens that live under the Vineland Avenue off-ramp of the Hollywood Freeway (U.S. Route 101) in Los Angeles, California. It is not definitively known how they came to be there, although news stories generally ascribe them to an overturned poultry truck.

Wed Oct 05

Thin-film interference is a natural phenomenon in which light waves reflected by the upper and lower boundaries of a thin film interfere with one another, either enhancing or reducing the reflected light.

Tue Oct 04

The Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices for Streets and Highways (usually referred to as the Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices, abbreviated MUTCD) is a document issued by the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) of the United States Department of Transportation (USDOT) to specify the standards by which traffic signs, road surface markings, and signals are designed, installed, and used.
Comparison of MUCTD-influenced traffic signs
Comparison of traffic signs in English-speaking territories
Comparison of European road signs
The Convention on Road Signs and Signals, commonly known as the Vienna Convention on Road Signs and Signals, is a multilateral treaty designed to increase road safety and aid international road traffic by standardising the signing system for road traffic (road signs, traffic lights and road markings) in use internationally.

Mon Oct 03

This is a list of well-known real birds. For famous fictional birds, see list of fictional birds.

Sun Oct 02

Kangaroo meat is produced in Australia from wild kangaroos and is exported to over 60 overseas markets. Kangaroo meat is sourced from the 4 main species of Kangaroos that are harvested in the wild. It is the current largest commercial land based wildlife trade on the planet.

Sat Oct 01

In computer networking, a flit (flow control unit or flow control digit) is a link-level atomic piece that forms a network packet or stream.

September 2022

Fri Sep 30

Automatic Packet Reporting System is an amateur radio-based system for real time digital communications of information of immediate value in the local area. Data can include object Global Positioning System (GPS) coordinates, weather station telemetry, text messages, announcements, queries, and other telemetry. APRS data can be displayed on a map, which can show stations, objects, tracks of moving objects, weather stations, search and rescue data, and direction finding data.

Thu Sep 29

Idiot etymology: The word “idiot” comes from the Greek noun ἰδιώτης idiōtēs ‘a private person, individual’ (as opposed to the state), ‘a private citizen’ (as opposed to someone with a political office), ‘a common man’, ‘a person lacking professional skill, layman’, later ‘unskilled’, ‘ignorant’, derived from the adjective ἴδιος idios ‘personal’ (not public, not shared).

Wed Sep 28

Blast fishing is a destructive fishing practice using explosives to stun or kill schools of fish for easy collection. This often illegal practice is extremely destructive to the surrounding ecosystem, as the explosion often destroys the underlying habitat (such as coral reefs) that supports the fish.

Tue Sep 27

Iceland v Iceland Foods Ltd is an ongoing legal dispute between the country of Iceland and the British supermarket chain Iceland Foods over the trademark, intellectual property rights and use of the name “Iceland”.

Mon Sep 26

Surtitles are translated or transcribed lyrics/dialogue projected above a stage or displayed on a screen, commonly used in opera, theatre or other musical performances.

Sun Sep 25

A lakh is a unit in the Indian numbering system equal to one hundred thousand (100,000; scientific notation: 105). In the Indian 2,2,3 convention of digit grouping, it is written as 1,00,000. For example, in India, 150,000 rupees becomes 1.5 lakh rupees, written as ₹1,50,000 or INR 1,50,000.

Sat Sep 24

Wombats poop in a cube shape

Fri Sep 23

A fish ladder is a structure on or around artificial and natural barriers (such as dams, locks and waterfalls) to facilitate diadromous fishes’ natural migration as well as movements of potamodromous species.

Thu Sep 22

The Dionne quintuplets are the first quintuplets known to have survived their infancy. The identical girls were born just outside Callander, Ontario, near the village of Corbeil. All five survived to adulthood

Wed Sep 21

Two-body problem is a dilemma for life partners (e.g., spouses or any other couple) often referred to in academia, relating to the difficulty of both spouses obtaining jobs at the same university or within a reasonable commuting distance from each other. The inability of one partner to accommodate the other produces this central dilemma, which is a no-win situation in which if the couple wishes to stay together one of them may be forced to abandon an academic career, or if both wish to pursue academic careers the relationship may falter due to the spouses being constantly separated.

Tue Sep 20

4.48 Psychosis is the final play by British playwright Sarah Kane. It was her last work, first staged at the Royal Court’s Jerwood Theatre Upstairs on 23 June 2000, directed by James Macdonald, nearly one and a half years after Kane’s death on 20 February 1999. The play has no explicit characters or stage directions; this continues the style of her previous production entitled Crave. Stage productions of the play vary greatly, therefore, with between one and several actors in performance; the original production featured three actors. According to Kane’s friend and fellow-playwright David Greig, the title of the play derives from the time, 4:48 a.m., when Kane, in her depressed state, often woke.

Mon Sep 19

Lumpers and splitters are opposing factions in any discipline that has to place individual examples into rigorously defined categories. The lumper–splitter problem occurs when there is the desire to create classifications and assign examples to them, for example schools of literature, biological taxa and so on. A “lumper” is an individual who takes a gestalt view of a definition, and assigns examples broadly, assuming that differences are not as important as signature similarities. A “splitter” is an individual who takes precise definitions, and creates new categories to classify samples that differ in key ways.

Sun Sep 18

The French paradox is an apparently paradoxical epidemiological observation that French people have a relatively low incidence of coronary heart disease (CHD), while having a diet relatively rich in saturated fats

Sat Sep 17

Geordie is a nickname for a person from the Tyneside area of North East England
Mackem a nickname for residents of and people from Sunderland, a city in North East England

Fri Sep 16

An idiophone is an instrument that makes its sound primarily from vibrating the instrument itself

Thu Sep 15

During World War II, there was a shortage of butter in the United States, and “oleomargarine” became popular. In 1951, the W.E. Dennison Company received U.S. Patent 2,553,513 for a method to place a capsule of yellow dye inside a plastic package of margarine. After purchase, the capsule was broken by pressing on the outside of the package, and then the package was kneaded to distribute the dye.

Wed Sep 14

A puppy cat is a term used to refer to specific breeds of domestic cats that have unusual behavioral tendencies that are reminiscent of young domestic dogs. These are within the scope of feline behavior, and may be enhanced through selective breeding. These behaviors, not specific to any breed, include following people around from room to room, the desire to receive frequent moments of physical affection such as being held and petted, a lack of aggression toward some fellow animals, and a placid nature.

Tue Sep 13

Mozart and scatology

Mon Sep 12

Pretzels were invented by monks

Sun Sep 11

Mr. Big is a covert investigation procedure used by undercover police to elicit confessions from suspects in cold cases (usually murder). Police officers create a fictitious grey area or criminal organization and then seduce the suspect into joining it. They build a relationship with the suspect, gain their confidence, and then enlist their help in a succession of criminal acts (e.g., delivering goods, credit card scams, selling guns) for which they are paid. Once the suspect has become enmeshed in the criminal gang they are persuaded to divulge information about their criminal history, usually as a prerequisite for being accepted as a member of the organization.

Sat Sep 10

A catafalque is a raised bier, box, or similar platform, often movable, that is used to support the casket, coffin, or body of a dead person during a Christian funeral or memorial service.

Fri Sep 9

MEAT EXTENDERS

Thu Sep 8

Kaguya was a mouse that had two parents of the same sex (c. April, 2004). She was named after a Japanese folk tale, in which the Moon-born princess Kaguya (Kaguya-hime) is found as a baby inside a bamboo stalk

Wed Sep 7

An emoji domain is a domain name with one or more emoji in it, for example 😉.tld.

Tue Sep 6

The mnemonic major system is a mnemonic technique used to aid in memorizing numbers. The system works by converting numbers into consonants, then into words by adding vowels. The system works on the principle that images can be remembered more easily than numbers.

Mon Sep 5

The Enumclaw horse sex case was a series of incidents in 2005 involving Kenneth Pinyan, an engineer who worked for Boeing and resided in Gig Harbor, Washington; James Michael Tait, a truck driver; and other unidentified men. Pinyan and Tait filmed and distributed zoophilic pornography of Pinyan receiving anal sex from a stallion under the alias “Mr. Hands”. After engaging in this activity on multiple occasions over an unknown span of time, Pinyan received fatal internal injuries in one such incident.

Sun Sep 4

The Man of the Hole was an indigenous person who lived alone in the Amazon rainforest in the Brazilian state of Rondônia. He was the sole inhabitant of the Tanaru Indigenous Territory, a protected indigenous territory demarcated by the Brazilian government in 2007.

Sat Sep 3

Medium capactiy rail system is a rail transport system with a capacity greater than light rail, but less than typical heavy-rail rapid transit.[1] MCS’s trains are usually 1-4 cars, or 1 light rail vehicle (LRV). Most medium-capacity rail systems are automated or use light rail type vehicles. Light rail is considered high capacity as trains use 2-4 LRVs.

Fri Sep 2

Temple garments are a type of underwear worn by adherents of the Latter Day Saint movement after they have taken part in the endowment ceremony. Garments are required for any adult who previously participated in the endowment ceremony to enter a temple. The undergarments are viewed as a symbolic reminder of the covenants made in temple ceremonies and are seen as a symbolic and/or literal source of protection from the evils of the world.

Thu Sep 1

Quarter Days were the four dates in each year on which servants were hired, school terms started, and rents were due. They fell on four religious festivals roughly three months apart and close to the two solstices and two equinoxes. The significance of quarter days is now limited, although rents for properties in England are often still due on the old English quarter days.

August 2022

Wed Aug 31

Anvil firing is the practice of firing an anvil into the air with gunpowder. In the United Kingdom, the term refers to a method of testing anvils. Black powder was poured onto the top of the anvil and ignited. If the anvil did not shatter, it was deemed safe to use.

Tue Aug 30

Aggressive inline skating is a sub discipline of inline skating in the action sports canon. Aggressive inline skates are specially modified to accommodate grinds and jumps. Aggressive skating can take place on found street obstacles or at skate parks.

Mon Aug 29

Yoga tourism is travel with the specific purpose of experiencing some form of yoga, whether spiritual or postural. The former is a type of spiritual tourism; the latter is related both to spiritual and to wellness tourism. Yoga tourists often visit ashrams in India to study yoga or to be trained and certified as yoga teachers. Major centres for yoga tourism include Rishikesh and Mysore.

Sun Aug 28

U’ pastizz ‘rtunnar commonly known as pastizz, is a baked turnover with a savoury filling, typical of the Italian Basilicata region.
A pastizz is a traditional savoury pastry from Malta. Pastizzi usually have a filling either of ricotta (tal-ħaxu, pastizzi tal-irkotta, cheese cake) or curried peas (pastizzi tal-piżelli, pea cake)

Sat Aug 27

Lapidary is the practice of shaping stone, minerals, or gemstones into decorative items such as cabochons, engraved gems (including cameos), and faceted designs. A person who practices lapidary is known as a lapidarist.

Fri Aug 26

A blind item is a news story, typically in a gossip column, in which the details of the matter are reported while the identities of the people involved are not revealed.
The small penis rule is an informal strategy used by authors to evade libel lawsuits. It was described in a New York Times article by Dinitia Smith in 1998: “For a fictional portrait to be actionable, it must be so accurate that a reader of the book would have no problem linking the two,” said Mr. Friedman. Thus, he continued, libel lawyers have what is known as “the small penis rule”. One way authors can protect themselves from libel suits is to say that a character has a small penis, Mr. Friedman said. “Now no male is going to come forward and say, ‘That character with a very small penis, that’s me!’”

Thu Aug 25

Gonzo journalism is a style of journalism that is written without claims of objectivity, often including the reporter as part of the story using a first-person narrative. The word “gonzo” is believed to have been first used in 1970 to describe an article about the Kentucky Derby by Hunter S. Thompson, who popularized the style.
A roman a clef is a novel about real-life events that is overlaid with a façade of fiction. The fictitious names in the novel represent real people, and the “key” is the relationship between the nonfiction and the fiction.

Wed Aug 24

A light pillar is an atmospheric optical phenomenon in which a vertical beam of light appears to extend above and/or below a light source. The effect is created by the reflection of light from tiny ice crystals that are suspended in the atmosphere or that comprise high-altitude clouds (e.g. cirrostratus or cirrus clouds).[1] If the light comes from the Sun (usually when it is near or even below the horizon), the phenomenon is called a sun pillar or solar pillar.

Tue Aug 23

List of impostors
Billy Tipton was an American jazz musician, bandleader, and talent broker. Tipton lived as a man for most of his adult life; after his death, friends and family were surprised to learn that he was transgender.

Mon Aug 22

Sarah Baartman was a Khoikhoi woman who was exhibited as a freak show attraction in 19th-century Europe under the name Hottentot Venus, a name which was later attributed to at least one other woman similarly exhibited. The term “Hottentot” was the colonial-era term for the indigenous Khoekoe (formerly known as Khoikhoi) people of the southwestern area of Africa. The women were exhibited for their steatopygic body type uncommon in Western Europe which not only was perceived as a curiosity at that time, but became subject of scientific interest as well as of erotic projection.

Sun Aug 21

The Candy Desk has been a tradition of the United States Senate since 1968, whereby a senator who sits at a particular desk near a busy entrance keeps a drawer full of candy for members of the body. The current occupant of the candy desk is Pennsylvania Senator Pat Toomey.
The Parliamentary snuff box is a wooden snuff box at the door of the House of Commons of the United Kingdom where snuff is stored for use by Members of Parliament. It originated after 1694 when smoking was banned in the House of Commons. It is the responsibility of the Principal Doorkeeper to ensure it is kept stocked.

Sat Aug 20

A greeble is an artificial objects designed to be used as stimuli in psychological studies of object and face recognition.

Fri Aug 19

Runways are labeled based on the angle you have to approach from (from magnetic north). Because magnetic north moves, the runway numbers have to be relabeled.

Thu Aug 18

A signum manus refers to the medieval practice, current from the Merovingian period until the 14th century in the Frankish Empire and its successors, of signing a document or charter with a special type of monogram or royal cypher.
The rota is one of the symbols used by the Pope to authenticate documents such as papal bulls. It is a cross inscribed in two concentric circles. Pope Leo IX was the first pope to use it.

Wed Aug 17

Fe, Fi, Fo, Fum and Phooey were five mice who traveled to the Moon and circled it 75 times on the 1972 Apollo 17 mission. NASA gave them identification numbers A3305, A3326, A3352, A3356, and A3400, and their nicknames were given by the Apollo 17 crew, Eugene Cernan, Harrison Schmitt, and Ronald Evans. The four male mice, one female mouse, and Evans orbited the Moon for a record-setting six days and four hours in the Apollo command module America as Cernan and Schmitt performed the Apollo program’s last lunar excursions.

Tue Aug 16

A cork hat is a type of headgear with corks strung from the brim, to ward off insects. Pieces of cork, typically bottle corks, are hung on strings from the brim of the hat. The low density of cork means a number of pieces may hang from a hat without significantly increasing its weight. Movement of the head causes the corks to swing, discouraging insects, particularly bush flies, from swarming around the wearer’s head, or entering the nose or mouth. The shape and material of cork hats varies but, typically, they are similar to a slouch hat.

Mon Aug 15

The Dutch angle is a type of camera shot which involves setting the camera at an angle on its roll axis so that the shot is composed with vertical lines at an angle to the side of the frame, or so that the horizon line of the shot is not parallel with the bottom of the camera frame.

Sun Aug 14

Hash House Harriers is an international group of non-competitive running social clubs. An event organized by a club is known as a Hash or Run, or a Hash Run.
A paper chase is a racing game played outdoors (best played within a wood or even a shrubbery maze) with any number of players. At the start of the game, one person is designated the ‘hare’ and everyone else in the group are the ‘hounds’. The ‘hare’ starts off ahead of everyone else leaving behind a trail of paper shreds (or chalk marks in an urban environment) which represents the scent of the hare. Just as scent is carried on the wind, so too are the bits of paper, sometimes making for a difficult game. After some designated time, the hounds must chase after the hare and attempt to catch them before they reach the ending point of the race.

Sat Aug 13

Countertop came from the fact that countertops where businesspeople did calculations, counting, etc. with abaci (abacuses?).

Fri Aug 12

Roald Dahl was a spy in WW2

Thu Aug 11

The Orphan Train was a supervised welfare program that transported children from crowded Eastern cities of the United States to foster homes located largely in rural areas of the Midwest. The orphan trains operated between 1854 and 1929, relocating about 250,000 children. The co-founders of the Orphan Train movement claimed that these children were orphaned, abandoned, abused, or homeless, but this was not always true. They were mostly the children of new immigrants and the children of the poor and destitute families living in these cities. Criticisms include ineffective screening of caretakers, insufficient follow-ups on placements, and that many children were used as strictly slave farm labor.

Wed Aug 10

Texas German is a group of German language dialects spoken in Texas by descendants of German immigrants who settled there in the mid-19th century.

Tue Aug 9

Rubber tyred metro is a form of rapid transit system that uses a mix of road and rail technology. The vehicles have wheels with rubber tires that run on rolling pads inside guide bars for traction, as well as traditional railway steel wheels with deep flanges on steel tracks for guidance through conventional switches as well as guidance in case a tyre fails.
Platform screen doors also known as platform edge doors (PEDs), are used at some train, rapid transit and people mover stations to separate the platform from train tracks, as well as on some bus rapid transit, tram and light rail systems.
An articulated bus also referred to as a banana bus, bendy bus, tandem bus, vestibule bus, wiggle wagon, stretch bus, or an accordion bus, (either a motor bus or trolleybus) is an articulated vehicle used in public transportation.
- A bi-articulated bus is a type of high-capacity articulated bus with an extra axle and a second articulation joint, as well as extended length. Bi-articulated buses tend to be employed in high-frequency core routes or bus rapid transit schemes rather than in conventional bus routes.
Guided buses are buses capable of being steered by external means, usually on a dedicated track or roll way that excludes other traffic, permitting the maintenance of schedules even during rush hours. Unlike trolleybuses or rubber-tired trams, for part of their routes guided buses are able to share road space with general traffic along conventional roads, or with conventional buses on standard bus lanes.
Automated guideway transit is a type of fixed guideway transit infrastructure with a riding or suspension track that supports and physically guides one or more driverless vehicles along its length.
The Kassel kerb is a special kerb (curb in US English) designed for low-floor buses that serve an elevated bus stop platform.
Bus rapid transit creep is a phenomenon commonly defined as a bus rapid transit (BRT) system that fails to meet the requirements to be considered “true BRT”. These systems are often marketed as a fully realized bus rapid transit system, but end up being described as more of an improvement to regular bus service by proponents of the “BRT creep” term.
A road rail vehicle is a dual-mode vehicle which can operate both on rail tracks and roads.
Transit Elevated Bus was a proposed new bus concept where a guided bus straddles above road traffic, giving it the alternative names such as straddling bus, straddle bus, land airbus, or tunnel bus by international media.
Translohr is a rubber-tired tramway (or guided bus) system, originally developed by Lohr Industrie of France and now run by a consortium of Alstom Transport and Fonds stratégique d’investissement (FSI) as newTL, which took over from Lohr in 2012.
A trolleybus is an electric bus that draws power from dual overhead wires (generally suspended from roadside posts) using spring-loaded trolley poles.
A trackless train is a road-going articulated vehicle used for the transport of passengers, comprising a driving vehicle pulling one or more carriages connected by drawbar couplings, in the manner of a road-going railway train.
A dual mode bus is a hybrid bus that can run independently on power from two different sources, typically electricity from overhead lines (in the same way as trolleybuses) or batteries, alternated with conventional fossil fuel (generally diesel fuel).

Mon Aug 8

Sputtering is a phenomenon in which microscopic particles of a solid material are ejected from its surface, after the material is itself bombarded by energetic particles of a plasma or gas.

Sun Aug 7

A rappen originally was a variant of the medieval Pfennig (“penny”) common to the Alemannic German regions Alsace, Sundgau and northern Switzerland. As with other German pennies, its half-piece was a Haller, the smallest piece which was struck. Today, one-hundredth of a Swiss franc is still officially called a Rappen in German and Swiss German and rap in Romansh.
Withdrawal of low-denomination coins

Sat Aug 6

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly is a memoir by journalist Jean-Dominique Bauby. It describes his life before and after a massive stroke left him with locked-in syndrome. The entire book was written by Bauby blinking his left eyelid, which took ten months (four hours a day). Using partner assisted scanning, a transcriber repeatedly recited a French language frequency-ordered alphabet (E, S, A, R, I, N, T, U, L, etc.), until Bauby blinked to choose the next letter. The book took about 200,000 blinks to write and an average word took approximately two minutes. The book also chronicles everyday events for a person with locked-in syndrome.

Fri Aug 5

A level crossing is an intersection where a railway line crosses a road or path, or in rare situations an airport runway, at the same level, as opposed to the railway line crossing over or under using an overpass or tunnel. The term also applies when a light rail line with separate right-of-way or reserved track crosses a road in the same fashion.
- List of level crossing crashes
- A boom barrier is a bar, or pole pivoted to allow the boom to block vehicular or pedestrian access through a controlled point.
- A four-quadrant gate is a type of boom barrier gate protecting a grade crossing. It has a gate mechanism on both sides of the tracks for both directions of automotive traffic. The exit gates blocking the road leading away from the tracks are equipped with a delay, and begin their descent to their horizontal position several seconds after the entrance gates do, so as to avoid trapping highway vehicles on the crossing.
- A crossbuck is a traffic sign used to indicate a level railway crossing. It is composed of two slats of wood or metal of equal length, fastened together on a pole in a saltire formation (resembling the letter X).
- A whistle post is a sign marking a location where a train driver is required to sound the horn or whistle.
  - A wayside horn is an audible signal used at level crossings. They can be used in place of, or in addition to, the locomotive’s horn as the train approaches the crossing. They are often used in special railroad “quiet zones” in the United States, where the engineer is not required to sound the locomotive’s horn at a crossing. This reduces the ambient noise at the crossing, which may be desirable in residential areas.
- A wigwag is a nickname for a type of railroad grade crossing signal once common in North America, referring to its pendulum-like motion that signaled the approach of a train. The device is generally credited to Albert Hunt, a mechanical engineer at Southern California’s Pacific Electric (PE) interurban streetcar railroad, who invented it in 1909 for safer railroad grade crossings
The breakover angle is the maximum possible supplementary angle (usually expressed in degrees) that a vehicle, with at least one forward wheel and one rear wheel, can drive over without the apex of that angle touching any point of the vehicle other than the wheels.
Grade separation is a method of aligning a junction of two or more surface transport axes at different heights (grades) so that they will not disrupt the traffic flow on other transit routes when they cross each other. The composition of such transport axes does not have to be uniform; it can consist of a mixture of roads, footpaths, railways, canals, or airport runways. Bridges (or overpasses, also called flyovers), tunnels (or underpasses), or a combination of both can be built at a junction to achieve the needed grade separation.
An occupation crossing allows an landowner whose land is split in two by a (new) railway (or road) to retain access from one parcel of land to the other. Where is crossing a railway line, it is a special kind of railway level crossing.

Thu Aug 4

The brushing scam is a scam where people are sent random items on Amazon, so that their name can be used in reviews to bolster ratings.

Wed Aug 3

The 1904 Olympics men’s marathon was absolutely bonkers:
- While Fred Lorz was greeted as the apparent winner, he was later disqualified as he had hitched a ride in a car for part of the race.
- Thomas Hicks ended up the winner of the event, although he was aided by measures that would not have been permitted in later years. Ten miles from the finish, Hicks led the race by a mile and a half, but he had to be restrained from stopping and lying down by his trainers. From then until the end of the race, Hicks received several doses of strychnine (a common rat poison, which stimulates the nervous system in small doses) mixed with brandy in an egg white. He continued to battle onwards, hallucinating, barely able to walk for most of the course. When he reached the stadium, his support team carried him over the line, holding him in the air while he shuffled his feet as if still running. Hicks had to be carried off the track, and might have died in the stadium had he not been treated by several doctors. He lost eight pounds during the course of the marathon.
- Another near-fatality during the event was William Garcia of the United States. He was found lying in the road along the marathon course with severe internal injuries caused by breathing the clouds of dust kicked up by the race officials’ cars
- Cuban postman Andarín Carvajal had also joined the marathon, arriving at the last minute. After losing all of his money gambling in New Orleans, Louisiana, he hitchhiked to St. Louis and had to run the event in street clothes that he cut around the legs to make them look like shorts. Not having eaten in 40 hours, he saw a spectator eating 2 peaches. He asked if he could have the peaches, and the spectator declined. He then stole both peaches and ran away. Later, he stopped off in an orchard en route to eat some apples, which turned out to be rotten. The rotten apples caused him to have strong stomach cramps, and he had to lie down and take a nap. Despite falling ill from the apples, and taking a nap, he still managed to finish in fourth place.
- The South African entrants, Len Taunyane and Jan Mashiani, finished ninth and twelfth, respectively: this was a disappointment, as many observers were sure Tau could have done better if he had not been chased nearly a mile off course by wild dogs.
- The only two sources of water for the competitors were a water tower at six miles and a well at about the 12-mile mark. James E. Sullivan was a chief organizer of the Olympics, and decided to allow only one water station on the 24.85 mile course of the marathon even though it was conducted in 32 °C (90 °F) heat over unpaved roads choked with dust. His ostensible reason was to conduct research on “purposeful dehydration”, even though dehydration is potentially fatal.

Tue Aug 2

Trust, but verify is a rhyming Russian proverb. The phrase became internationally known in English after Suzanne Massie, an American scholar, taught it to Ronald Reagan, then president of the United States, the latter of whom used it on several occasions in the context of nuclear disarmament discussions with the Soviet Union.

Mon Aug 1

Between 1867 and 1974, various cities of the United States had unsightly beggar ordinances, in retrospect also dubbed ugly laws. These laws targeted poor people and disabled people. For instance, in San Francisco a law of 1867 deemed it illegal for “any person, who is diseased, maimed, mutilated or deformed in any way, so as to be an unsightly or disgusting object, to expose himself or herself to public view.” Exceptions to public exposure were acceptable only if the people were subjects of demonstration, to illustrate the separation of disabled from nondisabled and their need for reformation.

July 2022

Sun Jul 31

A mellified man also known as a human mummy confection, was a legendary medicinal substance created by steeping a human cadaver in honey.

