If you cut along a third of the width instead of down the middle, you get an equal-sized loop with two twists and a half-sized Moebius strip.
I started googling around about that. It seems that it’s a vegetable in many places; in fact, watermelon is the state vegetable of Oklahoma.
A few trivia questions:
What’s an octothorpe?
A hashtag
The 100 folds in a chef’s hat represent…?
100 ways to cook an egg
True or false? The longest wedding veil was 23,000 feet long.
True
Many call a group of bunnies a herd, but another term is a …
fluffle
A hashtag
Oh man. Is that now the official term for that symbol?
A quick Wikipedia check reveals…
Most scholars believe the word was invented by workers at the Bell Telephone Laboratories by 1968,[32] who needed a word for the symbol on the telephone keypad. Don MacPherson is said to have created the word by combining octo and the last name of Jim Thorpe, an Olympic medalist.[33] (As you may know, it represents “sharping” a note in music…there are multiple aliases, I guess—look at the Wikipedia article)
No, no, not “octothorpe,” but the word in your spoiler. I know the word “octothorpe” and its history very well. I’ve probably even used it on this board.
I’m lost. You mean its equivalent, h******? You’re questioning whether we’ve settled on that as an official term?
Not so much “an” official term, but is it the default now? I feel weird calling it that outside any contexts that are not social media related. I like to observe how language changes and am curious if this one has gone over the hump replacing the old terms as the default.
Is it perhaps a case of all squares are rectangles but not all rectangles are squares? The symbol has other uses, e.g. in music.
Another tidbit from the article:
The voices of Mickey and Minnie Mouse got married in real life.
Wayne Allwine and Russi Taylor were married for 18 years until Allwine’s death in 2009.
The music symbol is shaped slightly differently.
I would say “yes” for any context where there isn’t another term (like the slightly different musical sharp sign).
My default was always “number sign”, but I now tend to use hashtag. I don’t think I ever used octothorpe (which auto-correct doesn’t seem to recognize, at least on this machine).
I too remember # being the number sign. I learned when I was 17 it also was used to mean pounds. This was new info to me as I always knew lbs as pounds.
I’m sure the # key showing up on telephones had a lot to do with people calling it the pound sign again. “Enter your four digit PIN and then press number” would be confusing!
I will amend my answer to say “number sign”/“pound sign” were used interchangeably (depending on if there was a context that required one or the other).
So, “hashtag” is an improvement in that there is now a single widely used named for the symbol.
It’s also got a longer pedigree. The symbol was referred to as a “hatch” 500+ years ago and “hash” was used by the Brits to describe the symbol on a keypad as early as the 1960s.
I don’t think “octothorpe” was ever supposed to be more than in-house usage at AT&T, and perhaps a bit deliberately silly. Yeah, I still call it a “pound sign” by default or perhaps “number sign” as, to me, my brain still hasn’t gotten around thinking of “hashtag” as, well, something that introduces a hashtag (a word or phrase that follows the pound sign in social media.) I’m sure I’ll get used to it, but it’s taking me a little time of thinking of the sign on the phone as a hashtag and not a pound sign (and I used that pound sign today to go straight to someone’s voicemail.)
Yeah, I guess it’s kind of italicized, for one thing.
I always think of the hair on the side of Archie’s head.
More from that Wikipedia cite, since the cat is well and truly out of the bag:
The key labeled # is officially called the “number sign” key, but other names such as “pound”, “hash”, “hex”, “octothorpe”, “gate”, “lattice”, and “square”, are common, depending on national or personal preference. The Greek symbols alpha and omega had been planned originally.[7]
IMO alpha and omega would have been cool.
To be pedantic, I believe the singular and plural both use lb as the symbol for pound/pounds.
If we wanted the plural form according to the Latin it would be lblb (I think).
The airport Johannisthal close to Berlin claims to have opened 1909:
And then there is Darmstadt, 1908:
Griesheim was originally part of an Imperial German Army (Reichsheer) military artillery firing range in 1874, an airfield was established on the site in 1908, being Germany’s first airfield and flight school.
Of course it depends on what “purpose-built” and “commercial” mean.
Voyager I is the fastest object humans have ever made at 10.5 mps. This means it can travel the longest distance in the continental US (San Ysidro, CA to West Quoddy Head, ME) in 5 min 20 sec. This velocity is 56.45% of the speed of the Earth around the Sun so (here is the random fact) there are times of the year such as now there the Earth and Voyager I are getting closer to each other.
Back in the 70s, I knew some girls that were almost that fast.
One of them tried to bed 200 different men in 1976 to celebrate the US bicentennial. Naturally, her nickname was “Bicentennial”.
In Maine, they refer to the low-bush blueberry as the wild blueberry, whether or not it is cultivated.
True wild blueberries are tiny and a pain to pick, but oh, so delicious and worth it, IMO. Just ask any brown bear.