Things I Learnt in 2020
drobinin.com
drobinin.com
> The recipe is a mystery, and every chippy mixes their own. However now I know the secret: Just dilute down some yourself. Add vinegar to brown sauce
I had the same self-referential discussion with a chippie in Scotland.
"So what exactly is in brown sauce?"
"Dunno mate, it's just got brown sauce in it."
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Re Roman numerals as multipliers:
I think this must be a recent invention (the example cited is 18th c). In Roman times, 2000 was MM, not IIM, and likewise MM did not mean one million, like the photo shows.
Ek number was commonly used in my childhood days in Mumbai and it means "First class" or "Classic". Typical uses: ek number joke, ek number daaru (daaru = alcohol, liquor), ek number maal (First class, good looking, hot girl), ek number vada pav (classic food dish) etc.
The closest I can think is ek-dam but a person would rarely say that in response to a joke.
Other replies say it's a common phrase in Maharashtra too, TIL.
Very minimalist, nice sounds.
> Will you go to the countryside this year? - Fadoremi?
> Will you go to the theatre tonight? - Soldoremi?
I was very intrigued at how much meaning could be packed into such a short word, given only seven phonemes.
Finally I found a dictionary and found that those words just mean "countryside" and "theater" respectively.
These sentences were examples from the language creator's original book [1], and his initial idea was to use nouns as a way to ask a question, and then add a personal pronoun for an affirmative statement:
> Will you go to the theatre tonight? - Soldoremi? > I will go to the theatre tonight. - Soldoremi dore.
As far as I know, later it was changed by the followers and the Solresol grammar [2] tries to move away from this approach, e.g
> Dore fasifa ladofa fami ladosol (I want to read this book [3])
instead of
> Ladosol dore.
[1]: http://www.ifost.org.au/~gregb/solresol/sudre-book.pdf [2]: http://mozai.com/writing/not_mine/solresol/ [3]: https://solresol.blogspot.com/2012/07/learning-solresol-less...
I'm cancelling my upcoming polar bear liver eating party ASAP.
I was amused by this one as well :).
Oh, wait. Covid...
Would such a "unit vector" for basic speech be similar in other languages?
Take the first ten "operations" of the Ogden list: come, get, give, go, keep, let, make, put, seem, take. Every one of these is the kind of word that has multiple non-interchangeable "synonyms" that you could use, depending on context. Expressing the "same" "concept" in another language is kind of like being forced to choose between them, when there's generally no 1:1 mapping.
> Epidemiologists are public health professionals who investigate patterns and causes of disease and injury in humans. They seek to reduce the risk and occurrence of negative health outcomes through research, community education and health policy.
So to cavalierly categorize epidemiologists as "more usually a bureaucrat" speaks to a myopic understanding of what value they provide.
0 - https://www.bls.gov/ooh/life-physical-and-social-science/epi...
Please reference the definition quoted and provided by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Regarding the rest of your post, you are certainly entitled to your opinion. And I am entitled to disagree.
Who are epidemiologists?
When disease outbreaks or other threats emerge, epidemiologists are on the scene to investigate. Often called "Disease Detectives", epidemiologists search for the cause of disease, identify people who are at risk, determine how to control or stop the spread or prevent it from happening again. Physicians, veterinarians, scientists, and other health professionals often train to be "Disease Detectives".
source: https://www.cdc.gov/careerpaths/k12teacherroadmap/epidemiolo...
See also: Epidemic Intelligence Service (EIS) (https://www.cdc.gov/eis/index.html)
What EIS Officers Do
EIS officers serve on the front lines of public health, protecting Americans and the global community, while training under the guidance of seasoned mentors. When disease outbreaks or other public health threats emerge, EIS officers investigate, identify the cause, rapidly implement control measures, and collect evidence to recommend preventive actions.
source: https://www.cdc.gov/eis/what-eis-officers-do/index.html
On a related note, there is also BS 6008:1980, a British Standard for making a cup of tea; later ratified as ISO 3103.