Sat Jul 30

Mousetrapping is a technique used by some websites (often tech support scam sites) to keep visitors from leaving their website, either by launching an endless series of pop-up ads, redirects or by re-launching their website in a window that cannot be easily closed (sometimes this window runs like a stand-alone application, and the taskbar and the browser’s menu become inaccessible). Many websites that do this also employ browser hijackers to reset the user’s default homepage.

Fri Jul 29

A tronie is a type of work common in Dutch Golden Age painting and Flemish Baroque painting that depicts an exaggerated or characteristic facial expression. These works were not intended as portraits but as studies of expression, type, physiognomy or an interesting character such as an old man or woman, a young woman, the soldier, the shepherdess, the Oriental, or a person of a particular race, etc.

Thu Jul 28

Apatheism is the attitude of apathy towards the existence or non-existence of God(s). It is more of an attitude rather than a belief, claim, or belief system.

Wed Jul 27

The Exploratorium in SF has an .edu website because they got it before there were rules about who could have them

Tue Jul 26

List of women who obtained doctoral degrees before 1800

Mon Jul 25

An incunable is a book, pamphlet, or broadside that was printed in the earliest stages of printing in Europe, up to the year 1500. Incunabula were produced before the printing press became widespread on the continent and are distinct from manuscripts, which are documents written by hand.

Sun Jul 24

Memory of the World Programme is an international initiative launched to safeguard the documentary heritage of humanity against collective amnesia, neglect, the ravages of time and climatic conditions, and willful and deliberate destruction. It calls for the preservation of valuable archival holdings, library collections, and private individual compendia all over the world for posterity, the reconstitution of dispersed or displaced documentary heritage, and increased accessibility to, and dissemination of, these items.

Sat Jul 23

Absolute time in pregroove is a method of storing information on an optical medium, used on CD-R and CD-RW . ATIP information is only readable on CD-R and CD-RW drives, as read-only drives don’t need the information stored on it. The information indicates if the disk is writable and information needed to correctly write to the disk.
ATIP is used as a method of putting data on an optical medium, specifically:
- Manufacturer
- Writable/Rewritable
- Dye type
- Spiral length in blocks
- Rated speed
- Audio

Fri Jul 22

CONTENT WARNING - Chick culling is the process of separating and killing unwanted (male and unhealthy female) chicks for which the intensive animal farming industry has no use. It occurs in all industrialised egg production, whether free range, organic, or battery cage. However, some certified pasture-raised egg farms are making steps to eliminate the practice in entirety.

Thu Jul 21

Napier’s bones is a manually-operated calculating device created by John Napier of Merchiston, Scotland for the calculation of products and quotients of numbers. The method was based on lattice multiplication, and also called ‘rabdology’, a word invented by Napier.

Wed Jul 20

NIST SELLS A $1000 STANDARD JAR OF PEANUT BUTTER

Tue Jul 19

The Stingray is an IMSI-catcher, a cellular phone surveillance device, manufactured by Harris Corporation. Initially developed for the military and intelligence community, the StingRay and similar Harris devices are in widespread use by local and state law enforcement agencies across Canada, the United States, and in the United Kingdom.

Mon Jul 18

Clock-face scheduling is a timetable system under which public transport services run at consistent intervals, as opposed to a timetable that is purely driven by demand and has irregular headways.

Sun Jul 17

Epanalepsis is the repetition of the initial part of a clause or sentence at the end of that same clause or sentence: “The king is dead; long live the king!”
Antimetabole is the repetition of words in successive clauses, but in transposed order; for example, “I know what I like, and I like what I know”. It is related to, and sometimes considered a special case of, chiasmus.
Chiasmus or, less commonly, chiasm, is a “reversal of grammatical structures in successive phrases or clauses – but no repetition of words”: Despised, if ugly; if she’s fair, betrayed.
Symploce is a figure of speech in which a word or phrase is used successively at the beginning of two or more clauses or sentences and another word or phrase with a similar wording is used successively at the end of them. It is the combination of anaphora and epistrophe.
- “When there is talk of hatred, let us stand up and talk against it. When there is talk of violence, let us stand up and talk against it.”
Epistrophe is the repetition of the same word or words at the end of successive phrases, clauses or sentences.
Anaphora is a rhetorical device that consists of repeating a sequence of words at the beginnings of neighboring clauses, thereby lending them emphasis.
Anadiplosis is the repetition of the last word of a preceding clause. The word is used at the end of a sentence and then used again at the beginning of the next sentence.

Sat Jul 16

Mehran Karimi Nasseri also known as Sir Alfred Mehran, is an Iranian refugee who lived in the departure lounge of Terminal One in Charles de Gaulle Airport from 26 August 1988 until July 2006, when he was hospitalized.

Fri Jul 15

Bricks have different names based on the orientation they’re laid in
- Stretcher or stretching brick: A brick laid flat with its long narrow side exposed.
- Header or heading brick: A brick laid flat with its width exposed.
- Soldier: A brick laid vertically with its long narrow side exposed.
- Sailor: A brick laid vertically with the broad face of the brick exposed.
- Rowlock: A brick laid on the long narrow side with the short end of the brick exposed.
- Shiner or rowlock stretcher: A brick laid on the long narrow side with the broad face of the brick exposed.
The EICAR test file is a computer file that was developed by the European Institute for Computer Antivirus Research (EICAR) and Computer Antivirus Research Organization (CARO), to test the response of computer antivirus (AV) programs. Instead of using real malware, which could cause real damage, this test file allows people to test anti-virus software without having to use a real computer virus.

Thu Jul 14

Floating island is a dessert consisting of meringue floating on crème anglaise (a vanilla custard).
A larder is a cool area for storing food prior to use. Originally, it was where raw meat was larded—covered in fat—to be preserved.

Wed Jul 13

Horizontal blanking interval refers to a part of the process of displaying images on a computer monitor or television screen via raster scanning. CRT screens display images by moving beams of electrons very quickly across the screen. Once the beam of the monitor has reached the edge of the screen, the beam is switched off, and the deflection circuit voltages (or currents) are returned to the values they had for the other edge of the screen; this would have the effect of retracing the screen in the opposite direction, so the beam is turned off during this time. This part of the line display process is the Horizontal Blank. In detail, the Horizontal blanking interval consists of:
- front porch – blank while still moving right, past the end of the scanline,
- sync pulse – blank while rapidly moving left; in terms of amplitude, “blacker than black”.
- back porch – blank while moving right again, before the start of the next scanline. Colorburst occurs during the back porch, and unblanking happens at the end of the back porch.
EIA-608, also known as “line 21 captions” and “CEA-608”, was once the standard for closed captioning for NTSC TV broadcasts in the United States, Canada and Mexico. It also specifies an “Extended Data Service”, which is a means for including a VCR control service with an electronic program guide for NTSC transmissions that operates on the even line 21 field, similar to the TeleText based VPS that operates on line 16 which is used in PAL countries.
CTA-708 is the standard for closed captioning for ATSC digital television (DTV) streams in the United States and Canada. It was developed by the Consumer Electronics sector of the Electronic Industries Alliance, which is now a standalone organization Consumer Technology Association.

Tue Jul 12

List of dumplings
- Including calzone, eclair, garlic knot, and Hot Pocket
List of rolled foods
- Including Fruit by the Foot, Tootsie Roll

Mon Jul 11

Literate programming is a programming paradigm introduced by Donald Knuth in which a computer program is given an explanation of its logic in a natural language, such as English, interspersed (embedded) with snippets of macros and traditional source code, from which compilable source code can be generated

Sun Jul 10

Christine Collins was an American woman who made national headlines during the late 1920s and 1930s after her nine-year-old son, Walter Collins, went missing in 1928. Five months after Walter’s disappearance, a boy claiming to be Walter was found in DeKalb, Illinois. At the reunion, Collins said that the boy was not Walter. Under pressure to resolve the case, the officer in charge, Captain J.J. Jones, convinced her to “try the boy out” by taking him home. She returned three weeks later, again saying that he was not her son. The police had Collins committed to the psychiatric ward at Los Angeles County Hospital under a “Code 12” internment – a term used to jail or commit someone who was deemed difficult or an inconvenience.

Sat Jul 9

Buck v Bell is a decision of the United States Supreme Court, in which the Court ruled that a state statute permitting compulsory sterilization of the unfit, including the intellectually disabled, “for the protection and health of the state” did not violate the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution. Despite the changing attitudes in the coming decades regarding sterilization, the Supreme Court has never expressly overturned Buck v. Bell.
Eugenics in the United States
Sterilization law in the United States
Compulsory sterilization
- Compulsory sterilization of disabled people in the U.S. prison system

Fri Jul 8

ABC Notation is a shorthand form of musical notation for computers. In basic form it uses the letter notation with a–g, A–G, and z, to represent the corresponding notes and rests, with other elements used to place added value on these – sharp, flat, raised or lowered octave, the note length, key, and ornamentation.
fast (v.):
- “abstain from food,” Old English fæstan “to fast” (as a religious duty), also “to make firm; establish, confirm, pledge,” from Proto-Germanic *fastanan “to hold, guard,” extended to the religious act “observe abstinence” (source also of Old Frisian festia, Old High German fasten, German fasten, Old Norse fasta “abstain from food”), from the same root as fast (adj.). The original meaning in prehistoric Germanic was “hold firmly,” and the sense evolved via “have firm control of oneself,” to “hold oneself to observance” (compare Gothic fastan “to keep, observe,” also “to fast”). Perhaps the Germanic sense shifted through use of the native words to translate Medieval Latin observare in its sense “to fast,” or it might have been a loan-translation of a Greek expression brought to the Goths by Arian missionaries and spread from them to other Germanic peoples. The verb in the sense “to make fast” continued in Middle English, but was superseded by fasten.

Thu Jul 7

Wed Jul 6

Ekistics is the science of human settlements including regional, city, community planning and dwelling design.

Tue Jul 5

A Pittsburgh toilet is a common fixture in pre-World War II houses built in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States and the surrounding region. It consists of an ordinary flush toilet installed in the basement, with no surrounding walls. Most of these toilets are paired with a crude basement shower apparatus and large sink, which often doubles as a laundry basin.

Mon Jul 4

House numbering

Sun Jul 3

Wardriving is the act of searching for Wi-Fi wireless networks, usually from a moving vehicle, using a laptop or smartphone. Software for wardriving is freely available on the internet.

Sat Jul 2

Seasteading is the concept of creating permanent dwellings at sea, called seasteads, in international waters outside the territory claimed by any government. No one has yet created a structure on the high seas that has been recognized as a sovereign state. Proposed structures have included modified cruise ships, refitted oil platforms, and custom-built floating islands.

Fri Jul 1

Tribeca - triangle below Canal Street

June 2022

Thu Jun 30

The Yankees have maintained a strict appearance policy, specifying that players’ hair must not touch their collars and that they may have mustaches but no other facial hair.

Wed Jun 29

Wendy Carlos is an American musician and composer best known for her electronic music and film scores. Studying and working with various electronic musicians and technicians at the city’s Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center, she helped in the development of the Moog synthesizer, the first commercially available keyboard instrument created by Robert Moog. In 1979, Carlos raised public awareness of transgender issues by disclosing she had been living as a woman since at least 1968, and in 1972 had undergone sex reassignment surgery.
Delia Derbyshire was an English musician and composer of electronic music. She carried out pioneering work with the BBC Radiophonic Workshop during the 1960s, including her electronic arrangement of the theme music to the British science-fiction television series Doctor Who. She has been referred to as “the unsung heroine of British electronic music”, having influenced musicians including Aphex Twin, the Chemical Brothers and Paul Hartnoll of Orbital.
White Noise is an English experimental electronic music band formed in London in 1968, after American-born David Vorhaus, a classical bass player with a background in physics and electronic engineering, attended a lecture by Delia Derbyshire, a sound scientist at the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. Derbyshire and Brian Hodgson, then both former members of electronic music project Unit Delta Plus, joined Vorhaus to form the band.

Tue Jun 28

Louver is a window blind or shutter with horizontal slats that are angled to admit light and air, but to keep out rain and direct sunshine. The angle of the slats may be adjustable, usually in blinds and windows, or fixed.

Mon Jun 27

Provinces of Ireland
- Counties of Ireland
Irish language in Newfoundland
ISO 3166-2 is part of the ISO 3166 standard published by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), and defines codes for identifying the principal subdivisions (e.g., provinces or states) of all countries coded in ISO 3166-1.
Alternative names for Northern Ireland

Sun Jun 26

Diapering is any of a wide range of decorative patterns used in a variety of works of art, such as stained glass, heraldic shields, architecture, and silverwork. Its chief use is in the enlivening of plain surfaces.
Histrionics is not etymologically related to hysterical

Sat Jun 25

A union station is a railway station at which the tracks and facilities are shared by two or more separate railway companies, allowing passengers to connect conveniently between them. The term ‘union station’ is used in North America and ‘joint station’ is used in Europe.

Fri Jun 24

To prescribe means to recommend something in an official way. Proscribe is a rare and more formal word, meaning to forbid something or to demand a stop to it.

Thu Jun 23

Cold welding is a solid-state welding process in which joining takes place without fusion or heating at the interface of the two parts to be welded. Unlike in fusion welding, no liquid or molten phase is present in the joint.
A Boston marriage was, historically, the cohabitation of two wealthy women, independent of financial support from a man. The term is said to have been in use in New England in the late 19th/early 20th century. Some of these relationships were romantic in nature and might now be considered a lesbian relationship; others were not.

Wed Jun 22

Pepper is a secret added to an input such as a password during hashing with a cryptographic hash function. This value differs from a salt in that it is not stored alongside a password hash, but rather the pepper is kept separate in some other medium, such as a Hardware Security Module

Tue Jun 21

Rice’s theorem states that all non-trivial semantic properties of programs are undecidable. A semantic property is one about the program’s behavior (for instance, does the program terminate for all inputs), unlike a syntactic property (for instance, does the program contain an if-then-else statement). A property is non-trivial if it is neither true for every partial computable function, nor false for every partial computable function.
Idiosyncrasy credit is a concept in social psychology that describes an individual’s capacity to acceptably deviate from group expectations. Idiosyncrasy credits are increased (earned) each time an individual conforms to a group’s expectations, and decreased (spent) each time an individual deviates from a group’s expectations.

Mon Jun 20

Tohu va Vohu is a Biblical Hebrew phrase found in the Genesis creation narrative (Genesis 1:2) that describes the condition of the earth (‘éretz) immediately before the creation of light in Genesis 1:3. Numerous interpretations of this phrase are made by various theological sources. The King James Version translation of the phrase is “without form, and void”, corresponding to Septuagint ἀόρατος καὶ ἀκατασκεύαστος, “unseen and unformed”.
Abzu is the name for fresh water from underground aquifers which was given a religious fertilising quality in Sumerian and Akkadian mythology. Lakes, springs, rivers, wells, and other sources of fresh water were thought to draw their water from the abzu. In Sumerian and Akkadian mythology, it is referred to as the primeval sea below the void space of the underworld (Kur) and the earth (Ma) above.
- Cosmic ocean is a mythological motif found in the mythology of many cultures and civilizations, representing the world or cosmos as enveloped by primordial waters.
Tehom was the mythological cosmic ocean of Biblical cosmology, covering the Earth until God created the firmament to divide it into upper and lower portions and reveal the dry land; the world has been protected from the cosmic ocean ever since by the solid dome of the firmament.
Hundun is both a “legendary faceless being” in Chinese mythology and the “primordial and central chaos” in Chinese cosmogony, comparable with the world egg.

Sun Jun 19

Sat Jun 18

Flash of unstyled content is an instance where a web page appears briefly with the browser’s default styles prior to loading an external CSS stylesheet, due to the web browser engine rendering the page before all information is retrieved. The page corrects itself as soon as the style rules are loaded and applied; however, the shift may be distracting. Related problems include flash of invisible text and flash of faux text.
List of games Buddha would not play is a list of games that Gautama Buddha is reputed to have said that he would not play and that his disciples should likewise not play, because he believed them to be a ‘cause for negligence’.

Fri Jun 17

Crypto-Judaism is the secret adherence to Judaism while publicly professing to be of another faith; practitioners are referred to as “crypto-Jews”

Thu Jun 16

A proscenium is the metaphorical vertical plane of space in a theatre, usually surrounded on the top and sides by a physical proscenium arch (whether or not truly “arched”) and on the bottom by the stage floor itself, which serves as the frame into which the audience observes from a more or less unified angle the events taking place upon the stage during a theatrical performance.
A theater in the round is a space for theatre in which the audience surrounds the stage.
A thrust stage is one that extends into the audience on three sides and is connected to the backstage area by its upstage end.

Wed Jun 15

Schnauzer comes from the German word for “snout” and means colloquially “moustache”, or “whiskered snout”, because of the dog’s distinctively bearded snout

Tue Jun 14

Lord Voldemort’s name was reworked in other languages to still make sense as an acronym

Mon Jun 13

A null-subject language is a language whose grammar permits an independent clause to lack an explicit subject; such a clause is then said to have a null subject.
Home sign is a gestural communication system, often invented spontaneously by a deaf child who lacks accessible linguistic input. Home sign systems often arise in families where a deaf child is raised by hearing parents and is isolated from the Deaf community. Because the deaf child does not receive signed or spoken language input, these children are referred to as linguistically isolated.
Nicaraguan sign language is a sign language that was developed, largely spontaneously, by deaf children in a number of schools in Nicaragua in the 1980s. It is of particular interest to the linguists who study it because it offers a unique opportunity to study what they believe to be the birth of a new language.
Simultaneous communication is a technique sometimes used by deaf, hard-of-hearing or hearing sign language users in which both a spoken language and a manual variant of that language (such as English and manually coded English) are used simultaneously.

Sun Jun 12

The Inverted Jenny is a 24 cent United States postage stamp first issued on May 10, 1918, in which the image of the Curtiss JN-4 airplane in the center of the design is printed upside-down; it is probably the most famous error in American philately. Only one pane of 100 of the invert stamps was ever found, making this error one of the most prized in philately.
- Philately is the study of postage stamps and postal history.
A stamp hinge is a small, folded, transparent, rectangular pieces of paper coated with a mild gum. They are used by stamp collectors to affix postage stamps onto the pages of a stamp album.

Sat Jun 11

Toki Pona is a philosophical artistic constructed language (philosophical artlang) known for its small vocabulary, simplicity, and ease of acquisition. It was created by Sonja Lang, a Canadian linguist and translator, to simplify thoughts and communication.

Fri Jun 10

An autostereogram is a single-image stereogram (SIS), designed to create the visual illusion of a three-dimensional (3D) scene from a two-dimensional image.

Thu Jun 9

Scholia are grammatical, critical, or explanatory comments – original or copied from prior commentaries – which are inserted in the margin of the manuscript of ancient authors, as glosses.
A gloss is a brief notation, especially a marginal one or an interlinear one, of the meaning of a word or wording in a text. It may be in the language of the text or in the reader’s language if that is different.
- Glossator - scholars of the 11th- and 12th-century legal schools in Italy, France and Germany

Wed Jun 8

Scorched rice is a thin crust of slightly browned rice at the bottom of the cooking pot. It is produced during the cooking of rice over direct heat from a flame.

Tue Jun 7

Grimm’s law is a set of sound laws describing the Proto-Indo-European (PIE) stop consonants as they developed in Proto-Germanic in the 1st millennium BC.
- It’s named after one of the Brothers Grimm.

Mon Jun 6

The Laser Kiwi flag was created by Lucy Gray in 2015 as a proposed flag of New Zealand. During the 2015–2016 New Zealand flag referendums, the Laser Kiwi flag became a large social media phenomenon, and was used in comedy routines by comedians, such as John Oliver, discussing the flag referendum and New Zealand in general. The flag features a New Zealand fern and a kiwi shooting a green laser beam from its eyes. The description of the flag was that “the laser beam projects a powerful image of New Zealand. I believe my design is so powerful it does not need to be discussed.”

Sun Jun 5

Morganatic marriage, sometimes called a left-handed marriage, is a marriage between people of unequal social rank, which in the context of royalty or other inherited title prevents the principal’s position or privileges being passed to the spouse, or any children born of the marriage.

Sat Jun 4

Zealand is the largest and most populous island in Denmark proper (thus excluding Greenland and Disko Island, which are larger in size
Zeeland is the westernmost and least populous province of the Netherlands. The country of New Zealand was named after Zeeland after it was sighted by Dutch explorer Abel Tasman.

Fri Jun 3

The Maple syrup event was the presence of a particular scent in New York City in the late 2000s, and the response to this smell by the residents, various media outlets, and government agencies.

Thu Jun 2

TEMPEST is a U.S. National Security Agency specification and a NATO certification referring to spying on information systems through leaking emanations, including unintentional radio or electrical signals, sounds, and vibrations. TEMPEST covers both methods to spy upon others and how to shield equipment against such spying.

Wed Jun 1

East Asian age reckoning
- Many countries consider babies 1 “year old” when they are born, and their age increases on New Year’s Day or Lunar New Year. They also track the traditional “age” of years since day of birth
List of list of lists!
List of flags by design

May 2022

Tue May 31

In ancient Roman culture, infamia was a loss of legal or social standing. As a technical term of Roman law, infamia was an official exclusion from the legal protections enjoyed by a Roman citizen, as imposed by a censor or praetor. More generally, especially during the Republic and Principate, infamia was informal damage to one’s esteem or reputation. A person who suffered infamia was an infamis (plural infames).

Mon May 30

A Tyrolean traverse is a method of crossing through free space between two high points on a rope without a hanging cart or cart equivalent. This is used in a range of mountaineering activities: rock climbing, technical tree climbing, caving, water crossings and mountain rescue.

Sun May 29

Dunbar’s number is a suggested cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships—relationships in which an individual knows who each person is and how each person relates to every other person. By using the average human brain size and extrapolating from the results of primates, he proposed that humans can comfortably maintain 150 stable relationships.

Sat May 28

Amor fati is a Latin phrase that may be translated as “love of fate” or “love of one’s fate”. It is used to describe an attitude in which one sees everything that happens in one’s life, including suffering and loss, as good or, at the very least, necessary.

Fri May 27

A doublet two or more words in the same language are called doublets or etymological twins or twinlings (or possibly triplets, and so forth) when they have different phonological forms but the same etymological root
Reborrowing is the process where a word travels from one language to another and then back to the originating language in a different form or with a different meaning. This path is indicated by A→B→A, where A is the originating language, and can take many forms. A reborrowed word is sometimes called a Rückwanderer (German, a ‘returner’)
Garaigo is Japanese for “loan word”, and indicates a transcription into Japanese. In particular, the word usually refers to a Japanese word of foreign origin that was not borrowed in ancient times from Old or Middle Chinese (especially Literary Chinese), but in modern times, primarily from English, Portuguese, Dutch, and modern Chinese dialects, such as Standard Chinese and Cantonese
An inkhorn term is a loanword, or a word coined from existing roots, which is deemed to be unnecessary or overly pretentious
Aureation is a device in arts of rhetoric that involves the “gilding” (or supposed heightening) of diction in one language by the introduction of terms from another, typically a classical language considered to be more prestigious. Aureation commonly involves other mannered rhetorical features in diction; for example circumlocution, which bears a relation to more native literary devices such as the kenning.
Circumlocution is the use of an unnecessarily large number of words to express an idea. It is sometimes necessary in communication (for example, to work around lexical gaps that might otherwise lead to untranslatability), but it can also be undesirable (when an uncommon or easily misunderstood figure of speech is used)
Language contact occurs when speakers of two or more languages or varieties interact and influence each other. The common products include pidgins, creoles, code-switching, and mixed languages. In many other cases, contact between speakers occurs but the lasting effects on the language are less visible; they may, however, include loan words, calques or other types of borrowed material.
A wanderwort is a word that has spread as a loanword among numerous languages and cultures, especially those that are far away from one another, usually in connection with trade.

Thu May 26

A trattoria is an Italian-style eating establishment that is generally much less formal than a ristorante, but more formal than an osteria.
- An osteria in Italy was originally a place serving wine and simple food. Lately, the emphasis has shifted to the food, but menus tend to be short, with the emphasis on local specialities such as pasta and grilled meat or fish, often served at shared tables.
- An enoteca serves no food; they were just a place to go and drink wine.

Wed May 25

There are cryptosystems that are based on the complexity of the knapsack problem

Tue May 24

Armenian orthography reform occurred between 1922 and 1924 in Soviet Armenia and was partially reviewed in 1940. Its main features were neutralization of classical etymological writing and the adjustment of phonetic realization and writing.
Armenian alphabet
Armenian Braille
- International uniformity of brailler alphabets: the goal of braille uniformity is to unify the braille alphabets of the world as much as possible, so that literacy in one braille alphabet readily transfers to another
- Braille pattern dots-6

Mon May 23

Soap operas are called soap operas because they used to be sponsored by soap companies
Horse operas is a Western movie or television series that is clichéd or formulaic, in the manner of a soap opera

Sun May 22

A slug is a common name for any apparently shell-less terrestrial gastropod mollusc. The word slug is also often used as part of the common name of any gastropod mollusc that has no shell, a very reduced shell, or only a small internal shell, particularly sea slugs and semislugs (this is in contrast to the common name snail, which applies to gastropods that have a coiled shell large enough that they can fully retract their soft parts into it).
- SOME SLUGS HAVE INTERNAL SHELLS

Sat May 21

A mezuzah is a piece of parchment, known as a klaf, contained in a decorative case and inscribed with specific Hebrew verses from the Torah. These verses consist of the Jewish prayer Shema Yisrael, beginning with the phrase: “Hear, O Israel, the Lord (is) our God, the Lord is One”. In mainstream Rabbinic Judaism, a mezuzah is affixed to the doorpost of Jewish homes to fulfill the mitzvah (Biblical commandment) to “write the words of God on the gates and doorposts of your house” (Deuteronomy 6:9).
- …Rabbenu Tam, felt that mezuzot should be affixed horizontally for the sake of tradition, because the scrolls in their leather cases were originally pushed horizontally into the crevices between the stones around the doorways of homes. Rashi argued that mezuzot should be affixed vertically, in such a way that the top pointed toward the Almighty. They eventually compromised, and agreed that a mezuzah should be hung on the diagonal, with its top inclined toward the inside.

Fri May 20

Lab lit is a loosely defined genre of fiction, distinct from science fiction, that centers on realistic portrayals of scientists and on science as a profession
Mundane science fiction is a niche literary movement within science fiction that developed in the early 2000s, characterized by its setting on Earth or within the Solar System; a lack of interstellar travel, intergalactic travel or human contact with extraterrestrials; and a believable use of technology and science as it exists at the time the story is written or a plausible extension of existing technology.
Hard science fiction is a category of science fiction characterized by concern for scientific accuracy and logic.

