Today I Learned

[DaveC426913]

Tau what?

In case this is a sincere question: Tau is a constant, equal to 2*pi.

 

[DaveC426913]

Hey! Today is Tauday!

 

[diogenesNY]

Of all of those, I think English only has Queer Street, and it's an informal (and mostly archaic) saying meaning trouble - to be "up Queer Street" means to have had things go wrong.

In the US, a similar usage applies in the sport of boxing, from at least the early 20th century to the present:

'Holy cow! After that right uppercut by Jones, Smith has been left on Queer Street.'

--diogenesNY

 

[fresh_42]

YIL that peanut butter can well be used to thicken sauces.

 

[Borg]

I use it in a homemade salad dressing - one tablespoon of olive oil, one of balsamic vinegar, and a small dab of peanut butter. Stir until consistent and drizzle on the salad.

 

[fresh_42]

I had some vegetable leftover: a red bell pepper, some tomatoes, and onions. Cut them and gave them with some olive oil into the pan. I used almost all the spices and herbs I could find to add some taste to it, and finally some PB. I was surprised that it not only gave some flavor but also made a perfect consistency which prior to it was only water and oil.

 

[DaveC426913]

I used almost all the spices and herbs I could find to add some taste to it...

Have you considered getting tested for Covid-19?

 

[pbuk]

I had some vegetable leftover: a red bell pepper, some tomatoes, and onions. Cut them and gave them with some olive oil into the pan. I used almost all the spices and herbs I could find to add some taste to it, and finally some PB. I was surprised that it not only gave some flavor but also made a perfect consistency which prior to it was only water and oil.

That is almost exactly the recipe for a satay sauce

 

[fresh_42]

That is almost exactly the recipe for a satay sauce

I ate it with rice (basmati), and it made sense.

 

[kyphysics]

https://www.yahoo.com/news/ransomware-attack-paralyzes-hundreds-u-232413623.html

WASHINGTON (AP) — A ransomware attack paralyzed the networks of at least 200 U.S. companies on Friday, according to a cybersecurity researcher whose company was responding to the incident.

The REvil gang, a major Russian-speaking ransomware syndicate, appears to be behind the attack, said John Hammond of the security firm Huntress Labs. He said the criminals targeted a software supplier called Kaseya, using its network-management package as a conduit to spread the ransomware through cloud-service providers. Other researchers agreed with Hammond's assessment.

That sucks.

 

[BillTre]

TIL (from here) that staghorn ferns can form colonies (in nature) of many individual plants. Different members of the colony can take on different functions to benefit the colony.
This is called eusociality and was thought to be limited to colonial animals like bees and ants (workers, queens, soldiers).

 

[ergospherical]

TIL that "sick pay" doesn't mean the job pays really well.

 

[Ibix]

TIL that "sick pay" doesn't mean the job pays really well.

"Sick" in the sense of "weak and feeble", however...

 

[gmax137]

TIL that "splat" is a term for asterisk, as in:

It appears that you are using multi-character variable names with splats ("*") for multiplication.

I like it.

 

[phinds]

I like it.

So does Rotten Tomatoes

 

[epenguin]

TIL that "splat" is a term for asterisk, as in:

I like it.

Ever since it was in the parodying film 'Modesty Blaise' whenever someone in a film falls off a building or a cliff I wait a second and then say in a flat voice 'SPLATT!'

 

[phinds]

Ever since it was in the parodying film 'Modesty Blaise' whenever someone in a film falls off a building or a cliff I wait a second and then say in a flat voice 'SPLATT!'

And, appropriately enough, Modesty Blaise got a splat:

 

[diogenesNY]

In the same vein as '*' is sometimes spoken as 'splat', '#' is sometimes spoken as 'crunch' and '!' is 'bang'.

--diogenesNY

 

[Ibix]

In the same vein as '*' is sometimes spoken as 'splat', '#' is sometimes spoken as 'crunch' and '!' is 'bang'.

! universe #

 

[gmax137]

In the same vein as '*' is sometimes spoken as 'splat', '#' is sometimes spoken as 'crunch' and '!' is 'bang'.

--diogenesNY

"Bang" I know. What's the connection between "#" and "crunch?"

When I was a kid, "#" was "number" or "pounds." Lately it's "hash" or more annoyingly "hash tag" from twitter. As far as I know, "hash" in this sense is a variable type, like integer "I" or "F" floating point. Wasn't "H" Hollerith type in FORTRAN, similar to # today in PERL? I'm no programmer. Obviously.

