TIL Deep Purple, the band, was named after Deep Purple, the song. Originally an instrumental, lyrics were added due to it’s popularity in sheet music sales. I never knew of or heard of the song, Deep Purple.
Nice melody. It’s said to be part of the Great American Songbook.
Reposting.
I’m guessing this #1 hit from 1963 is the most familiar version.
I was aware of the clock tower in Mecca, completed in 2011, but I wasn’t aware quite how big it is.
The clock faces are 43 m (141 ft) in diameter.
Here’s a size comparison with other clock faces:
The clock tower is 601 m (1,972 ft) tall, so dwarfs the Empire State Building, which is 443.2 m (1,454 ft) tall.
Size comparison:
World’s tallest buildings in 2023:
When I was learning touch typing in the 1980s one of the exercise was to type over and over again “Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their country.” My mother told me that when she learned touch typing in the 1950s, it was “Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of the party.” I always wondered which country, or which party.
Today I stumbled on a little book by Charles E Weller called The Early History of the Typewriter (1918) that seems to answer the question. During the testing phase of the first practical typewriter by inventor Christopher Latham Sholes and partners, someone came up with the line “Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of the party”. The author says this was “in the midst of an exciting political campaign.” He doesn’t say which campaign exactly, but it was implied to have been about 1866 or '68.
As for which party, presumably it was the Republican Party, since Sholes was a state legislator in Wisconsin as a member of the Free Soil Party until that party ceased to exist in the mid-1850s, and as a Republican from then until he left the legislature about 1858. He remained active in Republican party for the rest of his life.
What about the quick brown foxes and lazy dogs? Will no one consider their plights?
Just kidding. Nice investigation.
I always wondered: Did people type one of those “All The Letters” phrases to check whether the typewriter was working, or to see if their typing was consistent?
(It was easy to hit some of the keys heavier than others, so you’d have a bold C and a light A because those were struck by the thumb and pinky respectively…)
I’ve always assumed the purpose of those phrases is to check speed (words per minute) and/or training for novice typists.
You all might have known this before, but today I stumbled across why we call Mach 1 traveling at the the speed of sound. And Mach 2, twice that speed, etc.
The use and name of Mach numbers was proposed by Swiss engineer Jakob Ackeret in 1929. Ackeret named the term Mach after the physicist Ernst Mach , who conducted an experiment photographing an object moving faster than the speed of sound in 1887.
And do jackdaws REALLY love my big sphinx of quartz? Or are they just being nice?
The classical German pangram is:
Franz jagt im komplett verwahrlosten Taxi quer durch Bayern.
Which hilariously translates to:
Franz chases in the totally desolate taxi all across Bavaria.
Another such German classic is the first sentence ever transmitted in 1861 through the invention of Philipp Reis, the inventor of the telephone according to Germans (as with every invention, several nations claim to have invented it, with often similar good arguments):
Das Pferd frisst keinen Gurkensalat
The horse doesn’t eat cucumber salad
Were you just offering a hypothetical example, or do you really type those letters with those digits?
That could be just as easily checked by typing “abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz” or even “qwertyuiopasdfghjklzxcvbnm”
Nope, never even tried touch-typing. But I remember old manual typewriters with old ribbons that took a lot of effort, and thinking I could never get that much force with my little finger.
Interesting, another berry that is no berry at all: it is a rose. (see post 7174). They look nice, wonder whether I can find one in Europe. Had never heard of them until now.
D.V. Pike flung J. Q. Schwartz my box
That’s cheating !
Mr Jock, TV quiz PhD, bags few lynx.