I always thought the Nullarbor Desert in Australia was named after an Aboriginal word, but it’s actually Latin and means No Trees.
Steam-burn injuries are horrific, but man, if on top of all that I hafta die AT WORK while eating some shitty microwaved burrito on an uncomfortable folding chair while listening to Susan endlessly yammer about her boring-ass cousin’s stupid self-inflicted problems … 
The Bishop Mark, introduced by (English) Postmaster General Henry Bishop, was the world’s first postage stamp.
Henry Bishop introduced the world’s first known postmark in London in 1661. The “Bishop Mark” was designed to show the date on which a letter was received by the post and to ensure that the dispatch of letters would not be delayed. These were the world’s first handstruck postage stamps
And here are some specimens, which we stumbled across yesterday at Parham House.
j
Pigeons have taught themselves to play Battleship. Well, sort of.
When a pigeon comes across a field where peas have been planted, it will at first peck randomly at the ground, until it finds a pea. Having found one, it’ll then peck in a circle around that one, until it finds another. And having found two, it now knows what direction the rows run in, and so it’ll just go down the row pecking out all of the peas.
Panama hats are not originally from Panama, but from Ecuador. The middlemen were in Panama, but they were never made there.
Yep, from my research:
In 1835, Spanish immigrant Manuel Alfaro arrived in Ecuador and reorganised the local small-scale hat straw makers and weavers of the inland town of Montecristi into a modern production line. Looking for a larger market for his new line in broad-brimmed light straw hats he set up shop in Panama, then a trans-shipment point as the narrowest strip of land in the Americas – there would be no rail line across the United States until 1869, so the fastest and safest way across the US was by sea to Panama, by land across the isthmus, then sea again to San Francisco.
Three significant events boosted his business: the discovery of gold in California in 1848, the Spanish- American war of 1898, and the construction of the Panama canal – both the failed French attempt 1880–93 and the successful American one 1904–14. The ’49ers (as the early Californian goldminers became known) picked up the light broad-brimmed hats en route for protection from the tropical and Californian sun. Manuel’s son Eloy Alfaro did so well from this business that he funded the Ecuadorian Liberal revolutionary movement and became President of Ecuador in 1895.
Further influxes of Americans to Central America in 1898 (when the American Army bought 50,000 of the hats) and 1904–14 raised the public profile and so the sales of the hat; in particular in 1906 US President Teddy Roosevelt was pictured in US newspapers wearing a panama while inspecting the canal works. It sparked a craze for them as being the latest word in cool sophistication, and the Panama hat has been a stylish fashion perennial ever since.
Why does that remind me of the old saw from WWI about how helmets caused an increase in head injuries?
For those who haven’t heard that meme: helmets seemed to cause an increased number of head injuries; but this was because helmets were moving people from “killed” to “wounded”.
Similarly, Stilton cheese does not (and indeed cannot) come from Stilton:
Stilton is an English cheese, produced in two varieties: Blue, which has Penicillium roqueforti added to generate a characteristic smell and taste, and White, which does not. Both have been granted the status of a protected designation of origin (PDO) by the European Commission, requiring that only such cheese produced in the three counties of Derbyshire, Leicestershire and Nottinghamshire may be called Stilton. The cheese takes its name from the village of Stilton, now in Cambridgeshire, where it has long been sold, but cannot be made because it is not in one of the three permitted counties.
j
Are the European Commission’s ideas about protected designations of origin still relevant in the UK after Brexit?
Apparently so (thought I don’t know the detail of why):
For cheese to use the name “Stilton”, it must be made in one of the three counties of Derbyshire, Leicestershire and Nottinghamshire and use pasteurised local milk. Manufacturers of Stilton in these counties received protection under European Law as a protected designation of origin (PDO) in 1996. The cheese remains protected by its PDO even after Brexit, under EU law (in the EU and Northern Ireland) and under UK law (England, Scotland and Wales).
Same source.
j
There are probably rules about what you can sell in the EU, based on those rules. Most American companies don’t rely too much on sales in the EU, so they tend to just ignore protected-designation laws, but even post-Brexit, the EU is a major trade partner for the UK.
SciFi/Fantasy author Gene Wolfe was on the team that developed the machine used for making Pringles potato chips. It’s an odd coincidence that in his later years he began to look a little like the Mr. Pringles logo.
Plus, it was probably easier to declare that UK law matched EU law as of the date of Brexit, rather than ditch everything or re-legislate everything in a short space of time.
Some remote, coastal Alaskan communities are getting high-speed internet, thanks to global warming and a new underwater fiber-optic cable.
In addition to Netflix and other stuff the rest of us take for granted, those communities are now able to share medical information faster than it takes to be flown to the nearest big hospital.
I’m surprised that they’re actually laying fiber. If you don’t have the existing infrastructure for fiber backbones already in place, I’d have thought it’d be cheaper to just go straight to satellite. Which isn’t, admittedly, great for gaming, but works fine for Netflix and medical data.
Something I learned recently was that whenever you hear about major improvements in human athletics its not necessarily that human are getting stronger/faster etc…it’s that the equipment and apparatus around these things improved. Usain Bolt isn’t actually all that much faster than Jesse Owens was 90 years ago, but Bolt is running on a surface designed to be as condusive to speed as possible and in shoes made with technology to insure a perfect fit. Owens ran on a trail made of ash, and in imperfect shoes.
The Lindy effect supposedly applies only to non-perishable things, but it seems like some version of it applies to living things as well:
Indeed, life expectancy is typically defined as how long a just-born person is expected to live, but a person’s life expectancy changes depending on how old they are. A person born today in the US can expect to live about 77.5 years, but a person in the US who is already 76 today can expect to live well past 77.5 years.
Of course, another factor is that records go up, simply because they can’t go down.
And my 84-year-old mother has really excellent odds of living past 77.5 years.
So I just stumbled across this fact today…
Its pretty well known that the British royal family changed their name to Windsor during world war one when their previous German last name did not go down so well. What I discovered today was the actually specific reason they changed it. The actual event that forced their hand was the long range bomber attacks on London in 1917, including one infamous raid that destroyed a school killing many schoolchildren. The heavy bomber that carried out that raid was the Gotha GV bomber making a royal family with the name Saxe-Coburg-Gotha utterly untenable.