Thu May 19

Bus factor is a measurement of the risk resulting from information and capabilities not being shared among team members, derived from the phrase “in case they get hit by a bus”. It is also known as the bus problem, lottery factor, truck factor, bus/truck number, or lorry factor.

Wed May 18

TikZ is an acronym for “TikZ ist kein Zeichenprogramm” (TikZ is not a drawing program)

Tue May 17

Calentao is a Paisa and Antioquia, Colombian cuisine dish made from reheated leftovers including rice, egg, pasta, beans, potatoes and other foods such as arepa, chorizo, and ground beef. It is generally eaten for breakfast and is often accompanied by aguapanela, arepa, coffee, juice or hot chocolate.

Mon May 16

Flyting is a contest consisting of the exchange of insults between two parties, often conducted in verse.

Sun May 15

Bicycle culture
- Alleycat race is an unsanctioned bicycle race. Alley cats almost always take place in cities, and are often organized by bicycle messengers. The informality of the organization is matched by the emphasis on taking part, rather than simple competition. For instance, many alleycats present prizes for the last competitor to finish (sometimes known as Dead Fucking Last or DFL)
- A spoke card is a card placed in the spokes of a bicycle wheel. They lie parallel to the entire wheel. One origin of the spoke card was laminated cards inserted in spokes with numbers used to identify competitors in competitive races held by bicycle messengers, in official competitions and in unofficial alleycat races. Tarot cards with the racers number written on them were used initially, but nowadays cards are often custom printed.
- Cycle Messenger World Championship

Sat May 14

frob - To manipulate in some ill-defined way; to tweak or mess about with
Dazzle camouflage was a family of ship camouflage used extensively in World War I, and to a lesser extent in World War II and afterwards. Unlike other forms of camouflage, the intention of dazzle is not to conceal but to make it difficult to estimate a target’s range, speed, and heading.

Fri May 13

Van Eck phreaking is a form of eavesdropping in which special equipment is used to pick up side-band electromagnetic emissions from electronic devices that correlate to hidden signals or data to recreate these signals or data to spy on the electronic device. Side-band electromagnetic radiation emissions are present in (and with the proper equipment, can be captured from) keyboards, computer displays, printers, and other electronic devices.
A ewer is a kind of widemouthed pitcher or jug with a shape like a vase and a handle.

Thu May 12

Free range parenting is the concept of raising children in the spirit of encouraging them to function independently and with limited parental supervision, in accordance of their age of development and with a reasonable acceptance of realistic personal risks.
- Children’s street culture refers to the cumulative culture created by young children
- Childhood secret club
A woonerf is a living street, as originally implemented in the Netherlands and in Flanders (Belgium). Techniques include shared space, traffic calming, and low speed limits.

Wed May 11

In ancient Rome, an itinerarium was a travel guide in the form of a listing of cities, villages (vici) and other stops on the way, including the distances between each stop and the next

Tue May 10

Eigenface is the name given to a set of eigenvectors when used in the computer vision problem of human face recognition.

Mon May 9

Sui generis is a Latin phrase that means “of its/his/her/their own kind”, “in a class by itself”, therefore “unique”

Sun May 8

Hipster PDA is a paper-based personal organizer. Originally a tongue-in-cheek reaction to the increasing expense and complexity of personal digital assistants (PDA), the Hipster PDA (said to stand for “Parietal Disgorgement Aid” and often abbreviated to “hPDA”) simply comprises a sheaf of index cards held together with a binder clip.
Mung is computer jargon for a series of potentially destructive or irrevocable changes to a piece of data or a file. It is sometimes used for vague data transformation steps that are not yet clear to the speaker. Common munging operations include removing punctuation or HTML tags, data parsing, filtering, and transformation.
The pomodoro technique is named after the tomato kitchen timer the inventor initially used

Sat May 7

Snatiation is a term coined to refer to the a medical condition originally termed “stomach sneeze reflex”, which is characterized by uncontrollable bursts of sneezing brought on by fullness of the stomach, typically immediately after a large meal.
Response to sneezing

Fri May 6

The Sonnenberg Tunnel in Lucerne was at its completion, the world’s largest civilian nuclear fallout shelter, designed to protect 20,000 civilians in the eventuality of war or disaster.

Thu May 5

A palimpsest is a manuscript page, either from a scroll or a book, from which the text has been scraped or washed off so that the page can be reused for another document.

Wed May 4

The chokeslam may have been invented by Abraham Lincoln:
- The chokeslam was innovated by Paul Heyman for use by the wrestler 911, though one of the earliest accounts of the move dates back to a 19th-century recounting that describes Abraham Lincoln (himself a wrestler in his youth) using a technique very similar in description.

Tue May 3

An Engineer’s ring is a ring worn by members of the United States Order of the Engineer, a fellowship of engineers who must be a certified Professional Engineer or graduated from an accredited engineering program (or be within one academic year of graduation to participate). The ring is usually a stainless steel band worn on the little finger of the dominant hand. This is so that it makes contact with all work done by the engineer. Rings used to be cast in iron in the most unattractive and simple form to show the nature of work. The ring is symbolic of the oath taken by the wearer, and symbolizes the unity of the profession in its goal of benefitting mankind. The stainless steel from which the ring is made depicts the strength of the profession.
The Iron Ring is a ring worn by many Canadian-trained engineers, as a symbol and reminder of the obligations and ethics associated with their profession.

Mon May 2

List of colossal sculptures in situ: A colossal statue is one that is more than twice life-size.[1] This is a list of colossal statues and other sculptures that were created, mostly or all carved, and remain in situ. This list includes two colossal stones that were intended to be moved. However, they were never broken free of the quarry in which they were carved, and therefore they would be considered carved in situ. Most of these were carved in ancient times.

Sun May 1

8-N-1 is a common shorthand notation for a serial port parameter setting or configuration in asynchronous mode, in which there is one start bit, eight (8) data bits, no (N) parity bit, and one (1) stop bit. As such, 8-N-1 is the most common configuration for PC serial communications today.

April 2022

Sat Apr 30

There are 51 discontinued flavors of Girl Scout Cookies

Fri Apr 29

The Free Speech Flag is a symbol of personal liberty used to promote freedom of speech. Designed by artist John Marcotte, the flag and its colors correspond to a cryptographic key which enabled users to copy HD DVDs and Blu-ray Discs. It was created on May 1, 2007, during the AACS encryption key controversy.

Thu Apr 28

A serious game is a game designed for a primary purpose other than pure entertainment. The “serious” adjective is generally prepended to refer to video games used by industries like defense, education, scientific exploration, health care, emergency management, city planning, engineering, and politics.

Wed Apr 27

Buffer state is a country lying between two rival or potentially hostile great powers. Its existence can sometimes be thought to prevent conflict between them. A buffer state is sometimes a mutually agreed upon area lying between two greater powers, which is demilitarized in the sense of not hosting the military of either power (though it will usually have its own military forces). The invasion of a buffer state by one of the powers surrounding it will often result in war between the powers.

Tue Apr 26

List of unusual deaths

Mon Apr 25

Combination Utensils
- Chopfork – A utensil with a fork at one end and chopsticks/tongs at the other
- Chork – Pointed and slightly curved tongs, which can be used like chopsticks (as pincers) or as a fork (for spearing). A different kind of chork is a fork with a split handle, which can be broken in half to make two chopsticks
- Forkchops – Used in a pair, these are basically a pair of chopsticks with a small fork and knife on the non-pointed ends
- Knork – A knife with a single tine, sharpened or serrated, set into the anterior end of the blade. (from knife and fork)
- Pastry fork – A fork with a cutting edge along one of the tines
- Spoon straw – A scoop-ended drinking straw intended for slushies and milkshakes
- Sporf – A utensil consisting of a spoon on one end, a fork on the other, and edge tines that are sharpened or serrated
- Spork – Spoon and fork
- Splayd – Spoon and fork and knife
- Spife – Spoon and knife

Sun Apr 24

Ben Barres was an American neurobiologist at Stanford University. His research focused on the interaction between neurons and glial cells in the nervous system. Beginning in 2008, he was chair of the Neurobiology Department at Stanford University School of Medicine. He transitioned to male in 1997, and became the first openly transgender scientist in the National Academy of Sciences in 2013.

Sat Apr 23

UK stores must provide a battery recycling collection if they sell more than 32kg of batteries a year

Fri Apr 22

Travelling gnome
- Gnoming as theft: There have also been a number of criminal incidents in which individuals or groups steal large numbers of garden gnomes without the intention of returning, often with the purported mission of “freeing” gnomes and “returning them to the wild”. These crimes can cause distress to the victims of the theft, particularly if the gnomes have sentimental value.
Baby Jesus theft is the theft of plastic or ceramic figurines of the infant Jesus from outdoor public and private nativity displays during the Christmas season. It is an “enduring (and illegal) practice” according to New York Times journalist Katie Rogers, “believed to be part of a yearly tradition, often carried out by bored teenagers looking for an easy prank.” The prevalence of such thefts has caused the owners of outdoor manger scenes to protect their property with GPS devices, surveillance cameras, or by other mean.

Thu Apr 21

Many recent Thai restaurants have been funded by the Thai government as part of culinary diplomacy

Wed Apr 20

The Crypto Wars is an unofficial name for the attempts of the United States (US) and allied governments to limit the public’s and foreign nations’ access to cryptography strong enough to thwart decryption by national intelligence agencies, especially the National Security Agency (NSA).

Tue Apr 19

Mozart wrote two songs about licking asses:
- Leck mich im Arsch
- Leck mir den Arsch fein recht schön sauber

Mon Apr 18

The Gävle Goat is a traditional Christmas display erected annually at Slottstorget in central Gävle, Sweden. It is a giant version of a traditional Swedish Yule Goat figure made of straw. It is erected each year by local community groups at the beginning of Advent over a period of two days. It has been the subject of repeated arson attacks, and, despite security measures and a nearby fire station, the goat has been burned to the ground most years since its first appearance in 1966. As of December 2021, 38 out of 56 goats have been destroyed or damaged in some way. Burning or destroying the goat in some way is illegal, and the Svea Court of Appeal has stated that the offence should normally carry a 3-month prison sentence; in 2018, it sentenced a 27-year-old man to a suspended sentence and day fines for aggravated property damage for burning the goat.

Sun Apr 17

The oft-quoted line “Do you think God stays in heaven because he too lives in fear of what he has created?” was first written for Spy Kids 2: The Island Of Lost Dreams.

Sat Apr 16

Well-known URIs a Uniform Resource Identifier for a URL path prefixes that start with .well-known. They are implemented in webservers so that requests to the servers for well-known services or information are available at URLs consistent well-known locations across servers.

Fri Apr 15

The Underhanded C Contest is a programming contest to turn out code that is malicious, but passes a rigorous inspection, and looks like an honest mistake even if discovered. The contest rules define a task, and a malicious component. Entries must perform the task in a malicious manner as defined by the contest, and hide the malice. Contestants are allowed to use C-like compiled languages to make their programs.

Thu Apr 14

Sprezzatura is an Italian word that first appears in Baldassare Castiglione’s 1528 The Book of the Courtier, where it is defined by the author as “a certain nonchalance, so as to conceal all art and make whatever one does or says appear to be without effort and almost without any thought about it”. It is the ability of the courtier to display “an easy facility in accomplishing difficult actions which hides the conscious effort that went into them”. Sprezzatura has also been described “as a form of defensive irony: the ability to disguise what one really desires, feels, thinks, and means or intends behind a mask of apparent reticence and nonchalance”.

Wed Apr 13

A beetle bank in agriculture and horticulture, is a form of biological pest control. It is a strip, preferably raised, planted with grasses (bunch grasses) and/or perennial plants, within a crop field or a garden, that fosters and provides habitat for beneficial insects, birds, and other fauna that prey on pests.
An insect hotel, also known as a bug hotel or insect house, is a manmade structure created to provide shelter for insects. They can come in a variety of shapes and sizes depending on the specific purpose or specific insect it is catered to. Most consist of several different sections that provide insects with nesting facilities – particularly during winter, offering shelter or refuge for many types of insects. Their purposes include hosting pollinators.

Tue Apr 12

Noble cause corruption is corruption caused by the adherence to a teleological ethical system, suggesting that people will use unethical or illegal means to attain desirable goals, a result which appears to benefit the greater good. Where traditional corruption is defined by personal gain, noble cause corruption forms when someone is convinced of their righteousness, and will do anything within their powers to achieve the desired result. An example of noble cause corruption is police misconduct “committed in the name of good ends” or neglect of due process through “a moral commitment to make the world a safer place to live.”.

Mon Apr 11

The first account of genital reassignment surgery was written in the first century BCE, describing a person who lived in the second century BCE. Here’s what we know about Callon of Epidaurus, as recorded by Diodorus Siculus.
- Source

Sun Apr 10

Doctor’s sausage is a popular variety of boiled sausage in Russia and the former Soviet republics, corresponding to GOST standard 23670-79, a sort of low-fat bologna. In accordance with the legislation of the Eurasian Economic Union, no meat products may be released using names that are similar to the names of meat products established by interstate (regional) standards, with the exception of meat products manufactured according to these standards. In the technical regulations, as an example of such a name, “Doctor’s sausage” (along with some others) is given.

Sat Apr 9

A lunchtime attack is a variant of the chosen-ciphertext attack, in which an attacker may make adaptive chosen-ciphertext queries but only up until a certain point, after which the attacker must demonstrate some improved ability to attack the system. The term “lunchtime attack” refers to the idea that a user’s computer, with the ability to decrypt, is available to an attacker while the user is out to lunch. This form of the attack was the first one commonly discussed: obviously, if the attacker has the ability to make adaptive chosen ciphertext queries, no encrypted message would be safe, at least until that ability is taken away.

Fri Apr 8

Bedtime procrastination is a psychological phenomenon in which people stay up later than they desire in an attempt to have control over the night because they perceive themselves (perhaps subconsciously) to lack influence over events during the day.
- This article personally attacked me

Thu Apr 7

Bilingual tautological expressions is a phrase that combines words that mean the same thing in two different languages, for example:
- River Avon, literally “River River”, from Welsh
- the Sahara Desert, literally “the The Desert Desert”, from Arabic.
- the La Brea Tar Pits, literally “the The Tar Tar Pits”, from Spanish.
- the hoi polloi, literally “the the many”, from Greek.

Wed Apr 6

Extreme ironing is an extreme sport in which people take ironing boards to remote locations and iron items of clothing. According to the Extreme Ironing Bureau, extreme ironing is “the latest danger sport that combines the thrills of an extreme outdoor activity with the satisfaction of a well-pressed shirt.”

Tue Apr 5

Thomas Midgely Jr. was called a “one-man environmental disaster”, having contributed to the discovery of Freon and leaded gasoline.

Mon Apr 4

Conscientious objection to military taxation is a legal theory that attempts to extend into the realm of taxation the concessions to conscientious objectors that many governments allow in the case of conscription, thereby allowing conscientious objectors to insist that their tax payments not be spent for military purposes.

Sun Apr 3

Redfoo and SkyBlu of LMFAO are uncle and nephew

Sat Apr 2

The Julian day is the continuous count of days since the beginning of the Julian period, and is used primarily by astronomers, and in software for easily calculating elapsed days between two events (e.g. food production date and sell by date).

Fri Apr 1

Newspaper formats
- A tabloid is a newspaper with a compact page size smaller than broadsheet. There is no standard size for this newspaper format.
- A broadsheet is the largest newspaper format and is characterized by long vertical pages, typically of 22.5 inches (57 cm).
- Berliner, or “midi”, is a newspaper format with pages normally measuring about 315 by 470 millimetres (12.4 in × 18.5 in). The Berliner format is slightly taller and marginally wider than the tabloid/compact format; and is both narrower and shorter than the broadsheet format.

March 2022

Thu Mar 31

George Boole was mostly self-taught and had no more than a primary school education

Wed Mar 30

An autopen is a device used for the automatic signing of a signature or autograph. Many celebrities, politicians and public figures receive hundreds of letters a day, many of which request a personal reply; this leads to a situation in which either the individual must artificially reproduce their signature or heavily limit the number of recipients who receive a personal response.
The royal sign-manual is the signature of the sovereign, by the affixing of which the monarch expresses his or her pleasure either by order, commission, or warrant. A sign-manual warrant may be either an executive act (for example, an appointment to an office), or an authority for affixing the Great Seal of the pertinent realm.

Tue Mar 29

Worse is better is a term conceived by Richard P. Gabriel in an essay of the same name to describe the dynamics of software acceptance. It refers to the argument that software quality does not necessarily increase with functionality: that there is a point where less functionality (“worse”) is a preferable option (“better”) in terms of practicality and usability. Software that is limited, but simple to use, may be more appealing to the user and market than the reverse.
The UNIX-HATERS Handbook is a semi-humorous edited compilation of messages to the UNIX-HATERS mailing list. The book concerns the frustrations of users of the Unix operating system. Many users had come from systems that they felt were far more sophisticated in features and usability, and they were frustrated by the perceived “worse is better” design philosophy that they felt Unix and much of its software encapsulated.

Mon Mar 28

Lake Vostok is the largest of Antarctica’s almost 400 known subglacial lakes. The overlying ice provides a continuous paleoclimatic record of 400,000 years, although the lake water itself may have been isolated for 15 to 25 million years. It is hypothesized that unusual forms of life could be found in the lake’s liquid layer, a fossil water reserve. Because Lake Vostok may contain an environment sealed off below the ice for millions of years, the conditions could resemble those of ice-covered oceans hypothesized to exist on Jupiter’s moon Europa, and Saturn’s moon Enceladus.

Sun Mar 27

Hawaii is the only U.S. state where no part of the state government performs DMV functions; it has completely delegated vehicle registration and driver licensing to local governments (i.e. the City and County of Honolulu; Hawai’i, Maui, and Kaua’i counties).

Sat Mar 26

The infinitely repeating digit in an infinite decimal is called the repetend

Fri Mar 25

The warp and woof are the two basic components used in weaving to turn thread or yarn into fabric. The lengthwise or longitudinal warp yarns are held stationary in tension on a frame or loom while the transverse woof is drawn through and inserted over and under the warp.
Ada Lovelace’s mother was also a mathematician

Thu Mar 24

Kremlinology is the study and analysis of the politics and policies of the Soviet Union while Sovietology is the study of politics and policies of both the Soviet Union and former communist states more generally. These two terms were synonymous until the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

Wed Mar 23

Mud-puddling is a behaviour most conspicuous in butterflies, but occurs in other animals as well, mainly insects; they seek out nutrients in certain moist substances such as rotting plant matter, mud and carrion and they suck up the fluid. Where the conditions are suitable, conspicuous insects such as butterflies commonly form aggregations on wet soil, dung or carrion.From the fluids they obtain salts and amino acids that play various roles in their physiology, ethology and ecology.

Tue Mar 22

Beef on weck is a sandwich found primarily in Western New York State, particularly in the city of Buffalo. It is made with roast beef on a kummelweck roll, a roll that is topped with kosher salt and caraway seeds.

Mon Mar 21

Squaring the circle is a problem proposed by ancient geometers. It is the challenge of constructing a square with the same area as a given circle by using only a finite number of steps with compass and straightedge.
The Indiana Pi Bill is the popular name for bill #246 of the 1897 sitting of the Indiana General Assembly, one of the most notorious attempts to establish mathematical truth by legislative fiat. Despite its name, the main result claimed by the bill is a method to square the circle, although it does imply various incorrect values of the mathematical constant π, the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter. The bill, written by a physician who was an amateur mathematician, never became law due to the intervention of Professor C. A. Waldo of Purdue University, who happened to be present in the legislature on the day it went up for a vote.

Sun Mar 20

Candlepin bowling is a variation of bowling that is played primarily in the Canadian Maritime provinces and the New England region of the United States. It is played with a handheld-sized ball and tall, narrow pins that resemble candles, hence the name.
Duckpin bowling is a variation of the sport of bowling. Duckpin balls are 4+3⁄4 in (12 cm) to 5 in (12.7 cm) in diameter, weigh 3 lb 6 oz (1.5 kg) to 3 lb 12 oz (1.7 kg) each, and lack finger holes. Duckpins, though arranged in a triangle identical to that used in ten-pin bowling, are shorter, slightly thinner, and lighter than their ten-pin equivalents, which makes it more difficult for the smaller ball to achieve a strike.

Sat Mar 19

Akhfash’s goat is a Persian parable in which a philosopher trains his pet goat to nod its head when asked if it had understood a book that it was shown. The term “Akhfash’s goat” refers to a person who nods along with a conversation that they do not understand.

Fri Mar 18

The International Cocoa Quarantine Centre is an organization aiming to reduce the amount of disease affecting cocoa plants. Cocoa plants are quarantined in a 1,000-square-metre (11,000 sq ft) greenhouse before being transported across the globe. Quarantining cocoa plants is considered important because over 70% of the global cocoa supply originates from West Africa, and therefore the cocoa market is susceptible to any catastrophic effects that should occur in that region.

Thu Mar 17

A True Story is a long novella or short novel written in the second century AD by the Greek author Lucian of Samosata. The novel is a satire of outlandish tales that had been reported in ancient sources, particularly those that presented fantastic or mythical events as if they were true. It is Lucian’s best-known work. It is the earliest known work of fiction to include travel to outer space, alien lifeforms, and interplanetary warfare. It has been described as “the first known text that could be called science fiction”.

Wed Mar 16

Comparative illusions are certain comparative sentences which initially seem to be acceptable but upon closer reflection have no well-formed meaning. The typical example sentence used to typify this phenomenon is “More people have been to Russia than I have”.

Tue Mar 15

Larrikin is an Australian English term meaning “a mischievous young person, an uncultivated, rowdy but good hearted person”, or “a person who acts with apparent disregard for social or political conventions”.

Mon Mar 14

A half-track is a civilian or military vehicle with regular wheels at the front for steering and continuous tracks at the back to propel the vehicle and carry most of the load. The purpose of this combination is to produce a vehicle with the cross-country capabilities of a tank and the handling of a wheeled vehicle.

Sun Mar 13

Mains hum is a sound associated with alternating current which is twice the frequency of the mains electricity. The fundamental frequency of this sound is usually double that of fundamental 50/60 Hz, i.e. 100/120 Hz, depending on the local power-line frequency. The sound often has heavy harmonic content above 50/60 Hz.

Sat Mar 12

Metonymy is a figure of speech in which a thing or concept is referred to by the name of something closely associated with that thing or concept.

Fri Mar 11

Obscurantism describes the practice of deliberately presenting information in an imprecise, abstruse manner designed to limit further inquiry and understanding. There are two historical and intellectual denotations of obscurantism: (1) the deliberate restriction of knowledge—opposition to disseminating knowledge; and (2) deliberate obscurity—a recondite literary or artistic style, characterized by deliberate vagueness.

Thu Mar 10

Prisencolinensinainciusol is a song composed by the Italian singer Adriano Celentano, and performed by Celentano and his wife Claudia Mori, a singer/actress-turned-record producer. The song is intended to sound to its Italian audience as if it is sung in English spoken with an American accent, designed to be “Bob Dylan-esque”; however, the lyrics are deliberately unintelligible gibberish with the exception of the words “all right.

Wed Mar 9

Sharks are older than trees
- Trees as we familiarly know them today — a primary trunk, large height, crown of leaves or fronds — didn’t appear on the planet until the late Devonian period, some 360 million years ago. You might be surprised to learn that sharks are older than trees as they’ve been around for at least 400 million years.

Tue Mar 8

Tap, rack, bang is jargon for the response to a failure to fire in a firearm with a removable magazine. This is designated as an “Immediate Action” and involves no investigation of the cause (due to being under fire in a combat or defensive situation), but is effective for common failures, such as defective or improperly seated ammunition magazines.

Mon Mar 7

Cf an abbreviation for the Latin word confer, meaning “compare” or “consult”

Sun Mar 6

Literary nonsense is a broad categorization of literature that balances elements that make sense with some that do not, with the effect of subverting language conventions or logical reasoning.

Sat Mar 5

Ketchup does not have to be made from tomatoes
- Mushroom ketchup
- Banana ketchup

Fri Mar 4

List of geographic portmanteaus

Thu Mar 3

A garbled circuit is a cryptographic protocol that enables two-party secure computation in which two mistrusting parties can jointly evaluate a function over their private inputs without the presence of a trusted third party. In the garbled circuit protocol, the function has to be described as a Boolean circuit.

Wed Mar 2

Lewis Carroll was also a mathematician, and invented multiple ciphers

Tue Mar 1

Skilly was a weak broth that was made with oatmeal mixed with water.

February 2022

Mon Feb 28

A fantasy video game console is an emulator for a fictional video game console. In short, it aims to create the experience of retrogaming without the need to emulate a real console, allowing the developer to freely decide what specifications their fictional hardware will have.

Sun Feb 27

Integrated circuits
- An early attempt at combining several components in one device (like modern ICs) was the Loewe 3NF vacuum tube from the 1920s. Unlike ICs, it was designed with the purpose of tax avoidance, as in Germany, radio receivers had a tax that was levied depending on how many tube holders a radio receiver had. It allowed radio receivers to have a single tube holder.
Chip art
- Silicon zoo

Sat Feb 26

List of egg topics

Fri Feb 25

Eleemosynary - relating to or dependent on charity; charitable

Thu Feb 24

Larrikin is an Australian English term meaning “a mischievous young person, an uncultivated, rowdy but good hearted person”, or “a person who acts with apparent disregard for social or political convention”

Wed Feb 23

Mechanism is a form of natural philosophy which compares the universe to a large-scale mechanism

Tue Feb 22

Titivillus was a demon said to work on behalf of Belphegor, Lucifer or Satan to introduce errors into the work of scribes

Mon Feb 21

Penurious - extrememly poor, poverty stricken

Sun Feb 20

Michaelmas is a Christian festival observed in some Western liturgical calendars on 29 September. In some denominations a reference to a fourth angel, usually Uriel, is also added. Michaelmas has been one of the four quarter days of the financial, judicial, and academic year.

Sat Feb 19

Aldi Sued owns Aldi USA, and Aldi Nord owns Trader Joe’s
Aldi is a syllabic abbreviation for Albrecht (brothers who started it) Diskont

Fri Feb 18

Internecine - destructive to both sides in a conflict.
Ebullient - cheerful and full of energy

Thu Feb 17

Ibid means the citation is within the same work

Wed Feb 16

Skirmish etymology
- Middle English (as a verb): from Old French eskirmiss-, lengthened stem of eskirmir, from a Germanic verb meaning ‘defend’.

