This week The Economist has a nice article on Texas Governor Greg Abbott. Abbott has had to use a wheelchair since he was a teenager. Nobody much talks about it. The article claims most Texans have no idea of this.
I recently learned the area of a circle is… 0.
The area of a disk, on the other hand, is πR².
I didn’t know about it until I saw a picture of him recently
Not long after I started working for the Canadian government in the early 70s, I found a spool of pink cloth tape in the back of a supply cabinet. This turned out to be the dreaded “red tape”, which had been changed from red to pink many years earlier, as it faded quickly to that colour and it was cheaper to produce it pre-faded. It was still listed in the official government supply catalogue until the late 80s when the catalogue was discontinued. (I occasionally later had the need to consult old records, which were indeed bound in faded pink tape.)
I recently came across “lede” in a crossword. I’ve been doing crosswords for years and years but had never seen this word before–just like my spellchecker.
That may be a bit of journalistic argot. It was common to spell it that way in my journalism classes in the 90s.
Discussion on the Merriam-Webster website. Oh! How cool! Discourse tells me that this has already been linked to back on Jun 23 by @Gary_Robson. What a neat feature.
This is inspired by a post about adjectives (bovine relating to cattle, etc.)
It’s interesting to me that we know a word like “swan” but maybe don’t know that the male is a cob, the female is a pen, the baby is a cygnet. Googling reveals that a group of them is called “A ballet, bevy, drift, herd, regatta, whiteness.” Poetic, IMO.
If you’re like me, you know a few terms for groups of animals. A group of fish is a school…a group of whales is a pod. As the above example indicates, there can be more than one, but that aside…can you match these group names to the animals?
Group: ambush, business, convocation, drove, fever, kindle, knot, quiver, scurry, smack
Animals to group:
cobras
eagles
ferrets
jellyfish
pigs
squirrels
stingrays
tigers
toads
cobras-quiver
eagles-convocation
ferrets-business
jellyfish-smack
pigs-drove
squirrels-scurry
stingrays-fever
tigers-ambush
toads-knot
More here:
List of Names for Groups of Animals: A Complete Glossary | YourDictionary
Ah shit, I left kittens out of the list of animals…
kittens-kindle
Maybe this topic is a bit too serious for this board, but I never heard of this story until yesterday.
Then where is it?
The island of St. Martin/Sint Maarten in the Caribbean.
We vacation there and cross the border between the two sides of the island multiple times each day, whistling Les Toureadors when crossing to the French side, and singing Het Wilhelmus crossing to the Dutch side.
I had to look up where it was, but France and The Netherlands obviously don’t share a border in Europe.
ETA: At least not in recent times.
Bob Rivers recorded “O Little Town of Bethlehem” to the tune of “House of the Rising Sun”. The metres (8 6 8 6) match perfectly. (syllables per line)
You could also sing “Amazing Grace” to either of the above (or vice versa).
Likewise - “Gilligan’s Island”, “Advance Australia Fair” (Aussie national anthem), “America the Beautiful”, or even “Casey at the Bat”. Sing any of these to any of the other tunes.
The outlook wasn’t brilliant for
The Mudville Nine that day;
The score stood four to two, with but
One inning more to play.
If I had to pick one favorite song of all time, “House of the Rising Sun” would be in the running.
I’m not sure whose version you’re referring to—Dave Van Ronk? Dylan, acoustic (or electric)? The Animals? Frijid Pink? Anyway if you google the sheet music, you see some is in 12/8, some in C(ommon), some 6/8, so I’m not sure. I can play the chords and I thought it was C, 4/4 throughout. Hmm.
By the way, Mrs. L and I went looking for the House when we were in NOLA. We went to 1614 Esplanade, though maybe that was manufactured by those who lived there. Well we went there and looked (from a distance). We visited other potential locations. I remember reading that while preparing to build at one site, contractors found jars that had once held rouge. They weren’t willing to conclude that they had belonged to women, however, since back in the day men also wore rouge.
There are debates about what that song means, which surprises me. IMO it’s about a young woman forced by hardship to work as a prostitute in a brothel. I know, some versions make it a “poor boy” but nah.
OK, I need to add something new. You may recall the Charley Pride song, “Kiss an Angel Good Morning.” He was groundbreaking in that wait, how many African-American country music artists were there, back in the day? Well it turns out he was actually in the “Negro Leagues.”
Brits of a certain age will remember the BBC sitcom Some Mothers Do 'Ave 'Em, starring a young Michael Crawford. A significant memory from my childhood, I discovered only today that the theme tune played by two piccolos is Morse Code for the title of the show.
Well, here’s something new I learned today while checking details for this thread entry.
What I already knew about Major Henry Rathbone and his fiancee Clara Harris was that they were the other couple in the balcony along with President Abraham and Mary Todd Lincoln on that fatal night. I also already knew Major Rathbone was seriously injured in his attempt to stop Booth from escaping. Booth slashed Major Rathbone’s left arm from shoulder to elbow, severing an artery. I also knew that Rathbone never fully recovered mentally from the attack, and after marrying Clara Harris and having three children with her, he stabbed Clara to death, and then attempted to kill himself with the same knife.
What I didn’t know was that Henry Rathbone and Clara Harris were stepbrother and stepsister. Rathbone’s mother married Clara’s father when Henry was eleven and Clara was thirteen.
No blood relation, but still, imagine Bobby Brady marrying Marcia. Ewwwwwwww.
To stave off the nitpickers, I am reporting here that Clara was killed with a gunshot to the head. But she was also stabbed, and Henry then tried to stab himself to death. In addition, it should be noted that Henry was attacking his three children, ages eleven, twelve, and thirteen at the time of the incident, and Clara was trying to stop him at the time of her death.
Precision is expressed as the number of decimal digits used, whether it’s a machine result or any other number.
This is regularly abused when units are converted. “190 miles” is giving spurious accuracy to “300 kilometers”. The normal human body temperature is not 98.6, it is 37-C, which implies anywhere from 97.7 to 99.5 on Fahrenheit scale…
’
On a related note, I always hate it when super-smart people in TV shows (like Mr Spock, Mr Data) demonstrate their abilities by stating numbers with a ridiculously inappropriate number of significant figures, given the obvious uncertainties. “Captain, I calculate the probability of surviving our encounter with the Klingons to be 43.2968%.”
Rattling off a long string of numbers after the decimal place does not mean you are smart, it just means you don’t understand how much of a number is meaningful.