“Uncopyrightable” is the longest word in the English language that doesn’t repeat any letters.
The shortest word which does repeat is “oo”.
or “aa”
Isn’t that usually spelled “aah”? Or is it a usage I haven’t seen before?
Knight: No, in the back of the throat, like this – Aaaaaaagh!
Other Knight: Oooh! as in alarm!
You need to do more crossword puzzles. aa is a form of cooled lava, distinct from pahoehoe. The word is Hawaiian in origin, but it’s been abducted into English, now.
I suppose ‘mm’ doesn’t count then. Or is that spelled ‘mmm’?
AA sounds like the world’s laziest crossword puzzle word.
Q: Name two people without Twitter vacvounts.
A: @kayaker and @realDonaldTrump.
Good one. 
I can think of a third. I’ve been wondering about leaving Facebook—honestly, I like keeping up with fam and all that but I don’t like the political shit. But I haven’t gone beyond it and I use it less and less. Hmm.
My contribution: I’m referencing Chris Cuomo from today, 1/8/21. Rough quote: “[Trump] has the nuclear codes…but he can’t be trusted with a Twitter account.”
Jesus’s disciples didn’t call him “Jesus”, as Greek, Hebrew and Aramaic don’t have "J"s. In Greek he would have been Iesus (YAY-soos), Hebrew would have been Yeshua (Yeh-SHOO-uh), and in the Aramaic which was spoken by most people, he would have been Yeesha (YEE-shuh).
I have always believed that the song “George Washington Bridge (George Washington, Washington Bridge)” was somebody’s original composition, written to be sung by children who wanted to annoy their brothers and sisters on long car rides. [That certainly is its main and perhaps only use.]
But today I learned that the melody is “real”–taken from a song called “When You Are in Love” or “The Loveliest Night of the Year,” a big hit for Mario Lanza back in the fifties. Who knew? Not me. Not my sister either, and she regularly inflicted it upon me on drives between Chicago and La Crosse, Wisconsin, back in the day.
You’re welcome!
You know that the first rule of this message board is “Don’t be a jerk,” right?
just kidding…
I’ve never heard the GW Bridge lyrics mentioned. I have heard the tune, though.
FTR, jump in at about 40 seconds:
I can’t figure out why I know the melody. Maybe my mom used to play it on keyboards?
ETA Wikipedia dates it to 1888.
Today I learned about the water integrator, a.k.a. the hydraulic integrator. Very clever.
The same was done with electronic op amps after they were invented… op amps were used to solve differential equations using analog voltage levels.
This will be oddly familiar to anyone who has read the Discworld novel Making Money, in which a tinkerer named Hubert has created a model of Ankh-Morpork’s economy using water moving through tubes, tanks, and bottles. (Of course, Discworld also has Hex, a computer that uses ants in place of electrons.)
The Glooper, as it is affectionately known, is what I call a quote ‘analogy machine’ unquote. It solves problems not by considering them as a numerical exercise but by actually duplicating them in a form we can manipulate: in this case, the flow of money and its effects within our society becomes water flowing through a glass matrix, the Glooper.
I would have sworn that one of the collections of annotations to the Discworld novels had mentioned the Russian Water Integrator, but there’s no reference to it here (yet), and there are no annotations for the book at all at the Annotated Pratchett File.
So perhaps I’m the first person (since Pterry) to make this connection? (Assuming he knew about it and wasn’t simply creating another fantastical analog computer out of his fertile imagination.)
Pratchett would more likely have been familiar with MONIAC - Wikipedia, the London School of Economics UK model.
There was supposed to be a triple conjunction tonight at sunset. I missed it. Three stars were supposed to look like a really tight triangle. Did you get to see it? Do you have pictures?
Ignorance fought. Thank you.