Tue Feb 15

Constructive mathematics is math that does not depend on proofs by contradiction, as it does not take the law of the excluded middle for granted
A setoid is a set equipped with an equivalence relation
- Setoid hell

Mon Feb 14

An etagere is a French set of hanging or standing open shelves for the display of collections of objects or ornaments
A what-not is a piece of furniture derived from the French étagère, which was exceedingly popular in England in the first three-quarters of the 19th century. It usually consists of slender uprights or pillars, supporting a series of shelves for holding china, ornaments, trifles, or “what nots”, hence the allusive name.

Sun Feb 13

There are 27 countries in the EU
- 5 candidate countries (Albania, Montenegro, North-Macedonia, Serbia, Turkey)
- EEA (European Economic Area) = EU + Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway
- EFTA (European Free Trade Association) = EU + Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway + Switzerland
- Schengen (Austria, Belgium, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Italy, Latvia, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland)

Sat Feb 12

Moon type is a writing system for the blind, using embossed symbols mostly derived from the Latin script (but simplified). It is claimed by its supporters to be easier to understand than braille, though it is mainly used by people who have lost their sight as adults, and thus already have knowledge of the shapes of letters

Fri Feb 11

sudo -E runs a command as sudo while attempting to preserve as much of the environment as possible

Thu Feb 10

White spaces refer to radio frequencies allocated to a broadcasting service but not used locally. In addition to white space assigned for technical reasons, there is also unused radio spectrum which has either never been used, or is becoming free as a result of technical changes. In particular, the switchover to digital television frees up large areas between about 50 MHz and 700 MHz. This is because digital transmissions can be packed into adjacent channels, while analog ones cannot. This means that the band can be compressed into fewer channels, while still allowing for more transmissions.

Wed Feb 9

Elevator surfing is an activity involving riding on top of elevators. Rarely, the activity may also involve jumping between moving elevators, although most elevator surfers consider this to be unwise and needlessly dangerous.

Tue Feb 8

There’s a public listing of all of the frequencies used by retail stores/malls
- Tips on scanning malls

Mon Feb 7

Bluetooth advertisement messages are unencrypted

Sun Feb 6

A party line is a local loop telephone circuit that is shared by multiple telephone service subscribers. It was called a party line because multiple callers could connect to the line and talk to each other

Sat Feb 5

The Order of the Smile is an international award given by children to adults distinguished in their love, care and aid for children.

Fri Feb 4

An obelisk ship was (shockingly) a ship that transported obelisks

Thu Feb 3

In Italian, ‘giorno’ refers to the full day, while ‘giornata’ refers to the daytime

Wed Feb 2

Hiberno-English is Irish English

Tue Feb 1

Syrup for mixing drinks is called squash in the UK

January 2022

Mon Jan 31

During the 2008 Passover season, kosher-for-Passover margarine in the United States was short in supply due to several issues, leading to a scramble among kosher consumers to obtain the staple since it features prominently in many Passover recipes

Sun Jan 30

Unsinkable aircraft carrier is a term sometimes used to refer to a geographical or political island that is used to extend the power projection of a military force.

Sat Jan 29

I, Libertine is a literary hoax novel that began as a practical joke by late-night radio raconteur Jean Shepherd. Shepherd was annoyed at the way bestseller lists were compiled in the mid-1950s. These lists were determined from sales figures and from the number of requests for new and upcoming books at bookstores. Shepherd urged his listeners to enter bookstores and ask for a non-existent book. He fabricated the author (Frederick R. Ewing) of this imaginary novel, concocted a title (I, Libertine), and outlined a basic plot for his listeners to use on bookstore clerks. Fans of the show took it further, planting references to the book and author so widely, demand for the book led to its inclusion on The New York Times Best Seller list

Fri Jan 28

Daughter from California syndrome - Wikipedia is a phrase used in the medical profession to describe a situation in which a long-lost relative arrives at the hospital at which a dying elderly relative is being treated, and insists that the medical team pursue aggressive measures to prolong the patient’s life, or otherwise challenges the care the patient is being given

Thu Jan 27

A useful idiot is a derogatory term for a person perceived as propagandizing for a cause without fully comprehending the cause’s goals, and who is cynically used by the cause’s leaders

Wed Jan 26

A third place is the social surroundings separate from the two usual social environments of home (“first place”) and the workplace (“second place”). Examples of third places include churches, cafes, clubs, public libraries, bookstores or parks.

Tue Jan 25

The Internet Research Agency also known as Glavset and known in Russian Internet slang as the Trolls from Olgino, is a Russian company engaged in online influence operations on behalf of Russian business and political interests.

Mon Jan 24

Hyperthymesia is a condition that leads people to be able to remember an abnormally large number of their life experiences in vivid detail. It is extraordinarily rare, with only about 60 people in the world having been diagnosed with the condition as of 2021.

Sun Jan 23

In 2009, art historian Gergely Barki, while watching Stuart Little on television with his daughter, noticed a painting that was previously considered lost, and after contacting the studios was able to track down its whereabouts

Sat Jan 22

Polari is a form of slang or cant used in Britain by some actors, circus and fairground showmen, professional wrestlers, merchant navy sailors, criminals, sex workers, and the gay subculture.
A cant is the jargon or language of a group, often employed to exclude or mislead people outside the group.

Fri Jan 21

Jabber in ethernet is when a packet frame is longer than the 1518 bytes.

Thu Jan 20

SMT is a generalization of SAT solving

Wed Jan 19

S.r.l. stands for Società a responsabilità limitata

Tue Jan 18

GEDCOM is an open de facto specification for exchanging genealogical data between different genealogy software. GEDCOM was developed by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS Church) as an aid to genealogical research.

Mon Jan 17

The word “lynch” comes from the phrase “Lynch law”, a term for punishment without trial

Sun Jan 16

Prairie has 2 i’s. I always thought it was spelled prarie

Sat Jan 15

Pedestrianism was a 19th-century form of competitive walking, often professional and funded by wagering, from which the modern sport of racewalking developed.

Fri Jan 14

Buda and Pest were 2 different cities that combined to make Budapest

Thu Jan 13

The broken escalator effect is the sensation of losing balance or dizziness reported by some people when stepping onto an escalator which is not working.

Wed Jan 12

nm is a tool that allows you to see symbols in object files

Tue Jan 11

The little squiggle goes under a letter is called a cedilla

Mon Jan 10

The root word ‘plex’ means weave

Sun Jan 09

A sneckdown is effectively a curb extension caused by snowfall. A natural form of traffic calming, sneckdowns show where a street can potentially be narrowed to slow motor vehicle speeds and shorten pedestrian crossing distances.

Sat Jan 08

Room 641A is a telecommunication interception facility operated by AT&T for the U.S. National Security Agency, as part of its warrantless surveillance program as authorized by the Patriot Act. The facility commenced operations in 2003 and its purpose was publicly revealed in 2006.

Fri Jan 07

List of shoe throwing incidents
- The oldest incident is from 359

Thu Jan 06

Mary Shelley is the daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft

Wed Jan 05

Prawo Jazdy was a supposed Polish national who was listed by the Garda Síochána in a police criminal database as having committed more than 50 traffic violations in Ireland. A 2007 memorandum stated that an investigation revealed prawo jazdy to be Polish for ‘driving licence’, with the error arising due to officers mistaking the phrase, printed on Polish driving licences, to be a personal name while issuing traffic tickets.

Tue Jan 04

In Islam, cats are revered animals.

Mon Jan 03

Sun Jan 02

Wikipedia has a list of drugs that were abandoned due to side effects, lack of efficacy, or other reasons

San Jan 01

The etymology of disaster is dis = bad and astro = star, meaning an ill-starred event

December 2021

Fri Dec 31

The Cotard delusion is a rare mental disorder in which the affected person holds the delusional belief that they are dead, do not exist, are putrefying, or have lost their blood or internal organs.

Thu Dec 30

Zenzizenzizenzic is an obsolete form of mathematical notation representing the eighth power of a number (that is, the zenzizenzizenzic of x is x8), dating from a time when powers were written out in words rather than as superscript numbers.

Wed Dec 29

Almon Strowger, the inventor of the first automatic phone exchange, created it because his undertaker business was losing clients to a competitor. The competitors wife, a phone operator, was redirecting calls to Strowger to her husband’s business.

Tue Dec 28

The two scientists that created the Cox-Zucker machine worked together on purpose because they wanted something named for both of their names combined.

Mon Dec 25

Italian Sounding is the marketing phenomenon consisting of words and images, colour combinations (the Italian tricolour) and geographical references for brands that are evocative of Italy to promote and market products – especially but not exclusively agri-food – that are not actually Made in Italy

Sun Dec 26

While the “hat” of doctoral academic regalia is called a tam, it’s actually a Tudor bonnet. It’s named after a Tam o’ shanter, which is something else.

Sat Dec 25

Tejo is a Colombian sport in which metal discs are thown toards packets filled with gunpowder

Fri Dec 24

The Kuleshov effect is the practice of cutting between two shots, which allows the viewers to derive more meaning from the interaction of the two shots than just one shot by itself.

Thu Dec 23

Bioswale are channels designed to concentrate and convey stormwater runoff while removing debris and pollution.
Xeriscaping is the process of landscaping, or gardening, that reduces or eliminates the need for irrigation.

Wed Dec 22

Poohsticks is a game from Winnie the Pooh books

Tue Dec 21

Quandary is spelled like that, not “quandry” like I thought it was

Mon Dec 20

An imperative (programming) language is one where you tell the compiler what you want to happen, step by step. In a declarative language, you write what you want in the end, but not explicity how to get it.
- Declarative languages often try to eliminate side effects

Sun Dec 19

Succor - assistance and support in times of hardship and distress

Sat Dec 18

Nobel disease is the embracing of strange or scientifically unsound ideas by some Nobel Prize winners, usually later in life

Fri Dec 17

A phantom island is a purported island which was included on maps for a period of time, but was later found not to exist. They usually originate from the reports of early sailors exploring new regions, and are commonly the result of navigational errors, mistaken observations, unverified misinformation, or deliberate fabrication.

Thu Dec 16

Bodybuilders are chasing sarcoplasmic muscle, and powerlifters are chasing myofibrillar muscle. The difference between the two is weight and rep ranges, though there is an overlap between the muscle types. Sarcoplasmic muscle locks in energy resources (glucose, creatine, etc) between the muscle layers, so looks a bit ‘bigger’ comparative to strength, i.e. the extra layers created by the resources between muscle layers helps bulk it out, and look a bit bigger. Myofibrillar muscle will have more layers of muscle over any given area when compared to sarcoplasmic muscle. So it will be able to lift more per lb or kg of muscle, but will run out of energy more quickly.

Wed Dec 15

Kongō Gumi is the oldest company in existence, being founded in 578

Tue Dec 14

An idiot plot is one which is “kept in motion solely by virtue of the fact that everybody involved is an idiot, and where the story would quickly end, or possibly not even happen, if this were not the case

Mon Dec 13

When using wildcards, you need to put the pattern in quotes or else the globbing won’t work properly

Sun Dec 12

Peaked - (pronounced peak-ed) gaunt and pale from illness or fatigue.

Sat Dec 11

Weet-bix and Weetabix are different things
Tivoization is the creation of a system that incorporates software under the terms of a copyleft software license like the GNU General Public License (GNU GPL), but uses hardware restrictions or digital rights management (DRM) to prevent users from running modified versions of the software on that hardware.

Fri Dec 10

Bus bunching refers to a group of two or more transit vehicles (such as buses or trains), running along the same route, which were scheduled to be evenly spaced, but instead run in the same place at the same time.

Thu Dec 9

In radio, a null is a direction in an antenna’s radiation pattern where the antenna radiates almost no radio waves, so the far field signal strength is a local minimum.

Wed Dec 8

The Tetragrammaton is the four-letter Hebrew word יהוה‎ (transliterated as YHWH), the name of the national god of Israel.
You can use DNS for steganographic communications

Tue Dec 7

Dr. Dobb’s Journal was a “granola” monthly magazine aimed at computer programmers

Mon Dec 6

Boustrophedon is a style of writing in which alternate lines of writing are reversed, with reversed letters.

Sun Dec 5

National Parks are maintained by the department of interior, whereas National Forests are maintained by the department of agriculture.

Sat Dec 4

The game canon is a list of video games to be considered for preservation by the Library of Congress.
Urk is a small Dutch town that was formerly an island, has its own dialect which differs significantly from standard Dutch and incorporates several Yiddish loanwords.

Fri Dec 3

The Mariko Aoki phenomenon is a Japanese expression referring to an urge to defecate that is suddenly felt after entering bookstores. The phenomenon’s name derives from the name of the woman who mentioned the phenomenon in a magazine article in 1985.

Thu Dec 2

Yuca and yucca are not the same plant
- Yuca (cassava) is a starchy tuber while a yucca is in the same family as agave (and Joshua Trees)

Wed Dec 1

The Hush-a-phone was a device designed to attach to the transmitter of a telephone to reduce noise pollution and increase privacy. It was the subject of Hush-A-Phone Corp. v. United States, where AT&T (who had a monopoly at that point) decided to sue them because you had to rent all phone equipment from AT&T and they claimed that the Hush-A-Phone was messing with company property.

November 2021

Tue Nov 30

An intracolonic explosion is an explosion inside the colon of a person due to ignition of explosive gases such as methane. This can happen during colonic exploration, as a result of the electrical nature of a colonoscope.

Mon Nov 29

THE NAVY IS TRAINING KILLER DOLPHINS
Earth–Moon–Earth communication also known as Moon bounce, is a radio communications technique that relies on the propagation of radio waves from an Earth-based transmitter directed via reflection from the surface of the Moon back to an Earth-based receiver.

Sun Nov 28

Onfim was a boy who lived in Novgorod (present-day Russia) in the 13th century, some time around 1220 or 1260. He left his notes and homework exercises scratched in soft birch bark which was preserved in the clay soil of Novgorod. Onfim, who was most likely six or seven at the time, wrote in the Old Novgorodian dialect of Old East Slavic. Besides letters and syllables, he drew “battle scenes and drawings of himself and his teacher”.
A raga is a melodic framework for improvisation akin to a melodic mode in Indian classical music

Sat Nov 27

Capitalization of Internet
A gay bomb is a non-lethal psychochemical weapon that a United States Air Force research laboratory speculated about producing. The theories involve discharging sex pheromones over enemy forces in order to make them sexually attracted to each other.

Fri Nov 26

Banburismus was a cryptanalytic process developed by Alan Turing at Bletchley Park in Britain during the Second World War. The process used sequential conditional probability to infer information about the likely settings of the Enigma machine. It gave rise to Turing’s invention of the ban as a measure of the weight of evidence in favour of a hypothesis.
The last name ”Menzies” is sometimes pronounced “ming-iss” because a “z” was used to represent the now obsolete letter yogh (which looked like a z)

Thu Nov 25

Dramaturg - a literary adviser or editor in a theatre, opera, or film company who researches, selects, adapts, edits, and interprets scripts, libretti, texts, and printed programmes, consults authors, and does public relations work.

Wed Nov 24

A folly is a building constructed primarily for decoration, but suggesting through its appearance some other purpose, or of such extravagant appearance that it transcends the range of usual garden buildings.

Tue Nov 23

In the UK, ULEZ zones are areas where vehicles that don’t meet pollution regulations have to pay a fee
The tare weight is the weight that is subtracted to account for the weight of the container

Mon Nov 22

DNS rebinding is an attack where a malicious web page causes visitors to run a client-side script that attacks machines elsewhere on the network.
- The attacker registers a domain (such as attacker.com) and delegates it to a DNS server that is under the attacker’s control. The server is configured to respond with a very short time to live (TTL) record, preventing the DNS response from being cached. When the victim browses to the malicious domain, the attacker’s DNS server first responds with the IP address of a server hosting the malicious client-side code. For instance, they could point the victim’s browser to a website that contains malicious JavaScript or Flash scripts that are intended to execute on the victim’s computer. The malicious client-side code makes additional accesses to the original domain name (such as attacker.com). These are permitted by the same-origin policy. However, when the victim’s browser runs the script it makes a new DNS request for the domain, and the attacker replies with a new IP address. For instance, they could reply with an internal IP address or the IP address of a target somewhere else on the Internet.

Sun Nov 21

List of city name changes
Stevedore - a person employed, or a contractor engaged, at a dock to load and unload cargo from ships.

Sat Nov 20

Oblique - superficially plausible, but actually wrong
“Tannoy” is slang for a loudspeaker in the UK because Tannoy was a company that made a lot of loudspeakers

Fri Nov 19

Post hoc means “after this” and ad hoc means “for this”
Anti-satellite weapons are space weapons designed to incapacitate or destroy satellites for strategic or tactical purposes.

Thu Nov 18

Packet Clearing House is an international nonprofit organization responsible for providing operational support and security to critical internet infrastructure, including Internet exchange points and the core of the domain name system.
A clearing house is a financial institution formed to facilitate the exchange (i.e., clearance) of payments, securities, or derivatives transactions.

Wed Nov 17

Propitious - giving or indicating a good chance of success; favorable.
Identification friend or foe is an identification system designed for command and control. It uses a transponder that listens for an interrogation signal and then sends a response that identifies the broadcaster. It enables military and civilian air traffic control interrogation systems to identify aircraft, vehicles or forces as friendly and to determine their bearing and range from the interrogator.

Tue Nov 16

Continental drip is the observation that southward-pointing landforms are more numerous and prominent than northward-pointing landforms. When published, it has been geological satire.

Mon Nov 15

Kernel versions have names too

Sun Nov 14

Operation Vegetarian was a British military plan in 1942 to disseminate linseed cakes infected with anthrax spores onto the fields of Germany. These cakes would have been eaten by the cattle, which would then be consumed by the civilian population, causing the deaths of millions of German civilians. Furthermore, it would have wiped out the majority of Germany’s cattle, creating a massive food shortage for the rest of the population that remained uninfected.

Sat Nov 13

Conservation-induced extinction can happen when trying to preserve a different species. This mostly threatens the parasite and pathogen species that are highly host-specific to critically endangered hosts. When the last individuals of a host species are captured for the purpose of captive breeding and reintroduction programs, they typically undergo anti-parasitic treatments to increase survival and reproductive success. This practice may unintentionally result in the extinction of the species antagonistic to the target species, such as certain parasites.

Fri Nov 12

An anti-king is a would-be king who, due to succession disputes or simple political opposition, declares himself king in opposition to a reigning monarch. The term is usually used in a European historical context where it relates to elective monarchies rather than hereditary ones. In hereditary monarchies such figures are more frequently referred to as pretenders or claimants.

Thu Nov 11

A phantom cat are large felids such as leopards, jaguars and cougars which allegedly appear in regions outside their indigenous range.

Wed Nov 10

Beeper versus pager
- A beeper was an older device that simply received a signal that the owner was wanted, just a “beep” and a flashing light. The idea was that the user would call the their phone service number for every beep who would then pass the salient information onto them.
- A pager actually allowed the caller to directly send a phone number (or code) to the owner so they could call back directly or be otherwise informed by a coded numeric message

Tue Nov 9

Coronation chicken is a combination of cold cooked chicken meat, herbs and spices, and a creamy mayonnaise-based sauce. It was invented as part of a banquet for Queen Elizabeth II’s coronation, hence the name.

Mon Nov 8

Gardening forks are not the same as pitchforks: gardening forks are used for moving and turning over soil in gardening, while pitchforks are for moving hay. Reflecting their differing uses, garden forks have shorter, flatter, thicker, and more closely spaced tines than pitchforks. They have comparatively a fairly short, stout, usually wooden handle, typically with a “D” or “T” shaped grab at the end.

Sun Nov 7

Cryptovirology is a field that studies how to use cryptography to design powerful malicious software. The field was born with the observation that public-key cryptography can be used to break the symmetry between what an antivirus analyst sees regarding malware and what the attacker sees. The antivirus analyst sees a public key contained in the malware, whereas the attacker sees the public key contained in the malware as well as the corresponding private key (outside the malware) since the attacker created the key pair for the attack. The public key allows the malware to perform trapdoor one-way operations on the victim’s computer that only the attacker can undo.

Sat Nov 6

The term “closed” (versus “open”) in “closed captions” indicates that the captions are not visible until activated by the viewer, usually via the remote control or menu option. On the other hand, “open”, “burned-in”, “baked on”, “hard-coded”, or simply “hard” captions are visible to all viewers as they are embedded in the video.
- Source
The United Kingdom, Ireland, and most other countries do not distinguish between subtitles and closed captions and use “subtitles” as the general term. The equivalent of “captioning” is usually referred to as “subtitles for the hard of hearing”. Their presence is referenced on screen by notation which says “Subtitles”, or previously “Subtitles 888” or just “888” (the latter two are in reference to the conventional videotext channel for captions), which is why the term subtitle is also used to refer to the Ceefax-based videotext encoding that is used with PAL-compatible video.

Fri Nov 5

Eroom’s law is the observation that drug discovery is becoming slower and more expensive over time, despite improvements in technology (such as high-throughput screening, biotechnology, combinatorial chemistry, and computational drug design), a trend first observed in the 1980s
- It’s Moore’s law spelled backwards

Thu Nov 4

Whamageddon is a game played during the 24 days before Christmas Eve in which players try to go from December 1 to the start of Christmas Eve as per European celebrations on the 24th December (midnight on the 24th December or 24:00 on the 24th of December) without hearing “Last Christmas” by Wham!
In TeX, \i and \j produce i and j without dots, e.g. so you can put symbols on top without the dot interfering.

Wed Nov 3

In fact the ‘rc’ extension often seen in shell profiles is directly taken from RUNCOM.
- Source
Long Bets is a site to make, well, long term bets

Tue Nov 2

Not even wrong is a phrase often used to describe pseudoscience or bad science. It describes an argument or explanation that purports to be scientific but uses faulty reasoning or speculative premises, which can be neither affirmed nor denied and thus cannot be discussed rigorously and scientifically.
UsrMerge is the merged usr directories scheme, i.e. the /{bin,sbin,lib} directories becoming symbolic links to /usr/{bin,sbin,lib}/

Mon Nov 1

Pierre Brassau was a chimpanzee and the subject of a 1964 hoax perpetrated by Åke “Dacke” Axelsson, a journalist at the Swedish tabloid Göteborgs-Tidningen. Axelsson came up with the idea of exhibiting a series of paintings made by a non-human primate, under the pretense that they were the work of a previously unknown French artist named “Pierre Brassau”, in order to test whether critics could tell the difference between true avant-garde modern art and the work of a chimpanzee.
- While one critic observed that “only an ape could have done this”, most praised the works. Rolf Anderberg of the Göteborgs-Posten wrote, “Brassau paints with powerful strokes, but also with clear determination. His brush strokes twist with furious fastidiousness. Pierre is an artist who performs with the delicacy of a ballet dancer.” After the hoax was revealed, Anderberg insisted that Peter’s work was “still the best painting in the exhibition”.
A cat organ is a hypothetical musical instrument which consists of a line of cats fixed in place with their tails stretched out underneath a keyboard so that they cry out when a key is pressed. The cats would be arranged according to the natural tone of their voices.

October 2021

Sun Oct 31

Publication bias is a type of bias that occurs in published academic research. It occurs when the outcome of an experiment or research study influences the decision whether to publish or otherwise distribute it
p-hacking is the misuse of data analysis to find patterns in data that can be presented as statistically significant, thus dramatically increasing and understating the risk of false positives

Sat Oct 30

Why are even numbered pages only ever on the left side of a book?
- Each of the bound leaves of paper in a book is known in publishing as a folio.
- The front side of a folio, or the “first” side which faces you, is known as the recto. Recto comes from the Latin for “right”and is a shortened form of rectō foliō or “right hand page”. It also has the adverbial sense of “on the right hand side”.
- Hence the publishing convention that the recto or first page of a bound book is numbered “1” and is normally the right hand page.
- The reverse side of a folio is the verso. This comes from the Latin vertĕre, “to turn”, and refers to the side of the folio which faces you once it is turned. This second side is numbered “2” and is conventionally (and logically) a left-hand page.
- Recto and verso

Fri Oct 29

DRAM is accessed by rows first

Thu Oct 28

Some pacemakers are nuclear powered

Wed Oct 27

You can use regex in the message entry box of Discord to edit your most recent message
There was a group of civilians that regained control of a NASA satellite, with their headquarters in an abandoned McDonalds

Tue Oct 26

Roofnet was an experimental mesh network developed by the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, originally started by grad students who wanted to have better internet access at their home

Mon Oct 25

The hair on your arms doesn’t grow as long as the hair on your head because it grows at a slower rate, and by the time it gets long enough, it will fall out
- Source

Sun Oct 24

The broken escalator phenomenon is the sensation of losing balance or dizziness reported by some people when stepping onto an escalator which is not working.

Sat Oct 23

F. D. C. Willard was the pen name of a Siamese cat named Chester, who internationally published under this name on physics in scientific journals, once as a co-author and another time as the sole author

Fri Oct 22

A phased array is a series of antenna that allow a beam of radio waves to be turned/angles without physically turning the dish

Thu Oct 21

The name ‘awk’ comes from the initials of its creators: Aho, Weinberger, and Kernighan

Wed Oct 20

The graveyard orbit is an orbit far away from other common orbits where decommissioned satellites are moved to

Tue Oct 19

Owls can turn their head ~270 degrees (not 360)

Mon Oct 18

Tetration is the 4th hyperoperations (1 is addition, 2 is multiplication, 3 is exponentiation)
- Hyperoperation
Common paging protocols include TAP, FLEX, ReFLEX, POCSAG, GOLAY, ERMES and NTT.

