Personal Blogs
Going Up!
Sunday, 28 Jan 2024, 00:37
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Heritage?
Wednesday, 24 Jan 2024, 22:14
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Meanings you didn't know #1
Tuesday, 23 Jan 2024, 00:38
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Wind Haiku
Monday, 22 Jan 2024, 01:11
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All night long
The wind was roaring like a lion
About to gobble us up.
Record Breaker
Sunday, 21 Jan 2024, 23:45
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Edited by Richard Walker, Sunday, 21 Jan 2024, 23:47
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.
Unique rhyme?
Friday, 19 Jan 2024, 23:24
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I’ve heard it said that there is no word in the English language that rhymes with ‘oblige’, which, as far as I can see is true, unless you count proper names, such as ‘Nige’.
So what about words that only have one other word that rhymes with them? Well, I thought of wombat and combat; but are there any other words that rhyme with these two? If you find any do write in the comments.
Sad News
Friday, 19 Jan 2024, 00:32
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Sad news, my steeplejack friend had a fall and now he’s expired..
One Liner
Wednesday, 17 Jan 2024, 23:56
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Edited by Richard Walker, Thursday, 18 Jan 2024, 00:06
Being overcharged for a pencil eraser. That’s daylight rubbery.
Words with triple letters
Tuesday, 16 Jan 2024, 01:03
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Edited by Richard Walker, Tuesday, 16 Jan 2024, 01:04
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.
brrr
duchessship
frillless
hostessship
oooh
uuula (I guess this is 'uvula' spelt before u and v were regarded as different letters)
vertuuus (which means more or less the same as 'virtuous')
yayyy (!)
Other -ship words are hyphenated, e.g. countess-ship, and I think the OED is just being inconsistent with the two examples above.
Dad Joke
Saturday, 13 Jan 2024, 23:31
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It’s only when you have finger problems that you realise how much you count on them.
Helvellyn from Whiteside
Saturday, 13 Jan 2024, 12:31
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Edited by Richard Walker, Saturday, 13 Jan 2024, 23:41
O'er the hills and far away
Thursday, 11 Jan 2024, 22:57
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Tom, he was a Piper's Son, And fell in love when he was young; But the only Tune that he could play, Was o'er the Hills, and far away.
Dad Joke
Wednesday, 10 Jan 2024, 10:43
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Edited by Richard Walker, Wednesday, 10 Jan 2024, 10:43
I keep missing the first letter off words. The doctor says it's rain damage.
A Room with a View
Wednesday, 10 Jan 2024, 00:15
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Night noises
Monday, 8 Jan 2024, 23:16
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Why did the cat flap bang just then?
Was it a ghost,
or only the wind.
Was it a ghost,
or only the wind.
Cave Bears
Saturday, 6 Jan 2024, 18:51
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This is a tooth from a cave bear. My brother gave it to me some years ago and I keep it by my bedside, as a sort of link to the past and the world in which our ancestors lived.
The coin is to give an indication of scale. It's a Roman denarius, about 1 cm across.
The tooth looks pretty formidable, and I thought about what sort of a bite it could give. I imagined prehistoric people competing for cave space with what I though would have been carnivorous animals. However, to my surprise, studies of their teeth suggest they may have been substantially herbivorous [1].Why did they die out? Some possibilities suggest themselves:
- The bears' diet was too specialised (think about giant pandas), the plants they eat were affected by climate change and there wasn't enough food
- Humans hunted them to extinction
- Humans out-competed them.
[1] Cave Bear: A Vegetarian Carnivore, https://www.senckenberg.de/en/pressemeldungen/cave-bear-a-vegetarian-carnivore/#:~:text=Together%20with%20an%20international%20team,had%20an%20exclusively%20vegetarian%20diet.
The Elephant
Sunday, 31 Dec 2023, 23:26
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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
Tuesday, 26 Dec 2023, 00:14
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Yesterday was the one day in the year when the alphabet has only 25 letters.
Noel.
Solution to Probability Question
Sunday, 24 Dec 2023, 16:01
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Edited by Richard Walker, Sunday, 24 Dec 2023, 16:02
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.
| 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | x | |||||
| 2 | x | |||||
| 3 | x | |||||
| 4 | x | |||||
| 5 | x | |||||
| 6 | x | x | x | x | x | x |
Of these both dice show 6 in only one case, so the required probability is 1/11 ~ 9%.
Probability question
Wednesday, 20 Dec 2023, 08:20
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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?
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