Below are things I’ve learned or found interesting in the past month:
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This 2017 blog post, Reality has a Surprising Amount of Detail.
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Per this map by Mark Lotto, only 13 states are entirely north of Mexico and entirely south of Canada.
![US map showing 13 states entirely between US and Canada]()
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More in the series of “things you didn’t realize were named after people: Macadamia nuts were named by a botanist after John Macadam. Wonder if he knew the botanist who named Fuschia after Leonhart Fuchs. Similarly, shrapnel was named after Lieutenant-General Henry Shrapnel. The more you know!
Related, I was recently re-introduced to this excellent list. A favorite entry is “Brown noise”.
4. Top-Level domains are the things that appear at the end of URLs, like .com and .gov. Many of these are reserved for countries (.us, .uk and so on). Only one of these, .su, is not governed by a country. It was assigned to the Soviet Union before its collapse, and the relevant governing bodies have attempted to eliminate it ever since. Currently, Russia governs it, and the domain is largely associated with cybercrime.
5. Stephen Soderbergh’s silent, B&W cut of Raiders of the Lost Ark, courtesy of Sam Sorensen’s piece about minimalism.
6. Some languages, like German and Turkish have evidentiality markers, used to distinguish between things seen first-hand versus heard from others. I expect to talk more about this once I finish reviewing “Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things”.
7. I can’t find it now, but I came across a Tweet some time ago that said something like “We think Dracula lived in a castle because he was a vampire, but he lived in a castle because he was a Count.” This thoroughly flipped my brain, and I have to wonder what other lesson’s we’ve collectively taken the wrong way.
One comes to mind: the expression “The game is afoot” means that the game (being hunted) is running. Typically it’s treated today as “The sport is underway”. I think of this often, but most recently while playing Splintered Fate, where Donatello yells, “The chase is afoot!”, a rather nonsensical statement when using the original meaning. Bonus: if you don’t know it, “The game is afoot” is a Shakespearean neologism.
8. The numbering of Popes John. Lots of good stuff in here, but the takeaway is that there was no Pope John XX (but there was a Pope John XXI), and Pope XVI (now considered an antipope) has been left in the order.
9. Courtesy of XKCD, the original Celsius scale was backwards, with 0 being the boiling point of water and 100 being the freezing point.
10. Support for the death penalty seems to be down about 20 percentage points over the last 30 years. Good!
Several interesting quotes from this 1998 article. Like that the cries of communism never change. “No one in elected office will say they’re against the death penalty. That’s seen as practically communistic.”
Or this from a reverend (emphasis mine): “Some of the very best people who are concerned about other injustices are completely silent on the death penalty…Church people tend to be punitive in their attitude towards people who mess up. It’s very strange. All the business you hear in church about redemption, forgiveness - if you commit a crime, then church people don’t believe it applies. And if you commit a capital crime, then you’re beyond the pale. Forgiveness is for small, everyday infractions.”