Sun Oct 17

A records are a*ddress records, and =CNAME= records are *c*anonical *name records
Chartreuse is a liquer, and the color was named after it

Sat Oct 16

The little magnifying monocle thingies are called loupes
Breadboards are called breadboards because people literally used to build their circuits by hand on wooden breadboards
These stick things are called pin headers

Fri Oct 15

Japanese prefecture flags are based off of different “characters”
- Japanese uses (mainly) four character sets: hiragana, katakana, kanji and romaji

Thu Oct 14

Gloria Ford Gilmer was an American mathematician and educator, notable for being the first African American woman to publish research papers (in 1956)
- Ethnomathematics - is the study of the relationship between mathematics and culture
- Ethnocomputing - is the study of the interactions between computing and culture

Wed Oct 13

You can order the results of ls numerically with ls -v
- Source
LaTeX versions are just longer and longer substrings of pi

Tue Oct 12

The battery symbol next to the USB port on my laptop means that the port will provide power even when the laptop is off
- Source
Sometimes, cellphone towers have to be made to look like trees

Mon Oct 11

A lemniscate is any figure eight shape (in algebraic geometry)
STIR/SHAKEN is a protocol aimed at combating caller ID spoofing

Sun Oct 10

Scrip is any substitute for legal tender. It is often a form of credit. Scrips have been created for exploitative payment of employees under truck systems, and for use in local commerce at times when regular currency was unavailable, for example in remote coal towns, military bases, ships on long voyages, or occupied countries in wartime.

Sat Oct 9

Router on a stick. The description is nowhere near as fun as the name seems :(

Fri Oct 8

What does wheel do? Rather than have to dole out individual permissions on a system, you can add users to the wheel group and they can gain access to administrator levels, simply by being in the wheel group. It’s typically tied directly into sudo. Previously you needed to be in the wheel group if you wanted to have access to use certain commands, such as su.
- Source

Thu Oct 7

The Queen’s Duck and the hairy arm technique - adding in intentional errors so reviewers find something to fix and don’t pry further

Wed Oct 6

The Blue Banana is a discontinuous corridor of urbanization spreading over Western and Central Europe, with a population of around 111 million

Tue Oct 5

There are types of lightning called “elves” and “sprites” that look super scary

Mon Oct 4

Furor(e) - an outbreak of public anger or excitement
Cox Automotive is the same Cox as the cable company

Sun Oct 3

BASE jumping is an acronym that stands for buildings, antennae (referring to radio masts), spans (bridges), and earth (cliffs)
ISO 3166 is a standard published by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) that defines codes for the names of countries, dependent territories, special areas of geographical interest, and their principal subdivisions (e.g., provinces or states).
- ISO 3166-1, Codes for the representation of names of countries and their subdivisions – Part 1: Country codes, defines codes for the names of countries, dependent territories, and special areas of geographical interest. It defines three sets of country codes:
  - ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 – two-letter country codes which are the most widely used of the three, and used most prominently for the Internet’s country code top-level domains (with a few exceptions).
  - ISO 3166-1 alpha-3 – three-letter country codes which allow a better visual association between the codes and the country names than the alpha-2 codes.
  - ISO 3166-1 numeric – three-digit country codes which are identical to those developed and maintained by the United Nations Statistics Division, with the advantage of script (writing system) independence, and hence useful for people or systems using non-Latin scripts.
- ISO 3166-2, Codes for the representation of names of countries and their subdivisions – Part 2: Country subdivision code, defines codes for the names of the principal subdivisions (e.g., provinces, states, departments, regions) of all countries coded in ISO 3166-1.
- ISO 3166-3, Codes for the representation of names of countries and their subdivisions – Part 3: Code for formerly used names of countries, defines codes for country names which have been deleted from ISO 3166-1 since its first publication in 1974.

Sat Oct 2

The bogus pipeline is a fake polygraph used to get participants to truthfully respond to emotional/affective questions in survey. It is a technique used by social psychologists to reduce false answers when attempting to collect self-report data. As an example, social desirability is a common reason for warped survey results.
Paucity - he presence of something only in small or insufficient quantities or amounts; scarcity

Fri Oct 1

You can eavesdrop on data running through a fiber optic cable by slightly bending the cable. Some of the light will continue to go straight past the bend, which can then be captured without having to do anything to the cable.
- Fiber tapping
- Optical fiber tapping: methods and precautions

September 2021

Thu Sep 30

Each zodiac sign is used to denote a 30° region of the sky. Since the Unicode symbols are consecutive, you can compute the code point of a symbol from the longitude angle θ in degrees: 9800 + floor(θ / 30)
- Source

Wed Sep 29

A joe job is a spamming technique that sends out unsolicited e-mails using spoofed sender data. Early joe jobs aimed at tarnishing the reputation of the apparent sender or inducing the recipients to take action against them (see also Email spoofing), but they are now typically used by commercial spammers to conceal the true origin of their messages and to trick recipients into opening emails apparently coming from a trusted source.

Tue Sep 28

BIND stands for BERKELEY INTERNET NAME DOMAIN

Mon Sep 27

Camel urine comes out as a thick syrup, and camel faeces are so dry that they do not require drying when the Bedouins use them to fuel fires.
- Source

Sun Sep 26

Sprint stands for Southern Pacific Railroad Internal Networking Telephony

Sat Sep 25

Snoezelen is a therapy for people with autism and other developmental disabilities, dementia or brain injury. It consists of placing the person in a soothing and stimulating environment, called the “Snoezelen room”. These rooms are specially designed to deliver stimuli to various senses, using lighting effects, color, sounds, music, scents, etc. The combination of different materials on a wall may be explored using tactile senses, and the floor may be adjusted to stimulate the sense of balance.

Fri Sep 24

The Rhinoceros Party is a Canadian federal-level satirical political party, sometimes referred to in English Canada as the Second Rhinoceros Party. It promises, like its predecessor, not to keep any of its promises if elected.

Thu Sep 23

A river (in typography) is a chain of gaps between lines of text that line up and look like a river

Wed Sep 22

Jesse Gelsinger was the first person publicly identified as having died in a clinical trial for gene therapy. The scientists leading the trial made many unethical decisions that ultimately led to his death
Tearoom Trade s a 1970 book by Laud Humphreys. Humphreys’ book is based on his 1968 Ph.D. dissertation, which was entitled “Tearoom Trade: A Study of Homosexual Encounters in Public Places.” Tearoom Trade debunked many of the stereotypes associated with individuals who participate in anonymous male-male sexual activity in public places, demonstrating that many of the participants lived otherwise conventional lives as family men and respected members of their communities; further, their activities posed no threat to non-participants. As Humphreys misrepresented his identity and intent to his subjects, and tracked their identities through license plate numbers, Tearoom Trade has been the subject of continued debate over privacy for research participants.

Tue Sep 21

Keith Haring often collaborated with LA2, and split profits while he was still alive, but since his death his estate doesn’t want LA2 to get any profits anymore

Mon Sep 20

Thunk is a subroutine used to inject a calculation into another subroutine. Thunks are primarily used to delay a calculation until its result is needed, or to insert operations at the beginning or end of the other subroutine. They have many other applications in compiler code generation and modular programming.

Sun Sep 19

Ed’s Easy Diner is a British restaurant chain that is themed liek an American 50s diner
American cheese is made from cheddar, Colby, or similar cheeses
A chiva is an artisan rustic bus used in rural Colombia.

Sat Sep 18

The Rainbow Series is a series of computer security standards and guidelines published by the United States government in the 1980s and 1990s. They were originally published by the U.S. Department of Defense Computer Security Center, and then by the National Computer Security Center.
- Were all the books mentioned in Hackers real?

Fri Sep 17

Gunk applies to any whole whose parts all have further proper parts. That is, a gunky object is not made of indivisible atoms or simples. Because parthood is transitive, any part of gunk is itself gunk.
An alderman is a member of a municipal assembly or council in many jurisdictions founded upon English law.

Thu Sep 16

Coop and Migros are both co-ops, and Migros has some cool values:
- Does not sell any alcoholic beverages nor any tobacco;
- Does not pay any dividend;
- If the earnings before interest and taxes (EBIT) reaches 5% of the market value of the company, the supermarkets have to lower their prices;
- Organised as a cooperative (federation of regional cooperatives), with more than two million shareholders;
- Every adult living in Switzerland can become a member (receive a share for free) and vote at the general assembly;
- Uses 0.5% of its revenue to social and cultural projects.
The terminal command convert uses -flop for horizontal mirroring, and -flip for vertical

Wed Sep 15

Quick bread is any bread leavened with a chemical leavening agent rather than a biological one like yeast or sourdough starter.
Corn bread is a quick bread made with cornmeal
Pone is a type of baked or fried bread in American cuisine, and the Cuisine of the Southern United States.
Johnnycake is a cornmeal flatbread
Mush is a type of cornmeal pudding (or porridge) which is usually boiled in water or milk
Hasty pudding is a pudding or porridge of grains cooked in milk or water.

Tue Sep 14

SIM stands for subscriber identity module
Data diodes are a thing - they only allow one way data transfer in each direction

Mon Sep 13

Cubs Win Flag is a flag that is flown from the Cubs stadium if they won their game

Sun Sep 12

Bat bombs were an experimental World War II weapon developed by the United States. The bomb consisted of a bomb-shaped casing with over a thousand compartments, each containing a hibernating Mexican free-tailed bat with a small, timed incendiary bomb attached. Dropped from a bomber at dawn, the casings would deploy a parachute in mid-flight and open to release the bats, which would then disperse and roost in eaves and attics in a 20–40-mile radius (32–64 km). The incendiaries, which were set on timers, would then ignite and start fires in inaccessible places in the largely wood and paper constructions of the Japanese cities that were the weapon’s intended target.

Sat Sep 11

X currency - in addition to codes for most active national currencies ISO 4217 provides codes for “supranational” currencies, procedural purposes, and several things which are “similar to” currencies:
- Codes for the precious metals gold (XAU), silver (XAG), palladium (XPD), and platinum (XPT) are formed by prefixing the element’s chemical symbol with the letter “X”. These “currency units” are denominated as one troy ounce of the specified metal as opposed to “USD 1” or “EUR 1”.
- The code XTS is reserved for use in testing.
- The code XXX is used to denote a “transaction” involving no currency.
- There are also codes specifying certain monetary instruments used in international finance, e.g. XDR is the symbol for special drawing right issued by the International Monetary Fund.
- The codes for most supranational currencies, such as the East Caribbean dollar, the CFP franc, the CFA franc BEAC and the CFA franc BCEAO. The predecessor to the euro, the European Currency Unit (ECU), had the code XEU.

Fri Sep 10

The British pet massacre was an event in 1939 in the United Kingdom where over 750,000 pets were killed in preparation for food shortages during World War II.
A ghost gun is a term for a (typically) homemade firearm that lacks commercial serial numbers.

Thu Sep 9

Project MKUltra is the code name given to a program of experiments on human subjects that were designed and undertaken by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), which were illegal. Experiments on humans were intended to develop procedures and identify drugs such as LSD to be used in interrogations in order to weaken the individual and force confessions through brainwashing and psychological torture.

Wed Sep 8

The least publishable unit is the smallest measurable quantum of publication, the minimum amount of information that can be used to generate a publication in a peer-reviewed venue, such as a journal or a conference.

Tue Sep 7

AES (or any other block cipher) counter mode encrypts a random nonce + counter with the encryption algorithm, and then XORs that encrypted part with the plaintext. This effectively turns the block cipher into a stream cipher

Mon Sep 6

Pixilated - crazy, confused

Sun Sep 5

The Paraquat murders were a series of indiscriminate poisonings carried out in Japan in 1985. Police were unable to gather any evidence about the murders other than they were caused by a poisoned beverage that was left inside or around vending machines. All the beverages were poisoned with the herbicide paraquat except for one which was poisoned with diquat, then placed in or near the vending machine, where the victim would consume the drink, then become poisoned.

Sat Sep 4

Fomenting - instigate or stir up
The Cajun Navy are informal ad hoc volunteer groups comprising private boat owners who assist in search and rescue efforts in the United States as well as offer Disaster Relief assistance

Fri Sep 3

An infodemic typically refers to a rapid and far-reaching spread of both accurate and inaccurate information about something, such as a disease.
Vitiate - spoil or impair the quality or efficiency of.

Thu Sep 2

Gauss is a unit of measurement

Wed Sep 1

Realpolitik is politics or diplomacy based primarily on considerations of given circumstances and factors, rather than explicit ideological notions or moral and ethical premises.
InfoconDB has information and metadata about infosec conferences

August 2021

Tue Aug 31

Suffused - gradually spread through or over
Horseshoe theory asserts that the far-left and the far-right, rather than being at opposite and opposing ends of a linear political continuum, closely resemble one another, analogous to the way that the opposite ends of a horseshoe are close together

Mon Aug 30

Ghidra servers are a thing

Sun Aug 29

Hypercorrection is non-standard use of language that results from the over-application of a perceived rule of language-usage prescription. A speaker or writer who produces a hypercorrection generally believes through a misunderstanding of such rules that the form is more “correct”, standard, or otherwise preferable, often combined with a desire to appear formal or educated.
Eye dialect is the use of deliberately nonstandard spelling to emphasize how a word is being pronounced.

Sat Aug 28

The author of Eragon started working on the book when he was 15, and published it at 20

Fri Aug 27

The evil maid attack is an attack on an unattended device, in which an attacker with physical access alters it in some undetectable way so that they can later access the device, or the data on it.

Thu Aug 26

Difference between PGP, OpenPGP and GPG
- PGP is proprietary software, currently owned by Symantec. PGP supports encryption, decryption, signatures, and verification. PGP can encrypt hard drives.
- OpenPGP is an Internet standard, like TLS. Its specifications are outlined in several RFCs, notably RFC 4880.
- GnuPG, or GPG is an open source implementation of the OpenPGP standard, kind of like how OpenSSL is an implementation of TLS. GPG supports encryption, decryption, signatures, and verification. Unlike PGP however, GPG cannot encrypt hard drives.

Wed Aug 25

Quantum suicide is a thought experiment in quantum mechanics and the philosophy of physics. Purportedly, it can falsify any interpretation of quantum mechanics other than the Everett many-worlds interpretation by means of a variation of the Schrödinger’s cat thought experiment, from the cat’s point of view. Quantum immortality refers to the subjective experience of surviving quantum suicide. This concept is sometimes conjectured to be applicable to real-world causes of death as well.

Tue Aug 24

EMF files were Window’s version of SVG files

Mon Aug 23

When videos are too wide for their screens and have black bars at the top and bottom, that’s called letterboxing. The opposite effect (bars on the sides) is called pillarboxing

Sun Aug 22

The Wizard of New Zealand is a New Zealand educator, comedian, magician and politician

Sat Aug 21

Gef, also referred to as the Talking Mongoose or the Dalby Spook, was the name given to an allegedly talking mongoose which was claimed to inhabit a farmhouse owned by the Irving family. The Irvings’ farm was located at Cashen’s Gap near the hamlet of Dalby on the Isle of Man

Fri Aug 20

Elevator street in Oregon is the only vertical street in the United States

Thu Aug 19

Excoriate - censure or criticize severely.

Wed Aug 18

Frank Lentini was a Sicilian-American sideshow performer who toured with numerous circuses. Born with a parasitic twin, Lentini had three legs

Tue Aug 17

Core rope memory is an old form of memory that used rope to encode ones and zeroes. It was very often programmed by female workers, so it was sometimes called LOL Memory– little old lady memory.

Mon Aug 16

The Eyes of Sibiu are the iconic eyebrow dormers on the roofs of Sibiu’s houses. Sibiu lies in Transylvania, a historical region of Romania. The eyes, which are a symbol and a tourist attraction of the city, have given Sibiu the nicknames of The City with Eyes, The City Where Houses Don’t Sleep and the portmanteau Seebiu. They vary in shape – most of them are trapezoid-shaped, others having rounded or elongated forms.

Sun Aug 15

ACARS, the protocol that planes use to communicate to ground stations, is unencrypted and can be intercepted by anyone.

Sat Aug 14

Maplewashing refers to the alleged tendency of Canadian governments, institutions, and media to perpetuate the notion that Canada is morally superior to other countries, thus sanitizing and concealing negative historical and contemporary actions.

Fri Aug 13

An egg of Columbus or Columbus’ egg refers to a brilliant idea or discovery that seems simple or easy after the fact. The expression refers to an apocryphal story, dating from at least the 16th century, in which it is said that Christopher Columbus, having been told that finding a new trade route was inevitable and no great accomplishment, challenges his critics to make an egg stand on its tip. After his challengers give up, Columbus does it himself by tapping the egg on the table to flatten its tip.

Thu Aug 12

Linux kernel oops!
lp0 on fire is an outdated error message generated on some Unix and Unix-like computer operating systems in response to certain types of printer errors.
Write only memory

Wed Aug 11

Disco Demolition Night was a Major League Baseball (MLB) promotion on Thursday, July 12, 1979, at Comiskey Park in Chicago, Illinois, that ended in a riot. At the climax of the event, a crate filled with disco records was blown up on the field between games of the twi-night doubleheader between the Chicago White Sox and the Detroit Tigers. Many of those in attendance had come to see the explosion rather than the games and rushed onto the field after the detonation. The playing field was so damaged by the explosion and by the fans that the White Sox were required to forfeit the second game to the Tigers.

Tue Aug 10

The lead–crime hypothesis is the association between elevated blood lead levels in children and increased rates of crime, delinquency, and recidivism later in life.

Mon Aug 9

Nijikon is the affective perception that two-dimensional anime, manga, and light novel characters are more attractive visually, physically or emotionally than people from the real world.

Sun Aug 8

Apple owns CUPS
YOU CAN PRINT DIRECTLY FROM NETCAT: nc <printer ip> 9100 < print.pdf

Sat Aug 7

Fri Aug 6

Nothern Ireland doesn’t have its own official flag
Capitol Hill’s mystery soda machine was a Coke vending machine in Capitol Hill, Seattle, that was in operation since at least the early 1990s until its disappearance in 2018. n June 2018, the machine mysteriously disappeared and a message was posted to the machine’s Facebook page stating “Going for a walk, need to find myself. Maybe take a shower even.” A note was taped to the rail where the machine used to be: “Went for a walk”.

Thu Aug 5

Upbraid: to scold
Microsoft acquisition hoax is a bogus 1994 press release suggesting that the information technology company Microsoft had acquired the Roman Catholic Church. It is considered to be the first Internet hoax to reach a mass audience.

Wed Aug 4

Judeo-Spanish (also called Ladino) is a Romance language derived from Old Spanish. Originally spoken in Spain, it is today spoken mainly by Sephardic minorities in more than 30 countries, with most of the surviving speakers residing in Israel
Drunk Tank Pink is a tone of pink which has been observed to reduce hostile, violent or aggressive behavior

Tue Aug 3

=sfc= is a utility in Microsoft Windows that allows users to scan for and restore corruptions in Windows system files
=dism= is a command-line tool that is used to mount and service Windows images before deployment

Mon Aug 2

Ambulance chasing, or barratry is a term which refers to a lawyer soliciting for clients at a disaster site. The term “ambulance chasing” comes from the stereotype of lawyers who follow ambulances to the emergency room to find clients.
Sword and planet is a subgenre of science fantasy that features rousing adventure stories set on other planets, and usually featuring humans as protagonists. The name derives from the heroes of the genre engaging their adversaries in hand-to-hand combat primarily with simple melée weapons such as swords, even in a setting that often has advanced technology.

Sun Aug 1

GmbH stands for Gesellschaft mit beschränkter Haftung, i.e. company with limited liability
The yips are a sudden and unexplained loss of ability to execute certain skills in experienced athletes. Symptoms of the yips are losing fine motor skills and psychological issues that impact on the muscle memory and decision-making of athletes, leaving them unable to perform basic skills of their sport.

July 2021

Sat Jul 31

Goat tower is a multi-story decorative goat house, modeled on a European garden folly, an early example of which was built in Portugal in the 19th century.

Fri Jul 30

There are negative rings in the computer architecture ring model, usually used by hypervisors
Yu-Mex was a style of popular music in the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia which incorporated the elements of traditional Mexican music. The style was mostly popular during the 1950s and 60s, when a string of Yugoslav singers began to perform traditional Mexican songs.

Thu Jul 29

The United States pays rent for Guantanamo Bay, but Cuba has never cashed the check

Wed Jul 28

An epigram is a brief, interesting, memorable, and sometimes surprising or satirical statement.

Tue Jul 27

The plane that takes horses to the Olympics and the Kentucky Derby is called Air Horse One

Mon Jul 26

Anti-Barney humor
A Veterstrikdiploma is a diploma which children between 5 and 6 years can get in the Netherlands and Belgium after they manage to tie their shoelaces by themselves. Veterstrikdiploma is sometimes used as a derogatory term for a diploma or degree which is deemed worthless

Sun Jul 25

Dried peppers have different names than the fresh pepper
- E.g. chipotle peppers are just dried jalapeno peppers

Sat Jul 24

The Public Universal Friend was an American preacher born in Cumberland, Rhode Island, to Quaker parents. After suffering a severe illness in 1776, the Friend claimed to have died and been reanimated as a genderless evangelist named the Public Universal Friend, and afterward shunned both birth name and gendered pronouns.

Fri Jul 23

IKEA’s naming scheme has different themes for each type of item:
- Bathroom articles = Names of Swedish lakes and bodies of water
- Bed textiles = Flowers and plants
- Beds, wardrobes, hall furniture = Norwegian place names
- Bookcases = Professions, Scandinavian boy’s names
- Bowls, vases, candles and candle holders = Swedish place names, adjectives, spices, herbs, fruits and berries
- Boxes, wall decoration, pictures and frames, clocks = Swedish slang expressions, Swedish place names
- Children’s products = Mammals, birds, adjectives
- Desks, chairs and swivel chairs = Scandinavian boy’s names
- Fabrics, curtains = Scandinavian girl’s names
- Garden furniture = Scandinavian islands
- Kitchen accessories = Fish, mushrooms and adjectives
- Lighting = Units of measurement, seasons, months, days, shipping and nautical terms, Swedish place names
- Rugs = Danish place names
- Sofas, armchairs, chairs and dining tables = Swedish place names

Thu Jul 22

Tarriff engineering refers to design and manufacturing decisions made primarily so that the manufactured good is classified at a lower rate than it would have been absent those decisions. It is a loophole whereby an importer pays a lower tariff by “adapting the item [being imported] so that [the importer doesn’t] have to pay any levy”.
- Columbia Sportswear uses so called “Nurse’s Pockets”, or small pockets near the waist line, on many of its women’s shirt, including the PFG Tamiami, because women’s shirts with pockets below the waistline are levied a lower import tariff than shirts without such pockets.

Wed Jul 21

Barcodes have different encodings for the right and left side so that they can be scanned correctly whether they are upside down or not

Tue Jul 20

Tamper evident - provide clear proof that a product has been accessed or altered by someone other than the end user
Tamper resistant - deters tampering but does not necessarily leave indicate obvious signs of tampering if such has taken place
Tamper proof - also known as security labels or tamper-fast labels, are generally waterproof, cannot be peeled off in cold or wet conditions, and often use a holographic design in addition to destructible technology

Mon Jul 19

Horses use leg wraps to protect them from bumps and to support their tendon and ligaments
Pastel QAnon is a collection of techniques and strategies of using feminine-coded aesthetics to indoctrinate predominantly women into the QAnon conspiracy theory

Sun Jul 18

The Four Pests campaign was one of the first actions taken in the Great Leap Forward in China from 1958 to 1962. The four pests to be eliminated were rats, flies, mosquitoes, and sparrows. The extermination of sparrows is also known as smash sparrows campaign or eliminate sparrows campaign which resulted in severe ecological imbalance, being one of the causes of the Great Chinese Famine. In 1960, Mao Zedong ended the campaign against sparrows and redirected the fourth focus to bed bugs.

Sat Jul 17

The Matilda effect is a bias against acknowledging the achievements of those women scientists whose work is attributed to their male colleagues.

Fri Jul 16

Temporary gentlemen (sometimes abbreviated to TG) is a colloquial term referring to officers of the British Army who held temporary (or war-duration) commissions, particularly when such men came from outside the traditional “officer class”.

Thu Jul 15

Jack Black’s mother, Judith Love Cohen, worked at NASA on the Hubble Space Telescope and the Apollo Space Program

Wed Jul 14

The Revenge dress is a dress once worn by Diana, Princess of Wales. The dress has been interpreted as having been worn “in revenge” for the televised admission of adultery by her husband, Charles, Prince of Wales.

Tue Jul 13

Swaziland was officially renamed Eswatini in 2018
A memory law is a legal provision governing the interpretation of a historical event and showcases the legislator’s or judicial preference for a certain narrative about the past. In the process, competing interpretations may be downplayed, sidelined, or even prohibited.

Mon Jul 12

Ladybugs start out as caterpillar-looking larvae

Sun Jul 11

Wabi-sabi is a world view centered on the acceptance of transience and imperfection. The aesthetic is sometimes described as one of appreciating beauty that is “imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete” in nature.

Sat Jul 10

Nicolas Bourbaki is the collective pseudonym of a group of mathematicians, predominantly French alumni of the École normale supérieure (ENS). Founded in 1934–1935, the Bourbaki group originally intended to prepare a new textbook in analysis. Over time the project became much more ambitious, growing into a large series of textbooks published under the Bourbaki name, meant to treat modern pure mathematics. The series is known collectively as the Éléments de mathématique (Elements of Mathematics), the group’s central work. Topics treated in the series include set theory, abstract algebra, topology, analysis, Lie groups and Lie algebras.

Fri Jul 9

Wagyu beef refers to any cattle that is bred in Japan or the Hapanese style. Kobe beef is actually from the specific Kobe region in Japan (and is therefore a type of wagyu).
There are 423 national park sites, 63 of which are actual National Parks

Thu Jul 8

Scrump - To steal fruit, especially apples, from a garden or orchard
Rapunzel is actually named after the rapunzel plant

Wed Jul 7

Coconut water is the actual liquid contained inside the coconut. Coconut milk comes from the grated pulp of coconuts.

Tue Jul 6

The way that flux works for soldering is that it cleans the PCB/contacts/etc from any oxides and impurities. It also protects metal surfaces from re-oxidizing during soldering.

Mon Jul 5

Plint - a panel between floor and interior wall; a skirting board or baseboard

Sun Jul 4

Steven Seagal’s Wikipedia page is just an interesting read in general

Sat Jul 3

Screed: a long speech or piece of writing, typically one regarded as tedious.

Fri Jul 2

Fennoscandia is (roughly) Finland, Norway and Sweden
Scandinavia is Denmark, Norway and Sweden, and sometimes the Åland Islands, the Faroe Islands, Finland, and Iceland.
The Scandanavian Peninsula is the mainland of Sweden, the mainland of Norway, the northwestern area of Finland, and a sliver of Northwest Russia.

Thu Jul 1

Viviparity is development of the embryo inside the body of the parent. This is opposed to oviparity which is a reproductive mode in which females lay developing eggs that complete their development and hatch externally from the mother.

