Personal Blogs

Yesterday I read in Scientific American that the record for the hottest chilli pepper has been officially broken. The new champion is Pepper X and is listed in the Guinness Book of Records. The plant breeder was the appropriately named Ed Curry (see nominative determinism), who also produced the previous record holder, the Carolina Reaper.

The Scorville rating of the new pepper is 2,693,000 SCU. Here is a chart (courtesy of Wikipedia) that compares this with more familiar varieties of chilli.

Sad news, my steeplejack friend had a fall and now he’s expired.. 

In the Oxford English Dictionary I found the following words where a letter occurs three times in succession.

A list was posted on Quora and all I've done is check which ones the OED lists, plus I thought of oooh.. So there could be others not discovered. Apart from brrr, oooh and yayyy my favourite is frillless, which makes perfect sense, although you don't hear it very often.

Other -ship words are hyphenated, e.g. countess-ship, and I think the OED is just being inconsistent with the two examples above.

It’s only when you have finger problems that you realise how much you count on them.

The Elephant is a curious bird

It flits from twig to twig.

It builds its nest in a rhubarb bush

And whistles like a pig.

Yesterday was the one day in the year when the alphabet has only 25 letters.

Noel.

This is the solution to the problem posted at https://learn1.open.ac.uk/mod/oublog/viewpost.php?post=279732

When two dice are rolled there are 6 x 6 = 36 possible outcomes, all equally likely. However the information that at least one has come up six narrows down the number of possibilities to the 11 shown as crosses below.

A friend who I know to be reliable rings me up and tells me they have just rolled a pair of dice and at least one came up 6. What is the probability that the other one also showed 6?

This picture is from the cover of the February 1925 edition of Science and Invention. The author of the article on page 978 was Hugo Guensback.

Guensback's prescient article foreshadows by nearly 100 years developments that are only just starting to become common. 

The 'teledactyl' sounds like a prehistoric winged reptile but is in fact a remote finger that mirrors the movement of the doctor's finger. Here is Guensberg's diagram of how the system might work.

This is all quite well thought out and even in 1925 it might have been possible to build a limited proof of concept prototype in the laboratory but of course cost and technical issues would have made mass production impractical, and without a modern communications infrastructure such as the internet it would be very hard to make it work in practice.

Here is a link to the whole article, courtesey ofl worldradiohistory.com

https://www.worldradiohistory.com/Archive-Electrical-Experimenter/SI-1925-02.pdf