[Pie Barm] One of the things I miss most about living in the UK is its breakfast sandwiches from manchester. Usually some mix of sausage, egg, bacon, beans on a big white barm/bap. Can't seem to get anywhere near as good sandwiches here in Canada. [1]
[Erstwhile] There word ere is still used almost the same as its Aer root word [2]
[Ogden's Basic English] XKCD had a play on this [3] using the first 1000 most common words. The Simple english version of wikipedia also feeds off of this basic 850 set [4]
[boh!] Was referenced in the most recent spider man movie [5]
[Why we can smell copper] Nile red had a video in 2019 where he synthesized the organic compound that is created by touching copper [6]
[1] https://www.bbcgoodfood.com/recipes/great-british-breakfast-...
[2] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/ere
[4] https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:How_to_write_Sim...
I can't believe I have missed the boh! reference in the most recent Spider Man movie.
Re: ere, I learnt it the hard way with the word "ereyesterday" (and on that note, the word "overmorrow" is nice too) .
Ah, yes. That's my dad's favourite thing, though bizarrely with no batter.
Can't say I eat square sausage much myself these days, despite being a treat (especially sandwiched in a roll between a tatty scone and a fried egg) it gives me hellish indigestion.
Source:
Heh.
I wonder how you stored this information, did you already prepare a draft? Do you use a "Google Docs"? Or do you have a more fancy way to store these ideas? I find it interesting
That's a very good question: newsletters are rendered from markdown files; each of them is a combination of an intro, a book section, and two sections with articles and facts.
Both facts and articles are stored in a local CSV with my brief comments, and then I manually pick and expand on the ones suitable for the edition.
I mostly use Pocket + IFTTT for storing, and a naive Bash script to automate everything routine related to it (e.g formatting sources).
Seriously, it's killing me. Some kind of fruit and chocolate and something??
There are all sorts of foods that can make you sick or kill you if improperly prepared.
The post is really just saying choose items that pair well with each other but not all together. (The only one I can think of quickly is sugar, yeast, and shaggy mane mushroom, assuming the yeast ends up fermenting the sugar).
This is sort of a cheat to the question though. The foods do pair well together from a flavor perspective, but there's a physiological issue when consumed together.
> ""Basic English cut its essential vocabulary to 850 words", says our critic. Let's not discuss the fact that the 850 words of Basic English do not enable you to say, for instance, "Waiter, a tomato salad!". But what is amazing is that Mr Rye appears not to know that people whose mother tongue is other than English have to learn by rote probably twice as many words as what they need in order to get along in an average language, and something like ten times as many as what is necessary to express everything in Esperanto.
Esperanto's basic vocabulary, unlike the basic vocabulary of English (as in Basic English or Nerrière's Globish) is a source of many thousands of words, because the right to combine elements is unlimited, or, to put it otherwise, because of the multiplying effect of many morphemes. The first level of the youth magazine Kontakto uses less than Ogden's 850 words: only 520 lexical elements. Since these include a hundred of vocabulary-enriching words, like igi, (words the Chinese call "empty words"), the list contains only something like 430 semantemes ("full words" in Chinese parlance). But when you read the short stories and the articles written with this limited vocabulary, you don't notice that the author was restricted in his choice of words. Esperanto enables him to be lively, expressive, fun, with a very small lexical basis, precisely because nothing restricts what French speaking mathematicians call the combinatoire (do you say "combinatory"?).
In Esperanto, most roots give birth to dozens of words, easy to form, or forming themselves automatically, by simple reflex, since the patterns are regular, whereas in English, you have to learn a new word for each new concept. Where in Esperanto you make up the adjective with a simple - a, in English you have to learn it by rote, and English differs from most other languages in that very often no similarity of form helps your memory. You don't derive lunar from moon, annual from year, rural from country, urban from city, avuncular from uncle (Esperanto: luna < luno; jara < jaro; kampara < kamparo; urba < urbo; onkla < onklo). And the same problem confronts the learner in other aspects of what is, in most languages, derivation: you don't form dentist from tooth, fraternize from brother or stallion from horse. Rye's statement in this respect is flabbergasting. How can one compare two languages and reach a conclusion so much at odds with reality?"