Nepal is GMT +5.45. Did my head in when a friend went travelling there and kept phoning me at stupid times.
I remember reading this factoid when I first joined the Internet in the mid 90s.
I wonder if it is still true that he is only author to achieve or if someone else has managed to equal this feat.
While Mansfield wasn’t decapitated, she was partially scalped, and her skull was sorta ‘crunched in.’ And it’s worth noting that to show that she wasn’t a ‘dumb blonde,’ her press machine cooked up this exorbitant IQ and that she knew (five?) languages.
Her decoration tastes, however
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Time in Japan was, once upon a time, weird:
Broken Hill in the far west of the state of New South Wales uses South Australian time (as Adelaide is closer to it than Sydney is) so is always on a different time to its state capital.
And the town of Eucla (pop < 100) in the far east of Western Australia has its own timezone.
daytime and nighttime are always divided into six periods whose lengths consequently change with the season.
Didn’t the ancient Romans use a system like that too?
Our modern hours originated with the ancient Romans, who used the same system (except twelve hours per day and per night, of course).
It actually wouldn’t be all that hard to have a clock mechanism that kept track of the mean solar year and adjusted the day and night hours accordingly. The main complication would be setting it for a particular latitude.
Today I learned why flying insects (e.g. moths) are attracted to lights.
Up until this year, scientists didn’t know the answer. There have been a lot of theories over the years, but not any conclusive answers.
But now they know. The reason is quite fascinating (and somewhat depressing). The bugs don’t want to fly around the light, but they can’t help it. The light screws up their navigation system so much that it forces them to endlessly circle around the light.
Another oddity I just learned from your link is Lord Howe Island, which has daylight savings time, but only springs forward 30 minutes.
That’s the explanation I’ve always heard. What other candidate explanations were there?
A recent article I read somewhere detailed England’s plan to restore island/atoll territory to Mauritius (for those of you who are unclear on it, Mauritius is an Indian Ocean, about 500 miles east of Madagascar), and then stated that, once the transfer is complete, the sun will at long last set on the Brittish Empire. But, if the “empire” is defined as the Commonwealth, member state Australia owns some rocks out in the Mid Southern/Indian Ocean, about due south of India, basically obviates the assertion.
Surprisingly she was an okay amateur violinist. On the Ed Sullivan show she played an abbreviated version of Vivaldi’s Violin Concerto in A Minor, Op 3, Nr 6. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rFEIOO8YIWY
If her tempo seems a bit slow, here’s a pro orchestra playing the same work just a bit faster. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TYAzRHvV6mU
I like that word!
Even though I was surprised to learn that it doesn’t mean what it looks like it should mean.
(it’s not the Latin 2nd declension singular of Trivia )
The root is Latin, “meeting of three ways "
and hence:
Trivium means " a group of studies consisting of grammar, rhetoric, and logic-- forming the lower division of the seven liberal arts in medieval universities”
The remainder being the quadrivium: arithmetic, music, geometry, and astronomy.
It looks like it is:
trivium n (genitive triviī or trivī); second declension
If an institute covers the seven arts and does a bad job of it, is that a deviant septium?
It would have to be a septivium.
By now, everyone has heard of the Great Molasses Flood of Boston. But TIL of a similar incident in Wisconsin in 1991: The Great Cheese Fire. Tons of cheese, butter, and collateral hot dogs conflagerated, with an ensuing liquid deluge. Thankfully, no human lives were lost, no margarine of course, but perhaps a few misadventurous mice.
“It literally was a river of butter,”
