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rubberpolicemanon How does IKEA come up with names for its products?

> Brzęczyszczykiewicz

MAUL HALTEN!

rubberpolicemanon The hardest working font in Manhattan (2025)

> hear 50hz

100Hz, actually…

rubberpolicemanon Study uncovers lost 'golden age' of languages

Animate gender didn’t split into masculine and feminine — inanimate collective plural was repurposed as feminine.

rubberpolicemanon How Thomas Mann wrote The Magic Mountain

Excellent. Now do “bürgerliches Gesetzbuch”.

rubberpolicemanon How Thomas Mann wrote The Magic Mountain

This isn’t hard to understand. “Burgher” is a perfectly legitimate translation of “Bürger” as in “bürgerlicher Mittagstisch”, “Der Bürger duldet nichts Unverständliches im Haus”. “Citizen” is a perfectly legitimate translation of “Bürger” when it comes to “Bürgeramt” or “Weltbürger”.

rubberpolicemanon How Thomas Mann wrote The Magic Mountain

> In German it really just means "Citizen".

It most definitely does not — it’s both “citoyen” and “bourgeois”.

rubberpolicemanon CIA staffers offered buyout deals to resign

They are not. In their defense, these people are imbeciles.

rubberpolicemanon Why does man print "gimme gimme gimme" at 00:30? (2017)

I think you’ll find we’re pedants.

rubberpolicemanon What’s the difference between an -ectomy, an -ostomy, and an -otomy? (1986)

> and mild inflammation may occur without noticable swelling.

Calor, dolor, rubor, tumor

rubberpolicemanon What's the fastest language in the world?

Golf.

rubberpolicemanon Vectors from Leibniz to Einstein

Also, http://www.numdam.org/item/SPHM_1979___2_A1_0.pdf

rubberpolicemanon Strange Metals: Where electricity may flow without electrons

This is not even approximately true. j is not “defined in terms of E”. It occurs as a source term in one of the inhomogeneous Maxwell equations, and consistency with the other inhomogeneous one (div D=rho) requires that div j = dot rho, which means that j is the flow of charge density. So, I guess if electron movement shouldn’t be referred to as current, we shouldn’t refer to electrons as charges, either…

rubberpolicemanon LK-99 isn’t a superconductor

Resistivity is measured in ohms * meter, so this may be a unit conversion issue…

rubberpolicemanon We Changed Our Lives Because of Our Remote Jobs. Now It’s All Crumbling

> Sure there was the odd professor that would call a stack a "Stapel"

“Kellerspeicher”, certainly

rubberpolicemanon U-Bahn station in Berlin is decorated with radioactive uranium glazed tiles

I don‘t think that‘s unintuitive. What goes into a source-free volume element has to go out of that volume element (radiation or field).

rubberpolicemanon Why the US and UK can’t stop fighting the metric system

> You also have the joy of "the hole for a 17/64ths Whitworth tap is 47.2 thou" or whatever other imperial nonsense machinists have to deal with.

It’s worse. The drill size for a 7/16” coarse tap is ‘U’.

rubberpolicemanon Old jokes

> 21. A widower was showing some friendly guests around his garden. "Look", he said, "There is the tree where my three unhappy wives hanged themselves". One of the attendees, who was a husband, asked for a cutting from the tree - that he might plant it in his garden.

That one can be traced back to Cicero:

https://en.m.wikisource.org/wiki/Gesta_Romanorum_Vol._I_(187...

rubberpolicemanon When murderers were hanged quickly (2014)

While I do hold opinions about criminal justice, you can't possibly know what they are. I was pointing out that introducing "free will" into the debate only introduces a layer of indirection. A perpetrator felt as if he wanted to commit a crime, and a judge felt as if he decided that three years of prison was a commensurate sentence. Now, let's just redefine all verbs of volition to imply "feels as if", and nothing has changed. The judge may feel as if he thinks the perpetrator "deserved" the sentence. You want him to want to not feel that way, or rather, you feel as if you wanted him to feel that he should feel as if he wanted not to feel that way, by pointing out that one can't choose what to want.

rubberpolicemanon When murderers were hanged quickly (2014)

Even if free will is an illusion (and I'm not sure how to assign meaning to this statement), how does that change anything? If a murderer had no choice but to murder, then the prosecutor had no choice but to prosecute, the jury had to find guilty, and the executioner had to execute.

rubberpolicemanon The Milkman Model Returns, This Time for Shampoo and Haagen-Dazs

On their way to the store, most bulk products have been expectorated on by a number of sweaty men in dirty boots. It's not obvious to me how packaging would lower that number.

rubberpolicemanon What was the role of the blacksmith in medieval society?

I know of Goldschmied, Silberschmied, Kupferschmied, Feinschmied, Grobschmied, Messerschmied, and Stahlschmied ({gold, silver, copper, fine, coarse, blade, steel} smith), all of which are either current trades or preserved as last names.

rubberpolicemanon The Awful German Language (1880)

> Having to think ahead to "okay what's the gender of the noun I'm gonna use three words from now.

Now, that's interesting. I'm a native speaker of German, and just the other day I realized that one of the mistakes I keep making in English is to make the "a/an" distinction not based on phonetics, but on agreement with the noun, disregarding any words preceding it: I know that it's "an error", not "a error"; but then I also tend to say (or write) "an common error".

rubberpolicemanon Fast word vectors with little memory usage in Python

German is not an agglutinative language.