When I was in high school I had a biology exam where I had to memorize the four stages of mitosis: prophase, metaphase, anaphase, telophase.
I had a crush/jerk friend in that class with me and I told him I came up with “People Meet At Telephones” to remember them by.
He said, “People Meet At Telephones? That’s the dumbest fucking thing I’ve ever heard.”
Then after the exam he said, “Never mind, that totally worked.”
I wonder if he still remembers. I do. Twenty-five years later, my biology days long behind me, I still remember that dumbass mnemonic and the four stages of mitosis.
CGP Grey has yet another explanation for all the Canadian Y airports – that the three letter IATA codes created in the 1950s were taken from the last three letters of the four letter IACO codes created in the 1940s, which started with K in the US and CY in Canada. Which used those letters because of codes for radio stations dating from the 1910s, which indeed used those letters for reasons going back to telegraphs.
Actually I think this is rather confusing the discussion.
Most airport codes around the world were adopted as three-letter standards by the IATA, usually mnemonics for the name of the city or airport. In Canada, some (arguable) combination of old railway station codes or weather station codes were turned into three-letter IATA codes by appending “Y” or “W” as appropriate, as discussed above.
ICAO codes conform to the much broader standard of the ITU country prefix codes. Which are assigned by various countries to internal use as they see fit. For example, the United States is allocated ITU country prefixes that include K, N, and W, among others. Which explains why radio and TV station call signs always start with K or W (on an east-west division) and aircraft registration numbers always start with “N”.
In the US and Canada, ICAO airport codes are always (AFAIK) the IATA code preceded by “K” for the US and “C” for Canada. Elsewhere in the world, the ICAO four-letter code usually bears little or no relationship to the IATA code.
Many, but by no means all, US or Canadian airports have the IATA & ICAO the same except for the leading C or K. As you say. There are exceptions but they’re rather rare.
The usual way things become different is a newly built non-airline airport is given an ICAO Kxxx code whose last 3 is already an IATA code in some other country. Then that US airport gains airline service and needs an IATA code assigned.
FAA also has a set of codes called "LID"s that are the usually the same as ICAO/IATA yet are also occasionally different.
Lotta obscure details starting here:
You can tell the US & Canada had a lot of clout in the early days of all this. The rest of the world doesn’t use the C/K+3 pattern for their ICAOs. Instead it’s 1 letter for region, 1 letter for country within region, and 2 letters/numbers for airport / facility within country. London Heathrow is IATA LHR which is a plausible contraction of “London Heathrow”. The ICAO is EGLL which is Europe, Great Britain, “LL”.
Does it make a difference in current versions of Word how many times you bang the space bar between sentences? But, yes, I have not used Word since about 1993 because of this type of broken behaviour; if you need text that looks good (for an article, poster, or book) you need a proper typesetting environment anyway.
The reason I’ve seen for the single characters all had to do with cramming a calendar-like display into 7 print positions on a fixed-pitch font printer or in fixed-format column-oriented data like a punched card or the fixed format disk records that followed.
Indeed. There are a lot of nice features in Chromebooks, but I think the lack of the capslock key tops the list. It never does anything but cause problems.
Re: Typing the double space, that’s how I learned. I got over that when I realized one day I had 5,000 characters to write a grant response rather than 5,000 words as I thought. Know the easiest way to remove characters when you need to cut something? That damned extra space.
This wasn’t meant to be the “Day of week abbreviation” thread. Rather the “What oddities did you learn long ago and and still stick with today against the odds?”
For me one of the biggies was 24-hour (so called “military”) time. Knew of it growing up, but didn’t use it in day to day use, nor did my parents. In the US military of course it was the only acceptable time format. I married another servicemember and despite us leaving the service after 8 and 4 years total respectively, we used it in our personal lives for the next 30+ years, despite the rest of the USA being actively hostile to the idea.
For sure, for much of that time my own job used it routinely, but not exclusively. In my wife’s occupation, 24 hour was simply unheard of. Yet she stuck with it too and happily so. She’s since died and I’ve since remarried.
My new wife, although an aerospace engineer by trade, totally hates 24h time. It’s a real struggle for me to convert afternoon / evening times to her preferred format. I totally think in 24h time and always will.
I learned a different method of tying my shoelaces ages ago, and have stuck with it ever since (this is just an example; it’s been probably 30 years since I learned it):
Most “lifehacking” stuff doesn’t seem to stick around, but this one did. I find that I can make a symmetrical, tight knot more efficiently this way.