June 2021

Wed Jun 30

SignWriting is a system of written Sign Language

Tue Jun 29

The Democracy Wall was a long brick wall of Xidan Street, Xicheng District of Beijing, where thousands of people put up posters to protest about the political and social issues of China.

Mon Jun 28

The Clipper chip was a hardware chip developed by the NSA that had a built in backdoor intended for government use. It was introduced in 1993 and completely defunct by 1996. Shocker.

Sun Jun 27

There’s a giraffe chess piece in (variant) chess

Sat Jun 26

Macedonia was renamed North Macedonia in 2019
- Macedonia naming dispute
Agent 355 was the code name of a female spy during the American Revolution, part of the Culper Ring. Agent 355 was one of the first spies for the United States, but her real identity is unknown.

Fri Jun 25

The dining cryptographers problem studies how to perform a secure multi-party computation of the boolean-OR function.

Thu Jun 24

Specifics about Judaism’s milk and meat laws:
- The classical rabbis expressed the opinion that each of the food rules could be waived if the portion of food violating the regulations was less than a certain size, known as a shiur (Hebrew: size, שיעור), unless it was still possible to taste or smell it; for the milk and meat regulations, this minimal size was a ke’zayit (כזית), literally meaning anything “similar to an olive” in size. However, the shiur is merely the minimum amount that leads to formal punishment in the classical era, but even half a shiur is prohibited by the Torah.

Wed Jun 23

Inchoate - being only partly in existence or operation

Tue Jun 22

Gropecunt Lane is a street found in English towns and cities during the Middle Ages, believed to be a reference to the prostitution centred on those areas; it was normal practice for a medieval street name to reflect the street’s function or the economic activity taking place within it.
Place names considered unusual
- Fucking, Upper Austria recently (Jan 2021) changed its name to Fugging
- There’s also Fugging, Lower Austria

Mon Jun 21

Expurgation also known as bowdlerization, is a form of censorship that involves purging anything deemed noxious or offensive from an artistic work, or other type of writing of media.

Sun Jun 20

Worcestershire sauce is not vegetarian as it is made with anchovies

Sat Jun 19

Tumulus is a mound of earth and stones raised over a grave or graves. Tumuli are also known as barrows, burial mounds or kurgans, and may be found throughout much of the world.
A cairn is a pile of stacked stones

Fri Jun 18

The Odagiri affect is a television phenomenon in which a program attracts a larger than expected number of women viewers because the program stars attractive male actors or characters.

Thu Jun 17

Baseball metaphors for sex
- There’s definitely more than I was aware of

Wed Jun 16

A minced oath is an expression used to replace a profane phrase that uses misspelling or mispronouncing to avoid saying the actual phrase.
- E.g. “beyotch”, “cheese and rice”
Different branches of Quakerism

Tue Jun 15

Scotch whisky is always spelled without an e, while Irish whiskey is always spelled with an e.

Mon Jun 14

The Salmon Act 1986 is an act of Parliament which outlines the difference between legal and illegal salmon fishery, among other things. The Act also makes it illegal to “handle salmon in suspicious circumstances”.

Sun Jun 13

License plates in Canada’s Northwest Territories are shaped like polar bears

Sat Jun 12

To toggle a specific key through the command line (like Caps Lock) : xdotool key Caps_Lock

Fri Jun 11

During the Rwandan genocide, Tusti women were deliberately infected with HIV to try to forcefully control the population

Thu Jun 10

Cows don’t convert grass directly into protein, they have bacteria living in their stomachs that eat the grass and die, which the cow then digests into protein

Wed Jun 9

Canoe sprint is a sport in which athletes race canoes or kayaks on calm water. In some of the races the racers are in a kneeling position in the boat.

Tue Jun 8

Wax lyrical - talk in a highly enthusiastic and effusive way

Mon Jun 7

- Meanings of MicroSD markings

Sun Jun 6

The first Costco (kind of, it wasn’t originally called Costco but was turned into a Costco after a merger) opened in 1976 in San Diego

Sat Jun 5

There’s an article about Hitler’s vegetarianism. Also one about animal welfare in Nazi Germany
Reducto ad Hitlerum also known as playing the Nazi card, is an attempt to invalidate someone else’s position on the basis that the same view was held by Adolf Hitler or the Nazi Party.

Fri Jun 4

An embarrassingly parallel problem is a problem where it takes little effort to parallelize it.

Thu Jun 3

Zootopia is called “Zootropolis” in Europe because there was already a Zoo in Denmark that had trademarked the name “Zootopia”

Wed Jun 2

Copyright - Original works of authorship, such as books, articles, songs, photographs, sculptures, choreography, sound recordings, motion pictures, and other works. Lasts for 70 years past the author’s lifetime.
Patent - Inventions, such as processes, machines, manufactures, compositions of matter as well as improvements to these. Lasts 20 years.
Trademark - Any word, phrase, symbol, and/or design that identifies and distinguishes the source of the goods of one party from those of others. Lasts for as long as the mark is used in commerce.

Tue Jun 1

Scaly boy!

May 2021

Mon May 31

There are a lot of landlocked countries that have navies

Sun May 30

I realized that obviously civil engineers spend a lot of time thinking about how to design road barriers, but this video had a lot of interesting information about it

Sat May 29

Water jousting is a sport.

Fri May 28

Leave the gate as you found it is a rule in countryside areas throughout the world. If a gate is found open, it should be left open, and if it is closed, it should be left closed. If a closed gate absolutely must be traversed, it should be closed again afterwards. Leaving a closed gate open can lead to animals escaping or unwanted mingling. Leaving an open gate closed can prevent livestock from accessing water or other resources.
The Country Code are a set of rules for rural areas in the UK

Thu May 27

Egg of Columbus refers to a brilliant idea that seems obvious after the fact. The expression refers to an apocryphal story, dating from at least the 16th century, in which it is said that Christopher Columbus, having been told that finding a new trade route was inevitable and no great accomplishment, challenges his critics to make an egg stand on its tip. After his challengers give up, Columbus does it himself by tapping the egg on the table to flatten its tip.

Wed May 26

US v. Vampire Nation has little to do with actual vampires; the defendant filed the appeal under that name as it was the name of his electronic music group (consisting of only himself).

Tue May 25

Wattle and daub is a composite building method used for making walls and buildings, in which a woven lattice of wooden strips called wattle is daubed with a sticky material usually made of some combination of wet soil, clay, sand, animal dung and straw.

Mon May 24

The main LaTeX document classes:
- article - For articles in scientific journals, presentations, short reports, program documentation, invitations, …
- IEEEtran - For articles with the IEEE Transactions format.
- proc - A class for proceedings based on the article class.
- minimal - It is as small as it can get. It only sets a page size and a base font. It is mainly used for debugging purposes.
- report - For longer reports containing several chapters, small books, thesis, …
- book - For books.
- slides - For slides. The class uses big sans serif letters.
- memoir - For changing sensibly the output of the document. It is based on the book class, but you can create any kind of document with it [1]
- letter - For writing letters.
- beamer - For writing presentations (see LaTeX/Presentations).

Sun May 23

NIST has a library of all mathematical functions

Sat May 22

The US spans 6 time zones, Hawaii and Alaska are each in their own (in terms of states)
Licit: not forbidden; lawful
- I’ve obviously heard ‘illicit’ before but never considered the fact that the opposite word would exist

Fri May 21

Rokus can be controlled with HTTP requests

Thu May 20

A jail tree is a tree used to chain a person up to

Wed May 19

CAPTCHA stands for Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart
Luis von Ahn, the inventor of CAPTCHA, also founded Duolingo

Tue May 18

Verbal arithmetic is a type of mathematical game consisting of a mathematical equation among unknown numbers, whose digits are represented by letters of the alphabet. The goal is to identify the value of each letter. The name can be extended to puzzles that use non-alphabetic symbols instead of letters.

Mon May 17

Psychiatrists are trained medical doctors, they can prescribe medications, and they spend much of their time with patients on medication management as a course of treatment. Psychologists focus extensively on psychotherapy and treating emotional and mental suffering in patients with behavioral intervention.

Sun May 16

A numbers station is a radio station that just broadcasts a bunch of formatted numbers. They’re believed to be use to communicate with intelligence officers, although they could also be used as a distraction to tie people up in trying to “decode” meaningless sequences.

Sat May 15

A tepui is a table-top mountain or mesa found in the Guiana Highlands of South America, especially in Venezuela and western Guyana.

Fri May 14

Sōkaiya are specialized racketeers unique to Japan, and often associated with the yakuza, who extort money from or blackmail companies by threatening to publicly humiliate companies and their management, usually in their annual meeting (総会, sōkai).

Thu May 13

There are two main ways to say ‘tea’ in different languages. They both come from the same character, but are prounounced different ways:
- ‘Te’: From Min, so that country was introduced to tea from Dutch merchants that sailed from China
- ‘Cha’: From Mandarin and Cantonese, so that country was introduced to tea from the Silk Road/land

Wed May 12

Rebracketing is a process in historical linguistics where a word originally derived from one source is broken down or bracketed into a different set of factors. E.g.:
- apron: Middle English a napron taken for an apron
- lone: Middle English al one (all one) taken for a-lone
- nickname: Middle English an eke name (“an additional name”) taken for a neke name

Tue May 11

What we normally think of as jellyfish is just one part of a jellyfish’s life cycle
- One specific species of jellyfish can just keep going through its life cycle over and over by rerverting to a polyp, so they’re basically immortal.
- Jellyfish can reproduce both sexually and asexually (basically by cloning themselves)
- Some jellyfish can grow over 10ft in length
- Jellyfish are mostly water, tentacles, and a digestive system
Submechanophobia is the fear of submerged man-made objects

Mon May 10

Timothy Dexter was an American businessman noted for his writing and eccentricity.
- At the end of the American Revolutionary War, he bought large amounts of depreciated Continental currency that was worthless at the time. At war’s end, the U.S. government made good on its notes at one percent of face value, while Massachusetts paid its own notes at par. His arbitrage enabled him to amass a considerable profit.
- He was advised to send bed warmers—used to heat beds in the cold New England winters—for resale in the West Indies, a tropical area. This advice was a deliberate ploy by rivals to bankrupt him. His ship’s captain sold them as ladles to the local molasses industry and made a handsome profit.
- Next, Dexter sent wool mittens to the same place, where Asian merchants bought them for export to Siberia.
- People jokingly told him to “ship coal to Newcastle”. Fortuitously, he did so during a Newcastle miners’ strike, and his cargo was sold at a premium.
- On another occasion, practical jokers told him he could make money by shipping gloves to the South Sea Islands. His ships arrived there in time to sell the gloves to Portuguese boats on their way to China.
Rabbit-skin glue is a thing, usually used in older paintings/art.
- Sizing is a substance that is applied to, or incorporated into, other materials—especially papers and textiles—to act as a protective filler or glaze.

Sun May 9

Hobby tunneling is tunnel construction as a diversion.

Sat May 8

“I’m not a scientist” is a phrase that has been often used by American politicians, primarily Republicans, when asked about a scientific subject, such as global warming, or the age of the earth.

Fri May 7

A capitonym is a word that changes meaning when it is capitalized
An irreversible binomial is a pair of words that is usually only heard one way and not the other (e.g. mac and cheese)

Thu May 6

IKEA has all of their catalogs, starting in 1950, available online

Wed May 5

The Onion Futures Act is a United States law banning the trading of futures contracts on onions as well as “motion picture box office receipts”.
- I had actually heard of this before but was reminded of it when I learned about the decorative gourd futures guy

Tue May 4

The Anti-PowerPoint Party is a Swiss political party dedicated to decreasing professional use of Microsoft PowerPoint, which the party claims “causes national-economic damage amounting to 2.1 billion CHF” and lowers the quality of a presentation in “95% of the cases”

Mon May 3

Mathpix Snip is a program/add-on that will extract the raw TeX for a screenshot of rendered TeX!

Sun May 2

The Linux Documentation Project

Sat May 1

“The Most Wanted Paintings” are a series of paintings created based on people’s responses to a survey about what they would most like to see in a painting, by Vitaly Komar and Alex Melamid.
- They also did they same thing for songs

April 2021

Fri Apr 30

The Josh fight was a viral internet meme, mock fight, and charity fundraiser at Air Park in Lincoln, Nebraska, on April 24, 2021. The event was originally conceived by a civil engineering student named Josh Swain from Tucson, Arizona on April 24, 2020. Swain encouraged participants of the chat to meet at a set of coordinates and compete for the right to use the name Josh. The event, though initially intended as a joke, drew a crowd of nearly a thousand on the day of the event. Despite the title, the gathering was lighthearted and there was no actual violence involved.

Thu Apr 29

Computer Science from the Bottom Up
A jobsworth is a person who uses the (typically minor) authority of their job in a deliberately uncooperative way, or who seemingly delights in acting in an obstructive or unhelpful manner. It characterizes one who upholds petty rules even at the expense of effectiveness or efficiency.

Wed Apr 28

The space cadet keyboard is more than just a set of popular keycaps
- Knight keyboard
- Lisp machine
A bucky bit is a bit in the binary representation of a character that it set by pressing a modifier key

Tue Apr 27

Project X Haren was an event that started out as a public invitation to a birthday party by a girl on Facebook, but ended up as a gathering of thousands of youths causing riots

Mon Apr 26

Alcohol and Drug Abuse Lake is a reservoir in Richland County, South Carolina, United States. The lake was likely named after a place called Morris Village, a nearby residential treatment center for people with substance dependence.

Sun Apr 25

“Embrace, extend, extinguish” is a phrase that was used internally by Microsoft to describe its strategy for entering product categories involving widely used standards, extending those standards with proprietary capabilities, and then using those differences in order to strongly disadvantage its competitors.
Disparate impact refers to practices in employment, housing, and other areas that adversely affect one group of people of a protected characteristic more than another, even though rules applied by employers or landlords are formally neutral.

Sat Apr 24

CRLF Injection is when a user manages to submit a CRLF into an application. This is most commonly done by modifying an HTTP parameter or URL.
Ansombe’s quartet comprises four data sets that have nearly identical simple descriptive statistics, yet have very different distributions and appear very different when graphed. They have the same mean, sample variance, correlation, etc.

Fri Apr 23

A spite house is a building constructed or substantially modified to irritate neighbors or any party with land stakes. Because long-term occupation is not the primary purpose of these houses, they frequently sport strange and impractical structures.
A ransom strip is a parcel of land needed to access an adjacent property from a public highway, to which the owner is denied access until payment is received.
A holdout is a piece of property that did not become part of a larger real estate development because the owner either refused to sell or wanted more than the developer would pay.

Thu Apr 22

A calque is a word or phrase borrowed from another language by literal word-for-word or root-for-root translation. When used as a verb, “to calque” means to borrow a word or phrase from another language while translating its components, so as to create a new lexeme in the target language.

Wed Apr 21

The Voynich manuscript is an illustrated codex hand-written in an unknown, possibly meaningless writing system. The Voynich manuscript has been studied by many professional and amateur cryptographers, including American and British codebreakers from both World War I and World War II. The manuscript has never been demonstrably deciphered, and none of the many hypotheses proposed over the last hundred years have been independently verified.

Tue Apr 20

Brood parasites are organisms that rely on others to raise their young.

Mon Apr 19

A Z movie is a low-budget film that has qualities lower than a B movie.
A redshirt is a stock character in fiction who dies soon after being introduced.

Sun Apr 18

One of the London bridges is now in Arizona
A mortsafe was a contraption designed to protect graves from disturbance, specifically from medial students.

Sat Apr 17

plonk is a Usenet jargon term for adding a particular poster to one’s kill file so that poster’s future postings are completely ignored.

Fri Apr 16

The Mpemba effect is a catch-all term for possible cases in which hot water appears to freeze faster than cold water. The phenomenon is temperature-dependent. There is disagreement about the parameters required to produce the effect and about its theoretical basis.

Thu Apr 15

Full size SIM cards are the size of a credit card
Data erasure
- Because of wear leveling on SSDs, there are special commands you have to use to actually write 0s to all of the disk

Wed Apr 14

Zulu languages have 3 types of clicks, an ‘x’ click, a ‘c’ click and a ‘q’ click

Tue Apr 13

Largesse - generosity in bestowing money or gifts upon others.

Mon Apr 12

Qualia are individual instances of subjective, conscious experience.

Sun Apr 11

Open Location Code, like What3Words, is a way to identify anywhere on Earth. Google states that plus codes are accepted as postal addresses in Cape Verde, parts of Kolkata, and the Navajo Nation.
Rotated letter

Sat Apr 10

Lignification is the process of becoming wood or woody
Numismatics is the study or collection of currency, including coins, tokens, paper money and related objects.

Fri Apr 9

The plan of action for when Queen Elizabeth II dies is called Operation London Bridge

Thu Apr 8

A finial is a distinctive ornament at the apex of a roof, pinnacle, canopy, or similar structure in a building.
Clandestine - kept secret or done secretively, especially because illicit.
Despondent - in low spirits from loss of hope or courage.

Wed Apr 7

The Wikipedia page for copy protection has lots of interesting examples:
- If a player pirated the Nintendo DS version of Michael Jackson: The Experience, vuvuzela noises will play over the notes during a song, which then become invisible. The game will also freeze if the player tries to pause it.
- Older versions of Autodesk 3ds Max use a dongle for copy protection; if it is missing, the program will randomly corrupt the points of the user’s model during usage, destroying their work.

Tue Apr 6

Initials at the bottom of a (typewriter) typed sheet were usually for <secretary>:<typist>

Mon Apr 5

Me at the zoo is the first video every uploaded to YouTube, featuring founder Jawid Karim talking about elephants at the San Diego Zoo.

Sun Apr 4

Cf. is used in writing to refer the reader to other material to make a comparison with the topic being discussed. Style guides recommend that cf. be used only to suggest a comparison, and the word see be used to point to a source of information.

Sat Apr 3

Wikidata is a huge database that contains metadata about Wikipedia

Fri Apr 2

Irish potato candy is a candy that looks like a potato and contains, coconut cream and is rolled in cinnamon or cocoa powder. It is not Irish and does not contain potatoes.

Thu Apr 1

A junket is another name for a film promotion, e.g. the process of press releases, advertising campaigns, merchandising, franchising, etc.

March 2021

Wed Mar 31

A magic cookie is a token or short packet of data passed between communicating programs, where the data is typically not meaningful to the recipient program. The cookie is often used like a ticket – to identify a particular event or transaction.
- This is the naming basis for web cookies

Tue Mar 30

A xenobot is a synthetic organisms that is automatically designed by computers to perform some desired function and built by combining together different biological tissues.
- They’re name after the African clawed frog Xenopus laevis

Mon Mar 29

Thursday October Christian I was the first child born on the Pitcairn islands after mutineers took refuge on the island. Born on a Thursday in October, he was given his unusual name because Fletcher Christian wanted his son to have “no name that will remind me of England.”

Sun Mar 28

The CR and LF control codes were added to the 1901 Murray code. Similarly, NUL and DEL were introduced in the 1870 Baudot code
- Wiki article about control codes
There’s also a bell character

Sat Mar 27

Port tongs are a special set of tongs designed to open wine bottles that are sealed with a cork. The tongs are heated over an open flame and held against the neck of the wine bottle for 20–30 seconds. The heated section of bottle is then cooled with a damp cloth or ice water, causing the glass to fracture due to thermal expansion. The result is generally a clean, predictable break.
Sabrage is the name for opening a champagne bottle with a saber.

Fri Mar 26

A weiner sausage is a thing in math
- I also just realized that ‘wiener’ means ‘Viennese’ in German

Thu Mar 25

A mass noun is a noun where any quantity of it is treated as an undifferentiated unit.
A plurale tantum is a noun that only appears in the plural form (e.g. scissors).

Wed Mar 24

Milkshake Duck is the name for the phenomenon where people who become popular on the internet for some positive or charming trait are found out to have a history of doing distasteful or offensive things.
dril has a Wikipedia page

Tue Mar 23

Founder’s syndrome is the difficulty faced by organizations, and in particular young companies such as start-ups, where one or more founders maintain disproportionate power and influence following the effective initial establishment of the organization, leading to a wide range of problems. The passion and charisma of the founder(s), often sources of the initial creativity and productivity of the organization, can become limiting or a destructive factor.

Mon Mar 22

The high-vis yellow and blue checkered markings on emergency vehicles are called Battenburg markings
- Battenburg cake is a light sponge cake with different sections held together with jam. The cake is covered in marzipan and, when cut in cross section, displays a distinctive two-by-two check pattern alternately coloured pink and yellow.

Sun Mar 21

Simpson’s paradox is a phenomenon in probability and statistics, in which a trend appears in several different groups of data but disappears or reverses when these groups are combined.
The bamboo ceiling is a term used to describe the combination of individual, cultural, and organizational factors that impede Asian Americans’ career progress inside organizations.

Sat Mar 20

Mary Kenneth Keller was a nun and also the first American woman to get a PhD in computer science (she was only a few hours away from being the first American to get a PhD in computer science).

Fri Mar 19

Pester power is advertising phenomenon where children who are bombarded with marketing tend to pester their parents to buy those things.
In Linux, -- denotes the end of arguments

Thu Mar 18

Indistinguishability obfuscation is a cryptographic primitive that allows users to run a program while still hiding the implementation.
Learning with errors is a… a thing

Wed Mar 17

PETA domain name disputes: In February 1995, a parody website calling itself “People Eating Tasty Animals” registered the domain name “peta.org”. PETA sued, claiming trademark violation, and won the suit in 2001; the domain is currently owned by PETA. While still engaged in legal proceedings over “peta.org”, PETA themselves registered the domains “ringlingbrothers.com” and “voguemagazine.com”, using the sites to accuse Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus and Vogue of animal cruelty.

Tue Mar 16

An antimony pill is a pill made from antimony that was used to “purge and revitalize the bowels”. They were typically reused :|

Mon Mar 15

The sweater curse is a term used by knitters to describe the belief that if a knitter gives a hand-knit sweater to a significant other, it will lead to the recipient breaking up with the knitter.
A toast sandwich is a real thing

Sun Mar 14

A patronymic is a component of a personal name based on the given name of one’s father, grandfather (avonymic), or an earlier male ancestor.
- Patronymic surname

Sat Mar 13

Dené–Yeniseian languages is a proposed language family consisting of the Yeniseian languages of central Siberia and the Na-Dené languages of northwestern North America.
Wikipedia has a list of ongoing armed conflicts

Fri Mar 12

Braille was based on a tactile military code called night writing, developed by Charles Barbier in response to Napoleon’s demand for a means for soldiers to communicate silently at night and without a light source.
New York Point is a braille-like tactile writing systemthat has contactions and common letter pairings

Thu Mar 11

Alicia Boole Stott was the daughter of George Boole and was best known for coining the term “polytope” for a convex solid in four (or more) dimensions, and having an impressive grasp of four-dimensional geometry from a very early age.

Wed Mar 10

Distributed Denial of Secrets is a whistleblower site founded in 2018. Sometimes referred to as a successor to WikiLeaks, it is best known for its June 2020 publication of a large collection of internal police documents, known as BlueLeaks. The group has also published data on Russian oligarchs, fascist groups, shell companies, tax havens, and banking in the Caymans, and has hosted data scraped from Parler in January 2021 and from the February 2021 Gab leak.

Tue Mar 9

Acoustic cryptanalysis is a side channel attack that involves learning information from sounds emitted by a computer or other devices
A rng (no that’s not misspelled) is an algebraic structure that is basically a ring without a multiplicative identity

Mon Mar 8

There’s a lot of research about the shape of the universe (e.g. topological properties)
[In topology, a handlebody is a decomposition of a manifold into standard pieces.

Sun Mar 7

An all-or-nothing transformation is an encyption mode which allows the data to be understood only if all of it is known

Sat Mar 6

There’s a family of languages called the Karen languages

Fri Mar 5

Turbinado sugar is a type of brown sugar, but turbinado sugar is sugar that has been spun in a centrifuge to get rid of most of the natural molasses, while brown sugar has all the natural molasses spun off, then added back.
There’s a Wikipedia article for the “Eyebrows” Cadbury commercial

Thu Mar 4

Japanese adult adoption is a thing
- Consanguinity is the property of being from the same kinship as another person. In that aspect, consanguinity is the quality of being descended from the same ancestor as another person.

Wed Mar 3

Wikipedia has a list of media that’s famous for being in development hell

Tue Mar 2

Emboss means to raise the design from the material, while debossing is the opposite effect
ILOVEYOU was a computer worm that infected over ten million Windows personal computers on and after 5 May 2000 when it started spreading as an email message with the subject line “ILOVEYOU” and the attachment “LOVE-LETTER-FOR-YOU.txt.vbs”.

Mon Mar 1

Seedfeeder is the pseudonym of an illustrator known for contributing sexually explicit drawings to Wikipedia. Between 2008 and 2012, the artist created 48 depictions of various sex acts. Seedfeeder’s illustrations garnered negative and positive reactions: some Wikipedia editors claimed they contained racist and sexist undertones, while Andy Cush of Gawker called him “Wikipedia’s greatest artist of sex acts”.

February 2021

Sun Feb 28

Truce term is a word or short phrase accepted within a community of children as an effective way of calling for a temporary respite or truce during a game or activity, such as tag or its variants.

Sat Feb 27

Wikipedia has a list of all of the equivalents of “it’s all Greek to me” in other languages
- Someone made a directed graph of these relationships
- The Steagles was a team created for the 1943 NFL season because of roster shortages, made of players from the Philadelphia Eagles and the Pittsburgh Steelers

Fri Feb 26

An illegal prime is a prime number that represents data that is illegal to posses or transmit
- It’s a special case of an illegal number
- One example is DeCSS, a program that could circumvent DVDs’ copyright protections

Thu Feb 25

The “nothing to hide” argument is an argument often used against privacy, claiming that “I don’t need to worry about privacy because I have nothing to hide”

Wed Feb 24

Wrongful birth is a legal cause of action in some common law countries in which the parents of a congenitally diseased child claim that their doctor failed to properly warn of their risk of conceiving or giving birth to a child with serious genetic or congenital abnormalities.
Wrongful life is the name given to a legal action in which someone is sued by a severely disabled child (through the child’s legal guardian) for failing to prevent the child’s birth. Typically, a child and the child’s parents will sue a doctor or a hospital for failing to provide information about the disability during the pregnancy, or a genetic disposition before the pregnancy. Had the mother been aware of this information, it is argued, she would have had an abortion, or chosen not to conceive at all.

