Personal Blogs

Q. What do call a race between sea snails? A. The limpet games.

Dear Laundry

Please submit your bill as soon as convenient.

Nietzsche

P.S. Have you read my latest article, There are no facts, only interpretations?

Dear Nietzsce

Your bill is as follows

Shirts 3 marks

Other items 2 marks

Total 5 marks

The Laundry

P.S. Very impressed by your article. We have reinterpreted your bill, which now stands at 500 marks.

Pretzels.

Are they a kind of doughknot?

I'm definitely against torture. Especially of me.

I watched a YouTube video by Steve Mould, in which he explained and demonstrated a type of structure called tensegrity. This was completely new to me and I found it fascinating. For example, here is a plant stand you can buy on Amazon

At first sight this seems impossible; how can the top magically levitate? Steve Mould explained it by starting with a 2-D version, something like this.

The black bars are rods and the red lines are wires. If you try to push the top down, the wire EF will be stretched and will pull the top part back up. If you try to push the top to the right, the wire AC will be stretched and will pull the top back into position. Similarly, if you try to push the top to the left, the wire BD will be stretched and will pull the top back into position.

The 3-D version in the plant stand follows the same principles. Although it has four radial wires it's still possible to build such structure with only three wires altogether and you can even buy a Lego-compatible version of this design.

It is said a lecturer once told an audience “A double negative makes a positive. ‘I ain’t got nothing’ would mean the speaker has got something. But a double positive can never make a negative.”

From the rear of the room someone called out, “Yeh yeh”.

The speaker said, “Making an audience laugh is a cheap trick. Anyone can do it.”

From the floor a heckler cried, “Go orn. Do it then!” 

I'm trying to teach my bloodhound to play football. But all he can do is dribble.

What’s the antonym of the antonym of synonym?

A Hydronym is the name of an individual pond/lake/stream/river/sea/ocean, as ‘The Round Pond’, ‘Lake Superior’, ‘The Tyburn Brook’, ‘The Yangtze’, ‘The South China Sea’, ‘The South Pacific’.

I came across the word when looking up the River Rhine (Wagner had come up in a quiz we did last night) and it appears that it is just the ancient Celtic name and means ‘flowing’. There is a river Reno in Italy which shares the same name origin. And the Greek roi meaning flow may be related. See also Rhône.

Names of rivers tend to be conservative : new arrivals may speak a different language but often just go with the flow and retain local names of physical features such as hills and rivers. And quite often the local name is not really a name so much as the literal description. For example, ‘Avon’, just means river, as in modern Welsh Afon.

Particularly interesting is ‘Ouse’. This is thought to be from Celtic usso = water. The word is cognate with, that is to say has the same root, as ‘water’, and Russian voda, from which vodka, ‘little water’, is derived. And these are cognate with Gaelic uisce, which is seen in the word whiskey, using beatha =‘ water of life’.