Today I Learned

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Ibix said:
We quite happily steal words from other languages
Well, Blitzkrieg is quite martial, that's all. Not really a friendly word. I guess adoption and adaption occur in every language. With words that make sense, there is no problem. One of the favorite words of an American grown up friend of mine is "schweigen". It cannot be translated without changing its meaning, and the other way around it's "sophisticated". However, it becomes annoying if there is no need to and it's just because it's hip to say it, here in English. No survey on tv or the internet in which people are requested "voten Sie jetzt" (vote now). The alien conjugation alone is terrible. I know the Russian have adopted "Butterbrot" (the German version of a sandwich) and "Schlagbaum", this red and white bar at boundaries where travelers are stopped by customs officers. From the Russian language we adopted "Bistro" for a diner, which means quick. And the Huguenots brought many French words with them, e.g. we say Trottoir for a sidewalk, or Kanapee for sofa, but also Couch. As @jim hardy has said:
jim hardy said:
language is fascinating.
 
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fresh_42 said:
And the Huguenots brought many French words with them, e.g. we say Trottoir for a sidewalk, or Kanapee for sofa
You'll find these in a few regions only - mainly close to the French border and in Switzerland.
Couch has a French origin as well, but came to Germany via the English language.
Ibix said:
We quite happily steal words from other languages - schadenfreude and zeitgeist are well known, even if not exactly used every day.
Kindergarten!
 
mfb said:
You'll find these in a few regions only - mainly close to the French border and in Switzerland.
The border isn't close but we do have quite a few French settlements in the area and even a church from Huguenots in my town. E.g. people say Atschö here for good-bye, which clearly once had been adieu. And some names are still of French origin. The traces of the Huguenots are all around here. It isn't the neighborhood to the border, rather the persecution of French protestants under Loius XIV.
 
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Today I learned that the Today I learned thread is still alive.
 
Today I learned about two features of the Windows interface that have been around since Windows 7 but I never heard of before.
  • If you try to drag a window as far as you can off the left or right side of the screen, it will resize to fill half the screen when you release the mouse.
  • If you "shake" a window (mouse-down on the title bar and rapidly drag from side-to-side), all the other windows will be minimised. Shake the window again and the others reappear.
 
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Microsoft has an addin for excel called fuzzy lookup; it compares data points between two (or more i think) tables. it will output a "match" of a reference data point from the table(s) being referenced and computes a value between 0 and 1 representing the "similarity"

Column1 Column2 Similarity
tomato tomatto 0.9488
 
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TIL that Eugen Goldstein did not know that canal rays were protons and that he thought it was related to the ether. This is contrary to all of the crap we are learning in school about how he discovered the proton and was so great for knowing that the proton had a lower charge to mass ratio. TIL that this is not true and that Wily Wein and JJ Thomson did most of this work.
 
TIL that there are at least two facebook group on isopods (mostly known to people as pill bugs), mostly as pets and for selling them.
In my ingnorance of pill bug diversity I didn't realize there was such variety of small morphological differences and colors.
They also have mutants like albino.
This is a lot like fish groups.

However they seem to lack any information on one of the more interesting isopods (a fish tongue eating parasite).
 
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jtbell said:
TIL that Swedish meatballs are actually Turkish.
As far as I've experienced, they are home in basically every culture. The meat might differ, and often they are wrapped in pasta dough and cooked, and they have different names, but in the end they all are the same.

There is a certain region here, where meat in pasta have a very funny (unofficial) name: Herrgottsbescheißerle. It's difficult to translate, but it means "screws the Lord". They are basically pelmeni, just German instead of Russian. The name came from the Middle Ages and they were eaten during lent, although forbidden. But as they were hidden behind the dough, the Lord couldn't see it.

Even grilled meatballs have a couple of different names in Germany alone, depending on the region. I think it's a bit like apple-pie: everybody has it.
 
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Today I learned that NEWS is an acronym for Notable Events, Weather, and Sports.
 
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newjerseyrunner said:
Today I learned that NEWS is an acronym for Notable Events, Weather, and Sports.
Darn, I thought that it was points on a compass.
 
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Borg said:
Damn, I thought that it was points on a compass.
I posted too quickly. I saw a bunch of sources saying this so I thought it was right. Webster dictionary tweeted to the contrary.
 
phinds said:
Yeah, but I've tried adjusting my personal aspect ratio and I'm STILL fat !
zoki85 said:
Today I learned that TV makes people more fat than they are in real.
Showing fatter people in ads makes them more attractive to the majority of us who are fat.
 
newjerseyrunner said:
Today I learned that NEWS is an acronym for Notable Events, Weather, and Sports.
Well I'll be damned. Did not know this, TIL.. lol
 
Craftek_Ana said:
Well I'll be damned. Did not know this, TIL.. lol
that's because it's not true lol
 
nitsuj said:
that's because it's not true lol
lol :D
 
Craftek_Ana said:
lol :D
yes; classic case of fake news :smile:
 
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Today I learned that cave systems often have caverns and tunnels named such names as, "The Big Chamber Near the Entrance", "The Big Chamber Nowhere Near the Entrance", and "The Birth Canal".
 
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TIL that I should have trained in wrestling instead of Karate. No offense to my old sensei but I never got to fly through the air and land in pieces of foam like these guys. This is so awesome.

 
Aufbauwerk 2045 said:
TIL that I should have trained in wrestling instead of Karate. No offense to my old sensei but I never got to fly through the air and land in pieces of foam like these guys. This is so awesome.



If you wanted to do that, you should have done gymnastics like I did. :biggrin:
 
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TIL that I can learn something even from nausea-inducing television. I was watching a program featuring a guy from some EMP "task force." I became curious about the major event c. 1858 that, according to the guest, fried the telegraph system. By following links, I came across the name Loomis, an American mathematician who was interested in astronomy and meteorology. He reported on the phenomenon at that time. Then I looked him up on archive.org and discovered he wrote some mathematics textbooks, which are free to download. So now, after being awakened from my sound sleep by someone playing hip-hop music from their automobile, loud enough to wake the whole neighborhood, I downloaded the Loomis textbooks. Now I'm reviewing cycloids. I honestly was not aware of just how fascinating they are. It seems the Loomis books influenced Chinese mathematics education. I have not learned exactly who is influencing American mathematics education today.
 
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