Tue Feb 23

Taxicab geometry is a form of geometry where distance is measured by the total sum of the absolute differences of their coordinates. More simply, the amound of streets a taxi would have to go on to traverse across city blocks.
Scry: to foretell the future using a crystal ball or other reflective object or surface

Mon Feb 22

The Vito Russo test is a test similar to the Bechdel test where in order for a piece of media to pass, the following must be true:
- The film contains a character that is identifiably lesbian, gay, bisexual, and/or transgender.
- That character must not be solely or predominantly defined by their sexual orientation or gender identity. i.e. they are made up of the same sort of unique character traits commonly used to differentiate straight characters from one another.
- The LGBTQ character must be tied into the plot in such a way that their removal would have a significant effect. Meaning they are not there to simply provide colorful commentary, paint urban authenticity, or (perhaps most commonly) set up a punchline. The character should “matter.”
Similarly, the Deggans’ rule has the following requirements for a piece of media to pass:
- At least two non-white human characters in the main cast… -…in a show that’s not about race.
There is a similar test for talking about women scientists in the news, the Finkbeiner test which has the following requirements for an article to pass:
- To pass the test, an article about a female scientist must not mention:
  - That she is a woman
  - Her husband’s job
  - Her childcare arrangements
  - How she nurtures her underlings
  - How she was taken aback by the competitiveness in her field
  - How she is a role model for other women
  - How she’s the “first woman to…”
Also related: Johanson analysis, Smurfette principle, Mary Sue, Gamine, Manic Pixie Dream Girl, Magical Negro, Noble savage

Sun Feb 21

There are dozens of barcode systems, including both one and two dimensional varieties

Sat Feb 20

The Zone of Death is a section of Yellowstone National Park where a criminal could theoretically not be prosecuted due to the fact that they could not have a jusry made of their peers (since nobody lived in that portion of the park)

Fri Feb 19

Because of discrepancies in interpreting Base64, you can input padding characters (====) between each chunk and still generate valid Base64

Thu Feb 18

A sponson is a projection from the sides of vehicles to provide protection, stability, storage, or mounting space.

Wed Feb 17

Catullus 16 is a Latin poem that was considered so explicit that a full English translation was not published until the late twentieth century. The first line has been called “one of the filthiest expressions ever written in Latin—or in any other language, for that matter.”

Tue Feb 16

There are an alarming number of anumals with fraudulent diplomas

Mon Feb 15

A fairy ring is a naturally occuring ring of mushrooms

Sun Feb 14

A patois is speech or language that is considered nonstandard, although the term is not formally defined in linguistics. As such, patois can refer to pidgins, creoles, dialects or vernaculars, but not commonly to jargon or slang, which are vocabulary-based forms of cant.
A pidgin language is a grammatically simplified means of communication that develops between two or more groups that do not have a language in common: typically, its vocabulary and grammar are limited and often drawn from several languages.
A creole language is a stable natural language that develops from the simplifying and mixing of different languages into a new one within a fairly brief period of time: often, a pidgin evolved into a full-fledged language.

Sat Feb 13

You can use the listings LaTeX package to input inline code
- Use \begin{lstlisting} and \end{lstlisting} and put code in between or,
- Use \lstinputlisting[language=foo]{bar.foo} to input it directly from the file bar.foo

Fri Feb 12

The jelly bean rule is a rule that says that just because foods are low in fat, cholesterol, and sodium, they cannot claim to be “healthy” unless they contain at least 10 percent of the Daily Value of: vitamin A, vitamin C, calcium, protein, fiber, or iron. The FDA also made a policy that companies could not fortify foods with the sole intent of making that claim.

Thu Feb 11

Words that have 2 opposite meaning are called contronyms (among other names), but I can’t figure out the name for words that look like opposites but mean the same thing (flammable/inflammable, bone/debone, caregiver/caretaker)
A skunked term is a word that becomes difficult to use because it transitions from one meaning to another

Wed Feb 10

Ogham is an early alphavet used to write early Irish
- Forfeda are the “additional” letters of the Ogham alphabet

Tue Feb 9

The Universal nut sheller is a nut shelling machine that costs less than $10 to make and can shell up to 126lbs of peanuts per hour

Mon Feb 8

A spherical cow is a metaphor for extremely simplified scientific models of real life phenomena.
“Assume a can opener” is a catchphrase used to mock economists and other theorists who base their conclusions on unjustified or oversimplified assumptions.

Sun Feb 7

A Kafkatrap is a rhetorical device in which any denial by an accused person serves as evidence of guilt

Sat Feb 6

Chaffing and winnowing is a cryptographic technique that involves hiding sensitive data within extraneous data that the receiver must then remove

Fri Feb 5

Post hoc ergo propter hoc is a fallacy that states: “Since event Y followed event X, event Y must have been caused by event X.”
Considered harmful is a part of a phrasal template “X considered harmful”. As of 2009, its snowclones have been used in the titles of at least 65 critical essays in computer science and related disciplines. Its use in this context originated with a 1968 letter by Edsger Dijkstra published as “Go To Statement Considered Harmful”.
- Snowclone is a cliché and phrasal template that can be used and recognized in multiple variants.

Thu Feb 4

Dystheism is the belief that a god is not wholly good and is possibly evil
Misotheism is the “hatred of God” or “hatred of the gods”
Gnosticism is a collection of religious ideas and systems that emphasised personal spiritual knowledge (gnosis) over the orthodox teachings, traditions, and authority of the church. Viewing material existence as flawed or evil, Gnostic cosmogony generally presents a distinction between a supreme, hidden God and a malevolent lesser divinity (sometimes associated with the Yahweh of the Old Testament) who is responsible for creating the material universe.

Wed Feb 3

Stephanie “Steve” Shirley was a female computer scientist who started a software company in 1962 called Freelance Programmers that employed over 300 women (including mothers, gay women and trans women). When the Sex Discrimination Act 1975 was enacted, she actually had to hire a bunch of men so she was not in violation of the act. She also adopted the name “Steve” to help her in the male-dominated business world, given that company letters signed using her real name were not responded to.

Tue Feb 2

Longlisting (as opposed to shortlisting) is the process of being added to a list that will later be whittled down (the shortlist)
Differential privacy is a system for sharing information about a dataset without exposing information about the individuals in the dataset

Mon Feb 1

Apollo insurance covers were letters and envelopes that the Apollo astronauts signed to use in place of life insurance (since nobody wanted to insure them) in case they died. The assumption was that if they died during the mission, these covers would be come so valuable that their families would be able to sell them and get as much money as they would have from life insurance.

January 2021

Sun Jan 31

A catenary is the shape made by a chain hanging from two ends.
Entoptic phenomenon are visual effects whose source is from within the eye itself.

Sat Jan 30

A fossil word is a word that is almost obsolete but is only used because it is part of an idiom
An eponym is a person, place, or thing after whom or which someone or something is, or is believed to be, named.

Fri Jan 29

Thu Jan 28

A Googlewhack is a contest where you try to find a Google Search query where there is only one result
A donkey sentence is a sentence that contains a pronoun with clear meaning (it is bound semantically) but whose syntactical role in the sentence poses challenges to grammarians.
A garden path sentence is a grammatically correct sentence that starts in such a way that a reader’s most likely interpretation will be incorrect; the reader is lured into a parse that turns out to be a dead end or yields a clearly unintended meaning.

Wed Jan 27

Wikipedia has a list of writing systems
- Abjad is a type of writing system where each symbol or glyph stands for a consonant, in effect leaving it to readers to infer or otherwise supply an appropriate vowel.

Tue Jan 26

Wisdom of the crowd is the phenomenon where the average answer of multiple people in a group is often more accurate than any single member of the group
Walgreens and Boots are both owned by the same company

Mon Jan 25

Ecash is an anonymous electronic money system (Bitcoin, etc. is not anonymous)

Sun Jan 24

Aoshima is an island in Japan that currently has a ratio of cats to residents of almost 36:1 (only 6 people still live on the island).

Sat Jan 23

Auxetics are structures or materials that have a negative Poisson’s ratio. When stretched, they become thicker perpendicular to the applied force.

Fri Jan 22

“He never married” was a phrase commonly used by obituary writers in the United Kingdom as a euphemism for the deceased having been homosexual.

Thu Jan 21

The candy bar protest was a protest by Canadian children in 1947 over the price of chocolate bars being raised from 5 cents to 8 cents.

Wed Jan 20

There are a ton of cities and places with “Silicon” in the name (a la Silicon Valley)

Tue Jan 19

The singular ‘they’ has been used since the 14th century.
Epicenity is the lack of gender distinction

Mon Jan 18

Sealioning is a type of trolling that consists of pestering people with repeated questions while maintaining a guise of politeness and sincerity. The goal is to erode the patience or goodwill of the target to the point where they appear unreasonable.
The Gish gallop is a technique in which a debater attempts to overwhelm an opponent by excessive number of arguments, without regard for the accuracy or strength of those arguments.
Brandolini’s law states that “The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude larger than to produce it”.
A Chewbacca defense is a legal strategy in which a criminal defense lawyer tries to confuse the jury rather than refute the case of the prosecutor.

Sun Jan 17

Norway is not part of the European Union
A panopticon is a type of prison where one guard can see all of the prisoners at (almost) the same time, and none of the prisoners know when they are being watched.

Sat Jan 16

Squinting works because you are reducing the amount of light into your eye, allowing in only a small amount of focused light
The only countries in Europe that have yellow license plates (for normal cars) are the Netherlands and Luxembourg
- Vehicle registration plates of Europe

Fri Jan 15

The ¶ character is called a pilcrow

Thu Jan 14

A vacuous truth is a conditional statement that is only true because the initial part of the statement is impossible to satisfy.
A double-barreled question is a question that asks about two issues but only allows for one answer

Wed Jan 13

The Wikipedia article for email storm has some pretty insane stories:
- On 31 March 1987, Jordan Hubbard, using rwall, intended to message every machine at UC Berkeley, but the message was sent to every machine on the internet. This message was not an email.
- On 7 December 2018, the Utah state government experienced an email storm originating in a holiday potluck invite that was mistakenly sent to 25,000 state employees, nearly the entire state workforce. Utah Lt. Gov. Spencer Cox called it “an emergency”.

Tue Jan 12

Wikipedia has a very helpful list of dips

Mon Jan 11

The politician’s syllogism is the logical fallacy of the form
- We must do something
- This is something
- Therefore, we must do this.

Sun Jan 10

Wikipedia has a list of all the famous public signage typefaces

Sat Jan 9

On the PS1/PSX, the region data was encoded in the discs through different frequencies of wobbles etched into the grooves

Fri Jan 8

The Cutting Room Floor is a site that indexes unused and cut content from video games.

Thu Jan 7

A camouflage passport is a passport-like document issued in the name of a non-existent country or location.
- A famous examples is the World Passport

INTERMISSION - WINTER BREAK

December 2020

Wed Dec 23

A bezoar is a mass found trapped in the gastrointestinal system. Gross.

Tue Dec 22

Tulip mania was a period during the Dutch Golden Age when contract prices for some bulbs of the recently introduced and fashionable tulip reached extraordinarily high levels, and then dramatically collapsed in February 1637. It is generally considered to have been the first recorded speculative bubble in history.

Mon Dec 21

A topological game is an infinite game of perfect information played between two players on a topological space. Players choose objects with topological properties such as points, open sets, closed sets and open coverings. Time is generally discrete, but the plays may have transfinite lengths, and extensions to continuum time have been put forth. The conditions for a player to win can involve notions like topological closure and convergence. It doesn’t seem very fun.

Sun Dec 20

Joseph Darby was a world renowned jumper who often did trick jumps for show. The Pittsburgh Press in November 1893 listed the following jumps in Darby’s repertoire:
- Jumps over twenty chairs placed ten feet apart.
- Jumps over six chairs in one jump.
- Clears two chairs 18 ft apart.
- Jumps off one brick, end up, over a chair, lands on another brick end up, and backwards without knocking the bricks down.
- Jumps on to a man’s face while lying down and off again without hurting the man.
- Jumps 36 ft in three successive jumps and in the third jump lands on a man’s back, whilst he is lying across the edge of two chairs, and off again without hurting him.
- Jumps off one brick, end up, over a horse 15 hands high.

Sat Dec 19

The paper bit on a Hershey’s kiss is called the plume

Fri Dec 18

Milquetoast: Meek, timid; lacking character or effectiveness. From the character Caspar Milquetoast of the comic strip The Timid Soul.
Milk toast is actually a thing though??

Thu Dec 17

The 1984 Rajneeshee bioterror attack, where salad bars at local restaurants were contaminated with Salmonella in hopes of incapacitating voters ahead of the county elections, was the first and largest bioterrorist attack in US history.

Wed Dec 16

The shortest war ever was the Anglo-Zanzibar war, which lasted only 38 minutes.

Tue Dec 15

Larry is a cat that serves as Chief Mouser to the Cabinet Office at 10 Downing Street.

Mon Dec 14

The phrase ‘going postal’ originates from a series of incidents from 1986 onward in which United States Postal Service (USPS) workers shot and killed managers, fellow workers, and members of the police or general public in acts of mass murder.

Sun Dec 13

All maps to the empty set are bijections, because the only function that maps to the empty set is the identity mapping from the empty set to itself, which is a bijection.

Sat Dec 12

Foreign accent syndrome is a medical condition in which patients develop speech patterns that are perceived as a foreign accent that is different from their native accent, without having acquired it in the perceived accent’s place of origin.

Fri Dec 11

Thankful Villages are settlements in England and Wales where all residents that served in WWI survived. There are currently 53 identified.
- 14 are doubly thankful - all their residents who served in WWII also survived

Thu Dec 10

James Buckley, who played Jay on the Inbetweeners has a Twitch channel aplty named ‘CompletedItMate’

Wed Dec 9

There are giant server-rack sized matrix switches that connect a BUNCH of different video inputs/outputs together

Tue Dec 8

Diegesis is a style of fiction storytelling that presents an interior view of a world in which:
- Details about the world itself and the experiences of its characters are revealed explicitly through narrative.
- The story is told or recounted, as opposed to shown or enacted.
- There is a presumed detachment from the story of both the speaker and the audience.

Mon Dec 7

“Nickelodeon” was the name for the first kind of theaters. Its name came from “nickel” (the price of a movie) and “odeion”, Greek for a roofed-over theater.
Sleeve garters (the bands men wore on their upper arms in early 1900s) were used to keep the sleeves of the single sized shirts of the time at the right length.

Sun Dec 6

There’s a speedrunning community for sharpening pencils

Sat Dec 5

Seeds can be patented and protected
- There are initiatives like OSSI that aim to combat this

Fri Dec 4

The BBC has their own personal backup of every television and radio broadcast they have output since around 2007, which is several petabytes in size.

Thu Dec 3

The Aral Sea, once the fourth largest lake in the world, has been shrinking since the 60s, when rivers that fed it were diverted for Soviet irrigation projects.

Wed Dec 2

The term “ricing”, used to describe customizing your computer setup (usually involving Linux), comes from the car modding scene. There, the term came from ”rice burner” - a pejorative term originally applied to Japanese motorcycles and which later expanded to include Japanese cars or any East Asian-made vehicles.

Tue Dec 1

The “Luling Effect” is something that happens in Austin where there’s a natural gas smell in the air. The odor comes from the oil fields in Luling and Lockhart: when we have a cold, still night, that sulfur smell collects at the ground instead of dissipating like normal, so in the morning the wind brings up the smell and it spreads across the city.

November 2020

Mon Nov 30

Benford’s law states that in many naturally occurring collections of numbers, the leading digit is likely to be small. In sets that obey the law, the number 1 appears as the leading significant digit about 30% of the time, while 9 appears as the leading significant digit less than 5% of the time.

Sun Nov 29

A trencher was originally a piece of (usually stale) bread that was used as a plate during medieval times

Sat Nov 28

The Human Interference Task Force was a team of engineers, anthropologists, nuclear physicists, behavioral scientists and others convened on behalf of the U.S. Department of Energy and Bechtel Corp. to find a way to reduce the likelihood of future humans unintentionally intruding on radioactive waste isolation systems. Specifically, the task force was to research the use of long-time warning messages to prevent future access to the planned, but stalled, deep geological nuclear repository project of Yucca Mountain.
Long-time nuclear waste warning messages are intended to deter human intrusion at nuclear waste repositories in the far future, within or above the order of magnitude of 10,000 years. They are intended to warn people of the dangers regardless of linguistic ability or cultural influence.

Fri Nov 27

Thu Nov 26

A 99 Flake is a soft serve ice cream with a Cadbury Flake in it
The boy Jones was a British teenager who became notorious for breaking into Buckingham Palace multiple times between 1838 and 1841.

Wed Nov 25

Soup is where the contents are more liquid than solid, and stew is the opposite.
Key Wrap constructions are a class of symmetric encryption algorithms designed to encrypt cryptographic key material.

Tue Nov 24

There’s a machine at the Exploratorium in San Francisco that consists of so many gear reductions that the final gear is embedded in concrete yet causes no problems
There’s a statue in Hiroshima made up of cog wheels that speeds up whenever nuclear weapons are tested. If the cog wheel speed sup too much, it will cause the clock to self destruct.

Mon Nov 23

Imbroglio: an extremely confused, complicated, or embarrassing situation.

Sun Nov 22

Test Card F is a test card used by the BBC that was the first to be broadcast in color in the UK and the first to feature a person.

Sat Nov 21

When large amounts of candy are spilled, spoiled, or otherwise ruined, they are often sold to farmers to use as cheap feed for their animals.

Fri Nov 20

In Atom, you can use CTRL + UP/DOWN to move entire lines up or down in order

Thu Nov 19

Voix céleste is an organ stop consisting of either one or two ranks of pipes slightly out of tune. The term celeste refers to a rank of pipes detuned slightly so as to produce a beating effect when combined with a normally tuned rank.
This is probably obvious, but a beat is a sort of combination of two waves.

Wed Nov 18

There’s a list of soups!

Tue Nov 17

Dasein is a German word that means “being there” or “presence” (German: da “there”; sein “to be”), and is often translated into English with the word “existence”. It is a fundamental concept in the existential philosophy of Martin Heidegger. Heidegger uses the expression Dasein to refer to the experience of being that is peculiar to human beings.

Mon Nov 16

Russian political jokes are a part of Russian humour and can be grouped into the major time periods: Imperial Russia, Soviet Union and finally post-Soviet Russia.

Sun Nov 15

Buttock mail was the colloquial term for a Scottish Poor Law tax which was introduced in 1595. Enforced by the ecclesiastical courts, buttock mail was levied as a fine for sexual intercourse out of wedlock.

Sat Nov 14

A massive astrophysical compact halo object (MACHO) is any kind of astronomical body that might explain the apparent presence of dark matter in galaxy halos.
Strongly interacting massive particles (SIMPs) are hypothetical particles that interact strongly between themselves and weakly with ordinary matter, but could form the inferred dark matter despite this.
Weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs) are hypothetical particles that are one of the proposed candidates for dark matter.

Fri Nov 13

Democracy sausage is a type of sausage that Australians often get after they go vote (usually as part of a fundraiser)

Thu Nov 12

Anthimeria is using one part of speech as another, such as using a noun as a verb: “The little old lady turtled along the road.” In linguistics, this is called conversion; when a noun becomes a verb, it is a denominal verb, when a verb becomes a noun, it is a deverbal noun.
- Denominal verb
- Deverbal noun
Antimetabole is the repetition of words in successive clauses, but in transposed order; for example, “I know what I like, and I like what I know”.
Symploce is a figure of speech in which a word or phrase is used successively at the beginning of two or more clauses or sentences and another word or phrase with a similar wording is used successively at the end of them. It is the combination of anaphora and epistrophe.
Verbification is the creation of a verb from a noun, adjective or other word.

Wed Nov 11

“It ain’t over till the fat lady sings” comes from the ending of Wagner’s opera Der Ring des Nibelungen. The “fat lady” is the valkyrie Brünnhilde, who was traditionally presented as a very buxom lady. Her farewell scene lasts almost twenty minutes and leads directly to the finale of the whole Ring Cycle.

Tue Nov 10

Saccular acoustic sensitivity is a measurement of the ear’s affectability to sound. Saccular acoustic sensitivity has a variety physiological as well as mental/emotional effects. Perhaps the most observable physical response is goose bumps. Certain sounds, such as fingernails drawn down a blackboard, cause strong feelings of aversion or even fear in most humans.

Mon Nov 9

‘Lay down’ is used to refer to laying down other objects. ‘Lie’ down is used to refer to you yourself going to lie down.

Sun Nov 8

*Anatopism* - An anatopism is something that is out of its proper place.
*Path dependence* - Path dependence is when the decisions presented to people are dependent on prior decisions or experiences made in the past.
*Presentism* - In literary and historical analysis, presentism is the anachronistic introduction of present-day ideas and perspectives into depictions or interpretations of the past.

Sat Nov 7

LanguageSquad is an online game similar to GeoGuessr: it plays audio of someone speakinng and you have to guess the language. You can also have it quiz you on different alphabet systems.

Fri Nov 6

The cp command natively supports hardlinking instead of actually copying (useful for hardlinking files between different git workspaces)
- cp -al dirA dirB

Thu Nov 5

Stambovsky vs. Ackley commonly known as the Ghostbusters ruling, is a case in the New York Supreme Court held that held that a house, which the owner had previously advertised to the public as haunted by ghosts, legally was haunted for the purpose of an action for rescission brought by a subsequent purchaser of the house

Wed Nov 4

Physics envy is a phrase used to criticize the overused, complicated mathematical jargon that is used in softer science, liberal arts, etc. to seem more rigorous (like physics).

Tue Nov 3

Eye-rolling has been present in literature since at least the 16th century
Bluster: talk in a loud, aggressive, or indignant way with little effect (verb) or loud, aggressive, or indignant talk with little effect (noun)

Mon Nov 2

PAL runs at roughly 25 FPS while NTSC runs at roughlt 30 FPS, meaning that when you play video games on PAL, it’s running at roughly 5/6 the speed of NTSC and therefore seems slower. In older games like Mario Kart 64 that didn’t account for this, this lead to the same race time differing between regions.

Sun Nov 1

You can create a pseudo-esolang using operators and =undefined=s in JavaScript
The main difference between apt and apt-get is that apt is more user-oriented while apt-get is now more useful for scripts/parsing

October 2020

Sat Oct 31

Pablum: bland or insipid intellectual fare, entertainment
- Named after a processed baby cereal

Fri Oct 30

Google got its data for Google Maps from the US Census Bureau. This is then augmented and corrected manually, with the data from Google Maps cars, and with feedback from users.

Thu Oct 29

Some abolsute wizards are working on a Super Mario Sunshine ROMhack for Super Mario 64 DS.

Wed Oct 28

The logo in the Discord logo is named Clyde

Tue Oct 27

Jelly: Jelly is made with strained fruit juice. There are no pieces of fruit in jelly.
Jam: Jam is made with mashed fruit.
Preserves: Preserves have whole fruit or large pieces of fruit. Some fruits such as blackberries or raspberries will not stay whole during the processing so there may not be much difference between raspberry jam and raspberry preserve.
Fruit spreads (only fruit): These are 100% fruit with no sugar added. If needed, a sweet fruit juice such as white grape juice or apple juice may be added. Because of the sugar in the fruit we cannot call these products sugarless. These spreads offer the most amount of pure fruit flavor.
Butters: Butters are made from pureed fruit. They are not as sweet as preserves, jams, or jellies but offer a full fruit flavor. Butters are cooked for over 6 hours ,at a low temperature, allowing the product to thicken. Butters tend to be dark because of the exposure to air during the cooking. These are also available with no sugar added.

Mon Oct 26

The moon is wet
On the other hand, a wet moon is the visual phenomenon when the “horns” of the crescent Moon point up at an angle, away from the horizon, so that the crescent takes on the appearance of a bowl or smile.

Sun Oct 25

The Mulford act is a 1967 California bill that repealed a law allowing public carrying of loaded firearms. with the goal of disarming the Black Panthers. It was heavily supported by the NRA, because they weren’t too happy that people who didn’t look like them were exercising the same rights that they did.

Sat Oct 24

Pound cake is called pound cake because it requires a pound each of the four ingredients: flour, butter, eggs and sugar.

Fri Oct 23

A man walked across the whole of Wales in a straight(ish) line

Thu Oct 22

While streaming audio in Discord doesn’t work natively on Linux, you can route your audio output through your mic as a temporary fix.

Wed Oct 21

Since fluids behave differently in space, you have to use very specifically shaped coffee cups

Tue Oct 20

To wax poetic is to become increasingly verbose

Mon Oct 19

Pizza to the Polls delivers pizzas to people waiting in really long polling lines!

Sun Oct 18

Classical vs Acoustic Guitar
- Classical: Nylon strings, wider neck, inner tuning peg
- Acoustic: Steel strings, smaller neck, outer tuning peg

Sat Oct 17

Pecuniary: relating to or consisting of money.

Fri Oct 16

Mandarins vs clementines vs tangerines
- Oranges are second in size to the grapefruit. This citrus fruit has a thick skin, is round in shape, and has a tart flavor.
- Mandarins are a type of orange and the overarching category that Tangerines, Clementines, and Satsumas fall into. They are generally smaller and sweeter than oranges, a little flatter in shape, and they and have a thinner, looser skin that makes them easier to peel.
- Tangerines are a specific type of mandarin orange. They are a bright orange color, slightly tougher skins, and their flavor is a little less sweet and a bit more tart.
- Clementines are the smallest type of mandarin orange. They are super sweet, seedless, and have red-orange skins that are smooth and shiny. The mandarins you see in grocery stores called Cuties and Sweeties are Clementines. They are easier to peel than tangerines, but not as easy to peel as Satsumas.
- Satsuma Mandarins are a specific type of mandarin orange, originating in Japan more than 700 years ago. They are a lighter orange, sweet, juicy, and seedless. They are also the easiest variety to peel. The most tender, easily damaged type of mandarin, Satsuma mandarin oranges are harder to find fresh in stores.

Thu Oct 15

Wikipedia has a list of guitars

Wed Oct 14

Carcinisation is an example of convergent evolution in which a crustacean evolves into a crab-like form from a non-crab-like form.
Polemic: a strong verbal or written attack on someone or something.

Tue Oct 13

Talmud vs Torah: The Jewish belief is that Moses received the Torah as a written text alongside a commentary: the Talmud. The Talmud is considered the oral traditions that coincide with the Torah. It is a depiction of the primary codification of the Jewish decrees. It explains the written texts of the Torah so that people know how to apply it to their lives.

