Australia truly is the land of the weird.
Today I learned that there are earthworms in Australia that can grow to more than 3 FEET LONG.
Nitpick: That is not a translator, that is an interpreter. And as a professional interpreter myself I find this option unprofessional. Underestimating language and nuance is very common. I don’t know whether better communication in the right languages would have improved the Saudi’s team performance, but it sure would not have hurt.
Of course people resort to English in situations where it is the easiest option for them, like the examples quoted (Chinese, Cantonese, Nigerian languages etc.). But on a professional environment like World Cup football with practically unlimited financial resources (I mean: Saudi Arabia…) it is a poor decision.
Exactly. And I am sorry to say that it happens all the time. People do not understand what communication is, how important it is and how much trouble they could avoid with professional help. It is jaw-dropping for outsiders, it is infuriating for insiders.
And then there is Google Translate… I better not get started on that!
Last year I learned that earthworms are invasive species to North America, and are harming our forests.
I learned via a recipe that golden mushroom soup/sauce is just plain cream of mushroom soup with tomato paste mixed in and you can make your own at home
To me that’s not golden mushroom soup which, in my experience, comes in a clear broth. Heading off to find my recipe.
This recipe is close to the mushroom soup that I love: https://www.myrecipes.com/recipe/wild-mushroom-soup-0
ahh Campbell’s and anything canned is supposedly made that way I just use it over pork chops occasionally one time I did eat it as a soup and well it cleaned me out let’s just say
Trying to figure out the total number of gifts referenced in “The twelve days of Christmas”, I discovered that the sum of the first n triangular numbers is \frac{n(n+1)(n+2)}6. When n=12, this comes to 2\times 13\times 14=364.
Check my math: take a bunch of marbles, form a big triangle with 36 along the side and tell me how many marbles it took to do that.
The Triangle of the Beast.
I discovered that the hard way in elementary school: my teacher assigned me that task because I had finished my other work. So I counted them all using just a pencil and paper.
Unrelated, it just occurred to me that the Doper whose name is @EllisDee could actually be a reference to LSD, and not someone named Ellis Dee.
Do you mean “drouth”?
Speaking of obscure words, I knew that “pismire” was an archaic word meaning “ant” but I just found out that it’s referring to the piss-like smell that anthills have. Ditto for the word “pissant”.
And the plant known as Leontodont, Taraxacum or dandelions in English, Löwenzahn in German, is called in French Pissenlit: Piss in your bed. It has diuretical properties.
- That’s the 36th triangular number. Had you made triangles with 1,2 ,…,36 marbles on each edge, you would have needed 8436 marbles.
Better check your math. The n-th triangular number is n(n+1)/2. 486 is not a triangular number at all.
No, it was in the dictionary as “droth” but the definition was almost exactly the same as drought. I’m sorry that I don’t remember the name of the dictionary.
The OED has no entry for “droth”, and although it lists 25 variant spellings of “drought”, none of them are “droth”.
And “pissabed” in English. It’s a dialectal name, but pretty widespread.
That’s nice! Dandelions seem to be either lion toothed or bed wetters.
While looking into the Monty Hall Problem, I stumbled across the fact that Monty Hall was born in Winnipeg, Manitoba. I was unaware that he was a Canadian by birth.
It seems from his Wikipedia entry that he himself understood the Monty Hall Problem. As he had a Bachelor in Science from the University of Manitoba, in all probability (ha!) it makes sense that he had the statistical tools to do so. Hall pointed out that the pure form of the Monty Hall Problem rarely applied. Hall himself referred to this as the Henry James treatment - The Turn of the Screw - as he would sometimes offer money to switch from a winning door, offer money not to switch from a losing door to a winning door, etc.