[quote=“Drunky_Smurf, post:35, topic:721565”]
The bird, Purple Martins, can only really survive with the help of people, on the east coast, by people making houses for them. Luckily lots of people love the things and are devoted to making the houses and keeping an eye on them.
Eight minute NPR video.
[/QUOTE]That’s the most amazing thing I’ve seen in a good while, thank you very much for sharing.
This year three different wild ducks have nested next to my yard, and I’ve been lucky to see all three take their babies into the lake for the first time.
On water day one and two, the ducklings swim in a very tight group behind the parent. From even a short distance away it appears to be two grown ducks, not a mom and her babies. I had never seen this before, or knew they had this particular protective instinct.
On day three the ducklings begin spreading out, and dive training begins. 
The tentative etymology that RAE gives for the related Spanish word bigote (moustache) actually matches your guess; could be that bigot came from bei Gott/by God and beato from beatus, could be that bigot came from a pun merging both of the above. I’ve found these chains of words in multiple languages fascinating since my 10th grade ESL teacher had us spend a class filling the blackboard with a network of them: it was a big blackboard but she was right when she said we needed to write small.
Where words come from, or may do, is truly of endless interest. Another English one, reminiscent of the “bigot” possibility: “bloody” as a swearword (British, rather than American, English) – adjective / adverb / general intensifier. Some theorise that it is a contraction that has come about, over the centuries, of “By Our Lady” – others go for the simpler answer that blood is a substance with solemn and weighty – including religious – significance.
My current bedtime book is On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen. Full of interesting trivia, but last night’s gem was about the color of beets. Apparently the deep red pigment binds with iron in your GI tract. If you have problems with iron or are not consuming enough, you will excrete the red pigment and look like you have blood in the toilet. I don’t eat beets often enough to have noticed an effect one way or another, but my other half loves them and reported having seen this effect before, when I told him this tidbit.
Also, rutabagas were an accidental hybrid between cabbage and turnips, and elephant garlic is actually a type of leek.
That figures – I’ve always considered them something from hell.
I learned yesterday that the Arecibo Message was a thing and it’s apparent response was also a thing and is interesting/kinda scary
Today I passed by a wedding shop, it was called [DaveBarry]and I’m not making this up[/DB] deBride.
If there was meant to be a space somewhere the logo didn’t bother with it.
I discovered this while shopping at Target today:
the advantage of paper dollars over dollar coins is that if you drop them
they don’t roll underneath the store’s photo printing machine where
it is impossible to reach.
What is this “apparent response” of which you speak?
Some jokers did one of those fake crop circles things. (Albeit very far from circular.)
Extremely naive people who don’t know that these things are fakes get excited about it. Everybody else, including the regular SETI folk, just don’t care.
Algorithm:
noun: algorithm; plural noun: algorithms
Having recently learned about algorithms helps me to better articulate my idea (which I recently posted about in here) of replacing our severely antiquated and corrupted political system
with one in which folks could use their home computers to implement their will, thus drastically reducing the human element as much as possible (as in a microchip the size of a postage stamp:-).
In the aforementioned post, I stated that my conceptualization of said system would be a computer program that would involve pie-charts, graphs, percentage bars, and clear concise pro and con arguments, etc.
But since then, of about 10 days ago, this lovely word algorithm has found its way to me and so now I can see its related importance to the matter as they (I think) would sort things out … allowing citizens to deal with issues that matter quickly and logically (instead, for example, of hearing of some evil rep that blew millions of dollars in trying to hush up his sexual misconduct).
I just finished a book about vultures – woohoo, knowledge in action!
The California Condor is a vulture; the conservation folk figured out that few people would get really excited about saving a vulture (because they are so associated with filth, disease, and so on) that the bird was rechristened as a “condor.” It worked!
Why don’t my vehicles have the gas arrow thingy? Is it all cars? 
No, but most newer cars (within at least the last 10-15 years) seem to have it. My 2004 Mazda 3 has it; my wife’s 2005 Ford Focus has it. My brother’s 2013 Hyundai Elantra has it. All the rental cars I’ve driven in the last few years have had it. I believe German cars don’t usually (if at all) have it.
While reading Brave Companions last night by David McCullough, I learned that there is an instrument that measures the blueness of the sky, a cyanometer. It never occurred to me that such a thing existed.
Here’s another Wiki aboot it
A group of sea turtles is called a “bale”, and some sea turtles can swim up to 35 mph!
Ah, that would explain why my BMW is arrowless. I’ll need to look closely at the Jeep for the gas arrow – since the tank is different on both vehicles I’m always pulling up to the pump on the wrong side. I suppose I could make homemade sticky arrows . . .
Huh. You’d’a thunk it was a device to check one’s food for poison.
I recently learned that tyromancy, the art of divining the future or interpreting omens by observing cheese, was a thing. As above, so in sammich.
Thanks. Nice to know some folks have a sense of humour. Shame there were no pictures of the actual “answer”.
You might enjoy this as well. http://circlemakers.org/