Personal Blogs

Q. Why was the Cassowary thrown out of Birdland?

A. Because it was Ostrich-sized.

Here is a way to sort a series of numbers. Proably not suitable for practical use but rather elegant.

Imagine for example we want to sort 3, 4, 2, 1 into ascending order. We set out some beads like so

3     o o o

4     o o o o

2     o o

1     o

Then we let the beads in each column drop vertically, and: hey presto

1    o

2    o o 

3    o o o

4    o o o o

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bead_sort

Q. Where do wheels sit down?

A. In wheelchairs.

Where does the word “etymology” come from.

When I heard people in the US talking about the right to bare arms, I thought, what’s the big deal about shirts with short sleeves? Turns out they mean guns.

Here's a nice photo my brother Simon took of a yellowhammer.

I loooked up where the bird got its name and there are different theories. All agree about the yellow bit. But what is a "hammer"

I found two suggestions and there may be more possibilities.

Old English amore, a kind of bird (probably the yellowhammer, so that would make it a yellow yellowhammer, or maybe just a bird of the bunting group)

Old English hama = feathers

The first seems to be a common Germanic word denoting a bunting or some similar bird. It's been suggested there is a connect with emmer, a kind of wheat, and indeed grains are part of a yellowhammer's diet. But the OED has a long discussion and I don't think we shall ever know the word origin; it's probably a conflation of more than one source word.

Why didn’t the duck cross the road?

Because it chickened out.

I know this guy called Will Power. Boy can he get his act together.

Whenever I travel from one land mass to another I experience a really strong need to urinate. My doctor says I'm incontinent.