Mon Oct 12

Canadian Holidays Explained is, well, a website that explains Canadian holidays.

Sun Oct 11

Apocryphal: of doubtful authenticity, although widely circulated as being true.
The Five Eyes is an intelligence alliance comprising Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States.

Sat Oct 10

Trix yogurt came after Trix cereal
Also, Trix cereal was originally just ball shaped. In 1991 they changed to the fruit shaped pieces, then reverted to balls again in 2007. Eventually in 2019 they returned to the fruit shapes.

Fri Oct 9

Chicken George (politics) was a campaign tactic in the 1992 U.S. presidential election, where one or more people in chicken costumes heckled President George H. W. Bush over his refusal to participate in a debate with Democratic candidate Bill Clinton.

Thu Oct 8

Wikipedia has a list of wheel-well stowaway flights. Of the 113 people having been recorded doing this, 86 of them died.

Wed Oct 7

A flugelhorn is a brass instrument played by trumpet players primarily in jazz music and sometimes in chamber settings. It is pitched in Bb. A mellophone is a forward facing french horn played by french horn players in a marching band. It is pitched in F. Mellophones are larger and MUCH heavier.

Tue Oct 6

Polar bear jail is a special building in Churchill, Manitoba where polar bears that are considered troublesome or dangerous are isolated before they can be relocated.

Mon Oct 5

A ludic loop is the cycle of doing the same thing again and again because you get just enough reward to keep you coming back

Sun Oct 4

It’s FOSS has a category of articles where they explain Linux Jargon

Sat Oct 3

Wikipedia has a list of scholarly publishing stings. These are nonsense papers that were accepted by an academic journal or academic conference; the list does not include cases of scientific misconduct. The intent of such publications is typically to expose shortcomings in a journal’s peer review process or to criticize the standards of pay-to-publish journals.

Fri Oct 2

Milk cars are a specialized type of railroad car intended to transport raw milk from collection points near dairy farms to a processing creamery. Some milk cars were intended for loading with multiple cans of milk, while others were designed with a single tank for bulk loading. Milk cars were often equipped with high-speed passenger trucks, passenger-type buffer plates, and train signal and steam lines seldom found on conventional refrigerator cars.

Thu Oct 1

The Damm algorithm is a check digit algorithm that detects all single-digit errors and all adjacent transposition errors. It was presented by H. Michael Damm in 2004.
The Verhoeff algorithm is a checksum formula for error detection developed by the Dutch mathematician Jacobus Verhoeff and was first published in 1969. It was the first decimal check digit algorithm which detects all single-digit errors, and all transposition errors involving two adjacent digits, which was at the time thought impossible with such a code.

September 2020

Wed Sep 30

The cat state, named after Schrödinger’s cat, is a quantum state that is composed of two diametrically opposed conditions at the same time, such as the possibilities that a cat be alive and dead at the same time.

Tue Sep 29

Missing white woman syndrome is a term used by social scientists and media commentators to refer to extensive media coverage, especially in television, of missing person cases involving young, white, upper-middle-class women or girls.
Gray goo is a hypothetical global catastrophic scenario involving molecular nanotechnology in which out-of-control self-replicating machines consume all biomass on Earth while building more of themselves, a scenario that has been called ecophagy (“eating the environment”, more literally “eating the habitation”).

Mon Sep 28

The Chaocipher is a cipher method invented by John Francis Byrne in 1918 and described in his 1953 autobiographical Silent Years. He believed Chaocipher was simple, yet unbreakable. Byrne stated that the machine he used to encipher his messages could be fitted into a cigar box. He offered cash rewards for anyone who could solve it.
Solitaire is a cryptographic algorithm was designed by Bruce Schneier at the request of Neal Stephenson for use in his novel Cryptonomicon, in which field agents use it to communicate securely without having to rely on electronics or having to carry incriminating tools. It was designed to be a manual cryptosystem calculated with an ordinary deck of playing cards.

Sun Sep 27

In the N door case of the Monty Hall problem, it’s always to the player’s advantage to switch doors

Sat Sep 26

The reason that the Monty Hall problem gives you a 2/3 chance of being correct when you switch doors doesn’t have much to do with the door being revealed - assuming your switch, your probability is already set when you pick your first door. This is because originally, you have a 2/3 chance of picking a goat. If the door you choose has a goat, and Monty reveals the goat in the 3rd door, then the car must be behind the door you didn’t choose. Thus you should switch because you know where the car is. 1/3 of the time, you pick the door with the car. When you switch, you switch to the door with another goat. But, this only happens 1/3 of the time, so it’s to your advantage to switch every time, because you most likely picked the goat the first time.
- With 4 doors, switching gives you a 3/8 chance of winning

Fri Sep 25

To remove all commits from a project from an author, you can make a new branch and then cherry pick all of the commits that weren’t made by that author:
- git log --author "<name>" --invert-grep --reverse --format“format:%H” HEAD..master | xargs git cherry-pick=

Thu Sep 24

A Shannon is another name for a bit

Wed Sep 23

There’s really not much difference between MicroSD cards and TF cards

Tue Sep 22

The gpl-violations.org project is a project that aims to raise awareness about GPL license infringement.

Mon Sep 21

Cockygate was a whole ordeal that happened after an author trademarked the word “cocky”

Sun Sep 20

Colombian women would encode messages into hair with different braids

Sat Sep 19

IBM’s technology was used to facilitate genocide during the Holocaust
- More info
Volvo made their patent for the 3 point seatbelt available to all

Fri Sep 18

You can add metadata to a PNG image using ImageMagick convert: convert IN.png -set 'Title' 'Foobar' OUT.png

Thu Sep 17

PPM and PGM are two simple file formats for color and grayscale pictures respectively

Wed Sep 16

Mise-en-scène is the stage design and arrangement of actors in scenes for a theatre or film production, both in visual arts through storyboarding, visual theme, and cinematography, and in narrative storytelling through direction.

Tue Sep 15

Uptalk is when your rise in inflection at the end of your sentence
Vocal fry is the lowest vocal register and is produced through a loose glottal closure that permits air to bubble through slowly with a popping or rattling sound of a very low frequency.

Mon Sep 14

The Quantum Zeno effect allows you to force a qubit to stay in a certain position by measuring it frequently enough

Sun Sep 13

17% of Americans live in the Bos-Wash Corridor

Sat Sep 12

A dead metaphor is a figure of speech which has lost the original imagery of its meaning due to extensive, repetitive, and popular usage.
- E.g.: to “hang up” the phone

Fri Sep 11

To oppress means to keep (someone) down by unjust force or authority. To repress is (1) to hold back, or (2) to put down by force. Suppress, which is broader and more common than the other two, means (1) to put an end to, (2) to inhibit, and (3) to keep from being revealed.

Thu Sep 10

Mirror life is a hypothetical form of life with mirror-reflected molecular building blocks

Wed Sep 9

Atoms have chirality, so if you found yourself reflected through the 4th dimension, you would be unable to eat anything because all food would have the “wrong” chirality

Tue Sep 8

Women in refrigerators is the name for the superhero comic-book trope whereby female characters are injured, raped, killed, or depowered (an event colloquially known as fridging) as a plot device intended to move a male character’s story arc forward.
- It refers to an incident in Green Lantern #54 (1994), written by Ron Marz, in which Kyle Rayner, the title hero, comes home to his apartment to find that his girlfriend, Alexandra DeWitt, had been killed by the villain Major Force and stuffed into a refrigerator.

Mon Sep 7

The many-worlds interpretation is an interpretation of quantum mechanics that asserts that the universal wavefunction is objectively real, and that there is no wavefunction collapse. This implies that all possible outcomes of quantum measurements are physically realized in some “world” or universe.

Sun Sep 6

Your fingernails curve when they grow long because the keratin on top grows faster than the keratin on the bottom

Sat Sep 5

Popcorn is actually a specific species of corn specfically made to be popped
There are 6 major types of corn: popcorn, dent corn, flint corn, pod corn, flour corn, and sweet corn

Fri Sep 4

Rhinos rub their horns down into different shapes

Thu Sep 3

A Munchausen Number is a natural number in a given number base b that is equal to the sum of its digits each raised to the power of itself.

Wed Sep 2

The People Walker is a service where people can hire someone to walk with them and provide motivation through conversation and companionship.

Tue Sep 1

Isle/island and day/diary are not etymologically related

August 2020

Mon Aug 31

The Bouba-Kiki is a non-arbitrary mapping between speech sounds and the visual shape of objects

Sun Aug 30

The Walt Disney Company is the largest consumer of fireworks in the world and the second largest purchaser of explosive devices, after the US military

Sat Aug 29

There are set theoretic definitions of the natural numbers that doesn’t use any numbers in the definition/proof

Fri Aug 28

Illicit is an adjective that means illegal/forbidden, while elicit is a verb that means ‘to evoke’

Thu Aug 27

The hair on the dolls at the It’s a Small World ride grows and has to be cut (due ot gravity + humidity)
- The only sources I could find were social media sites, so take this with a grain of salt. Sounds plausible though

Wed Aug 26

Category theory is sometimes referred to as abstract nonsense by some mathematicians
The term “freelance” comes from medieval times, when it was used to describe a mercenary with a “free lance”, i.e. they swore their sword to whoever paid them

Tue Aug 25

In mathematics, racks and quandles are sets with binary operations satisfying axioms analogous to the Reidemeister moves used to manipulate knot diagrams.

INTERMISSION

July 2020

Mon July 27

‘Female’ is actually not etymologically related to ‘male’

Sun July 26

This one is probably obvious, but I realized that birds don’t live in their nests, they just lay their eggs there and then leave when they hatch and grow up

Sat July 25

An attorney is someone who has passed the bar exam in their state and is allowed to practice law, while a lawyer is someone who has “only” gotten a law degree
A Realtor is a trademarked term that refers to a real estate agent who is an active member of the National Association of Realtors (NAR), the largest trade association in the United States

Fri July 24

The longest quote from Nim Chimpsky, a chimp that was taught sign language was: “Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you”

Thu July 23

As Slow as Possible is a musical piece that is currently being played on an organ at St. Burchardi church in Halberstadt, Germany. The performance began in 2001 and will end in 2640

Wed July 22

The Quaker Oats company, in collaboration with MIT, fed ~100 young boys oatmeal laced with radioactive tracers as part of an experiment trying to see how nutrients passed through the body

Tue July 21

United Nations delegates are given United Nations laissez-passer, which is a “passport” that allows them entry into almost any country

Mon July 20

Coloring a map on a torus can take up to 7 colors

Sun July 19

The staff with 2 snakes around it that is usually used to represent medicine is called a caduceus, and was actually Hermes’ (the messenger) staff and had nothing to do with medicine. The one that should actually be used is the staff with one snake around it, called the staff of Asclepius (Asclepius being the Greek god associated with healing).

Sat July 18

Most mammals have 7 bones in their neck

Fri July 17

The sun takes up 99% of the mass in our solar system

Thu July 16

A group of jellyfish is called a smack

Wed July 15

You can make a repo with your GitHub username as the title and put a README in it to create a profile README

Tue July 14

You can use repo.new to make a new GitHub repo and docs.new to make a new Google Doc

Mon July 13

Denatured alcohol is just ethanol with things added to it to make it poisonous or bad-tasting (and thus undrinkable).
Torpedo juice is slang for an alcoholic beverage from WWII, made from pineapple juice and the 180-proof grain alcohol fuel used in Navy torpedo motors. Various poisonous additives were mixed into the fuel alcohol by Navy authorities to render the alcohol undrinkable, and various methods were employed by the U.S. sailors to separate the alcohol from the poison.

Sun July 12

f-Strings in Python allows you to make inline format strings

Sat July 11

Instead of using json.loads() on a response from a request, you can just use response.json()

Fri July 10

The .raise_for_status() method in the requests Python library will throw an error for 400 and 500 return codes

Thu July 9

Lake Superior contains more water than all the other Great Lakes combined

Wed July 8

Technically, the Scandanavian countries are Sweden, Norway and Denmark, while the Nordic countries additionally include:
- Finland (parliamentary republic)
- Iceland (parliamentary republic)
- Åland Islands (an autonomous province of Finland since 1920)
- Faroe Islands (an autonomous territory within the Kingdom of Denmark (The unity of the Realm), self-governed since 1948)
- Greenland (an autonomous territory within the Kingdom of Denmark (The unity of the Realm), self-governed since 1979)
- Jan Mayen, which is under Norwegian sovereignty, is not considered part of Scandinavia as a cultural-historical region, but as a part of the Kingdom of Norway.
- Svalbard, which is under Norwegian sovereignty, is not considered part of Scandinavia as a cultural-historical region, but as a part of the Kingdom of Norway (since 1925). It is part of the Nordic countries (Norden).

Tue July 7

Nils Olav is a brigadier and colonel-in-chief of the Norwegian King’s Guard. He also happens to be a penguin.

Mon July 6

The crumbling skull rule is defined as follows: > It holds that where a plaintiff had a condition or injury that predates the tort and would have naturally deteriorated or worsened over time (e.g. a crumbling skull), the defendant is not responsible to the degree that the condition or injury would have naturally worsened over time. A defendant is only liable for the degree the injury was worsened or the hastening or acceleration of the damage caused by the tort

Sun July 5

The eggshell skull rule in tort law states that the unexpected frailty of the injured person is not a valid defense to the seriousness of any injury caused to them.
A tort is a a civil wrong that causes a claimant to suffer loss or harm, resulting in legal liability for the person who commits a tortious act

Sat July 4

The Champernowne constant (in base 10) is 0.12345678910111213141516…, which contains every natural number as a substring

Fri July 3

A normal number is a number in which no finite combination of digits occurs more frequently than any other

Thu July 2

Seaweed is a term used to generally describe sea plants, but kelp is the largest subgroup of seaweed
- You can break seaweed down into three groups — red, brown and green. This colour has a direct effect on how much light seaweed absorbs via photosynthesis, which decides how close to the ocean’s surface it grows. Sea kelp is officially labelled as a brown seaweed, even though it can vary in colour.

Wed July 1

The difference between PAL and NTSC is mostly in the refresh rate and subsequent FPS: 60 Hz NTSC TVs operate at 29.97 FPS, and 50 Hz PAL TVs run at 25 FPS. The United States are the only country to use NTSC, the rest of the world uses PAL.

June 2020

Tue June 30

In the late 1980s, unable to cover the cost of their Pepsi deal with vodka, the USSR paid Pepsi with 17 submarines, a cruiser, a frigate, and a destroyer. This temporarily made Pepsi the 6th most powerful military in the world (they then sold the ships for scrap).

Mon June 29

ReDoS is a denial of service attack that hogs resources by making a program evaluate a very difficult regex pattern

Sun June 28

The toilet handles that stick out sideways apparently have a name - flushometers

Sat June 27

.xpi files (archives usually used for Firefox add-ons and the like) are actually just ZIP archives. Might use this in a CTF problem…

Fri June 26

Cancelled and canceled are actually both valid spellings. ‘Cancelled’ is usually used in British English, while ‘canceled’ is used in American English. (I prefer ‘cancelled’. ‘Canceled’ looks wrong for some reason)

Thu June 25

I knew about snake_case and camelCase, but there are actually 4 (common) programming cases:
- camelCase
- PascalCase
- snake_case
- kebab-case

Wed June 24

The Easter Islands are actually a part of Chile. I always thought it was its own country ¯_(ツ)_/¯

Tue June 23

During the 1918 Influenza Pandemic, there was an Anti-Mask League in San Francisco

Mon June 22

The man who we usually refer to as “Fibonacci” was never actually called Fibonacci during his lifetime. His name was Leonardo Bonacci, and the name he is commonly called, Fibonacci, was made up in 1838 by the Franco-Italian historian Guillaume Libri and is short for filius Bonacci (‘son of Bonacci’).

Sun June 21

There’s actually a formal name (and a Wikipedia article) for “Donald Duck talk”

Sat June 20

Verdana-gate was the giant controversy that was the result of IKEA changing it’s main font from Futura to Verdana.

Fri June 19

The Baby Tooth Survey was a program where kids would turn in their baby teeth to their school in exchange for a nice button. The government was actually using these teeth to gauge the effects of nuclear testing on the human body.
Somatoparaphrenia is a phenomenon where one denies ownership of one of their limbs or one side of their body.

Thu June 18

During development of the Xbox 360, the circular pulses that appear around the Xbox logo on the menu screen were unique to each Xbox and were based on the serial number of the Xbox. This was done so anyone that broke an NDA and leaked footage of the Xbox 360 could be identified. (Source)
Apparently, the average size of clown shoes is 28EEEEE.

Wed June 17

Verdigris is a green pigment formed when copper, brass or bronze is weathered and exposed to air or seawater over time
Vellum is prepared animal skin/membrane used to write/print on
San Seriffe is a fictional island created for April Fools’ Day by the Guardian, filled with lots of typorgraphic puns and references

(Can you tell I started reading a typography book?)

Tue June 16

Cypherpunks are activists who advocate for strong crypto and privacy.
The XY Problem occurs when a person has X problem, and thinks that solving a secondary issue Y will help them solve X, when in reality it’s a poor solution or doesn’t help at all.

Mon June 15

I was wondering how seedless watermelons are grown since the desired fruit that you’d want to make more of, ya know, has no seeds. This is how they do it: > By contrast, seedless watermelons are grown from seeds. These seeds are produced by crossing diploid and tetraploid lines of watermelon, with the resulting seeds producing sterile triploid plants. Fruit development is triggered by pollination, so these plants must be grown alongside a diploid strain to provide pollen.

Sun June 14

The word “con-man” comes from confidence trick, which is an attempt to defraud a person or group after first gaining their trust. So basically, what a con-man does.

Sat June 13

A crevasse is a deep crack in ice or a glacier, while a crevice is a deep crack in rock.

Fri June 12

Symlinks work with Git! For some reason I assumed they didn’t and never bothered to check. I will be spending my weekend combining a lot of files across my different repos :)

Thu June 11

Consternate: Fill with anxiety
Not really “learning”, but I finished the book Countdown to Zero Day and started The Design of Everyday Things. Honestly I didn’t really like Countdown to Zero Day, as I was expecting more technical/security content than there actually was, and the book kind of dragged on with not-very-relevant details (in my opinion).

Wed June 10

Cement is actually an ingredient in concrete. Concrete is a composite material composed of fine and coarse aggregate bonded together with a fluid cement (cement paste) that hardens (cures) over time.

Tue June 9

Jelly vs. Jam vs. Preserves:
- In jelly, the fruit comes in the form of fruit juice. Jelly has the smoothest consistency and is usually clear.
- In jam, the fruit comes in the form of fruit pulp or crushed fruit. This makes jam less stiff than jelly.
- In preserves, the fruit comes in the form of chunks in a gel or syrup. Preserves will have more fruit in them than jam will. Marmalade is a type of preserve with citrus fruits in it.

Mon June 8

Proper left/right refer to the left/right of a figure or person being described. If you were looking at a statue, their right hand would be “proper right” despite which side it appeared to be on to you.

Sun June 7

This character: ˆ is called a circumflex

Sat June 6

Differences between sea lions and seals
- Noises: seals make a snorting noise, sea lions bark
- Movement: seals scoot around, sea lions walk with their hind flippers
- Ears: seals have small ear holes, sea lions have little ear flaps

Fri June 5

Icelandic police don’t carry weapons (they are kept in their car) .The first (and only) time a person was shot and killed by Icelandic police in modern history was in 2013, when a man was firing a shotgun in his home and began shooting at the police.

Thu June 4

Both tortoises and turtles can feel through their shells

Wed June 3

Schaefer’s Dichotomy Theorem states that there are 6 classes of SAT problems that are in P, while all of the rest are NP-complete. The 6 classes are
- all relations which are not constantly false are true when all its arguments are true;
- all relations which are not constantly false are true when all its arguments are false;
- all relations are equivalent to a conjunction of binary clauses;
- all relations are equivalent to a conjunction of Horn clauses;
- all relations are equivalent to a conjunction of dual-Horn clauses;
- all relations are equivalent to a conjunction of affine formulae.
Warhol superstars were a clique of New York City personalities promoted by the pop artist Andy Warhol during the 1960s and early 1970s. These personalities appeared in Warhol’s artworks and accompanied him in his social life, epitomizing his famous dictum, “In the future everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes”. Warhol would simply film them, and declare them “superstars”.

Tue June 2

While reading some articles about .package manager security, I learned that npm does not require the code in your published package to match the code in your git repo. In fact, npm doesn’t require you to have a public mirror of your code at all.
I learned the difference between a package and a module in npm. The npm registry contains packages, many of which are also Node modules, or contain Node modules.
- Packages: A package is a file or directory that is described by a package.json file
  - 1. A folder containing a program described by a package.json file.
  - 1. [@2] A gzipped tarball containing (a).
  - 1. [@3] A URL that resolves to (b).
  - 1. [@4] A @ that is published on the registry with (c).
  - 1. [@5] A @ that points to (d).
  - 1. [@6] A that has a latest tag satisfying (e).
  - 1. [@7] A git url that, when cloned, results in (a).
- Modules: A module is any file or directory in the node_modules directory that can be loaded by the Node.js require() function.
  - A folder with a package.json file containing a “main” field.
  - A folder with an index.js file in it.
  - A JavaScript file.

Mon June 1

I learned about SemVer (Semantic Versioning), which is a standard for numbering package versions
- Given a version number MAJOR.MINOR.PATCH, increment the:
  - MAJOR version when you make incompatible API changes,
  - MINOR version when you add functionality in a backwards compatible manner, and
  - PATCH version when you make backwards compatible bug fixes.

May 2020

Sun May 31

Pink Capitalism is the incorporation of the LGBTQ+ movement as a way to capitalism and the market economy; using LGBTQ+ imagery for economic gain.
Suffix alises in zsh allow you to launch files with a specific extension (or suffix) in your favorite tool. To register a suffix alias, use the alias -s extension=name-of-the-tool pattern.

Sat May 30

Solo garlic is garlic that only has one clove despite being roughly the size of a normal head of garlic

Fri May 29

The Waffle House Index is an informal metric named after the Waffle House restaurant chain and is used by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to determine the effect of a storm and the likely scale of assistance required for disaster recovery.
- It has 3 different levels:
  - GREEN: full menu – restaurant has power and damage is limited or no damage at all.
  - YELLOW: limited menu – no power or only power from a generator, or food supplies may be low.
  - RED: the restaurant is closed – indicating severe damage or severe flooding.

Thu May 28

The difference between a logomark and a logotype is that logomarks do not have any words in them (think the Twitter bird, the Apple apple) while a logotype is made of stylized words (think Coca Cola). A “logo” could refer to either, both, or a combination of the two.

Wed May 27

More definitions:
- Abbot - a man who is the head of an abbey of monks
- Catarrh - excessive discharge or buildup of mucus in the nose or throat, associated with inflammation of the mucous membrane. Gross.
- Genial - friendly and cheerful
- Impinge - have an effect or impact, especially a negative one.

Tue May 26

57 is often called ”Groethendieck’s prime” after a story in which mathematician Alexander Grothendieck supposedly gave it as an example of a particular prime number.
A repdigit (or monodigit) is a number that is made of a single number repeated multiple times
- A repunit is a repdigit that uses only 1s
- A [Brazilian number] is a number that can be written as a repdigit in some base, not allowing the repdigit 11.
A Mersenne prime is a prime number that is one less that a power of two (and therefore can be represented by all 1s in binary)

Mon May 25

If you accidentally make/write in a file in vim without sudo, you can write the changes as sudo anyways by using :w !sudo tee %

Sun May 24

I learned more words from my crosswords:
- Assent: the expression of approval or agreement
- Bivouac: a temporary camp without tents or cover, used especially by soldiers or mountaineers
- Lariat: rope
- Pall: become less appealing or interesting through familiarity
Nothing-up-my-sleeve numbers are numbers (in cryptography) that are above suspicion of hidden properties, based on how they are chosed or constructed.
The “tropical” in tropical geometry because the person who first wrote on it was from Brazil.
The en-dash (–) is the same width as a capital N, and is used to separate items in a list. The em-dash (—) is the same width as a capital M, and is used to signal a separate but related clause.

Sat May 23

The green stuff you eat in sushi restaurants is probably not real wasabi (it’s more likely a combination of horseradish, mustard, and green food coloring). Real wasabi is very expensive because it only grows by fresh mountain streams in Japan. It requires rocky soil, constant fresh water, and has to be kept at a certain temperature. It then has to be harvested by hand, and when it is grated, it only retains it’s flavor for ~30 minutes.
Along with the classic “Alice” and “Bob” placeholders used in cryptography as placeholders for the names of different communicating parties, there is a whole cast of characters.
Similarly, there are more variable names similar to “foo” and “bar”, including baz, qux, quux, quuz, corge, grault, garply, waldo, fred, plugh, xyzzy, and thud.
- Most notably, in Python (which is named after Monty Python, not the snake), the common variable placeholders are “spam” “ham” and “eggs” (from Monty Python’s “Spam” sketch).

Fri May 22

Add-Rotate-XOR algorithms (for cryptographic schemes) are popular because all of those functions run in constant time, and are therefore immune to timing attacks.
The Interesting Number Paradox states that if you were to categorize numbers as “interesting” and “uninteresting”, then of the set of “uninteresting” numbers, the smallest number would be an interesting number (as it is the smallest uninteresting number).

Thu May 21

I learned that frogs have teeth, although they are very weak and are only used to hold food (not chew or bite prey). On the other hand, toads don’t have any teeth.

Wed May 20

The movie Bend It Like Beckham was the first Western movie to be shown in North Korea.
I also learned some more words from my crosswords that I’ve been doing:
- Peal: a loud, prolonged ringing of bells
- Ply: to carry on, practice, or pursue busily or steadily
- Denude: to make bare
As far as we know magnetic monopoles do not exist. Whenever you break a magnet down, it will always have a “north” and “south” pole, no matter how small it is. This is in contrast to electric charges, where you can have something that is wholly positively or negatively charged.

Tue May 19

I was doing some crosswords and learned these words:
- Abase: to lower in rank, prestige or esteem
- Bung: to close with a stopper
- Impel: drive, force or urge to do something
- Prig: self-righteous moralistic person
- Rector: clergy who is in charge of a parish in the Episcopal church
I also learned that Andrew Wiles’ proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem was a proof by contradiction. He basically showed that if it was not true, then that would imply that a proven theorem about elliptic curves would be false.

alex-bellon/til

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