 

[diogenesNY]

"Bang" I know. What's the connection between "#" and "crunch?"

When I was a kid, "#" was "number" or "pounds." Lately it's "hash" or more annoyingly "hash tag" from twitter. As far as I know, "hash" in this sense is a variable type, like integer "I" or "F" floating point. Wasn't "H" Hollerith type in FORTRAN, similar to # today in PERL? I'm no programmer. Obviously.

I am familiar with the more descriptive names of hash, pounds, etc for '#'. Crunch, along with splat and bang can be found in the MIT 'Jargon File' as spoken vocalizations of those symbols when reading certain sorts of programming source code.

I _think_ that the term 'crunch' is some sort of throwback to 'adding machines' of the electro-mechanical sort that were ubiquitous in the mid-twentieth century, where the # key would total (crunch) all the previous entries.

--diogenesNY

 

[jbriggs444]

Wasn't "H" Hollerith type in FORTRAN, similar to # today in PERL?

A Hollerith literal was a way of encoding string values in a program, for instance, 3HABC. The leading digit gives the string length, the H identifies it as a Hollerith literal and the remaining characters are the string value. e.g.

I = 3HABC

It was before my time. I started on VAX Fortran-77 which had perfectly good (*) fixed length character strings, string literals with double quotes and a slice notation for sub-strings.

(*) Well, almost perfectly good. Null strings were not well supported. You could not do an empty string literal. If you compiled with bounds checking enabled, a null slice such as mystring(1:0) was disallowed. My code made liberal use of null slices to denote empty strings. It worked fine with bounds checking disabled.

 

[BWV]

Italy has 34 separate languages, all of which evolved independently from Latin. Modern Italian is a single dialect of Tuscan that was chosen in the late 19th century, after unification and independence, to be the national language.

 

[KingGambit]

Today I learned, why aliens never visit us.
Forget about Fermi paradox, Filter, Goldilocks, etc...

When I try to see if there's some discussion about cosmology from an enginner view as opposed to a scientist view (not that I regard Bill Nye is not a scientist).
And I type
Bill Nye Degrasse Tyson Big Bang I got this.

 

[jasonRF]

Today I learned that Earnst A. Guillemin, who was an EE prof at MIT and wrote a number of books on circuits and networks, earned his PhD under Sommerfeld.

I have had his Mathematics of Circuit Analysis for 25 years and never knew anything about him. That book was written in the late 1940s and features a truly excellent semi-rigorous presentation of complex analysis. It also has some good chapters on matrix algebra, including things like simultaneous diagonalization of two matrices, although the notation and language is a little different than modern treatments.

 

[Astronuc]

TIL that I'm related to a Richard Nixon (England, 1700s), not the Richard M Nixon (37th President of US), whose Nixon ancestry goes back to Cappagh, Tyrone, Ireland. So I have to go back further, which is a challenge.

 

[Stavros Kiri]

TIL that I'm related to a Richard Nixon (England, 1700s), not the Richard M Nixon (37th President of US), whose Nixon ancestry goes back to Cappagh, Tyrone, Ireland. So I have to go back further, which is a challenge.

Have you tried using the LDS Geneology Records/Files? ... (It works - independent of religion)

 

[Astronuc]

Have you tried using the LDS Geneology Records/Files? ... (It works - independent of religion)

Yes, that was one of the first databases I used. Since then though, I have used church records, government records and some historical publications from the 1800s.

Edit/update: I should add that I prefer to find independent sources. Sometimes, different online databases use the same original source, which may be incorrect. At least, that is what I found in my case. It's best to go to original archives, e.g., church records, or government census documents, or for recent family members, newspaper articles. Going back into the 1800s, or 1700s and earlier, church records, or family letters or documents, may be the only reliable source. I just happened to discover some old texts from the early 1800s, that I could cross-reference with other records for independent confirmation. Some churches were much better in records than others. I've also found spelling errors in various census documents.

 

[Stavros Kiri]

Yes, that was one of the first databases I used. Since then though, I have used church records, government records and some historical publications from the 1800s.

Combination of all available sources is always the best idea. Good luck in your research! ...

 

[Klystron]

TIL the astonishingly beautiful musical movements incorporated by Stanley Kubrick into "A Clockwork Orange" were based on excerpts from "Music for the Funeral of Queen Mary" by Purcell. With all the emphasis on 'Ludwig van' in "Clockwork", I assumed Kubrick had adapted phrases from Beethoven.

Wanting to hear orchestral versions I sifted through Beethoven recordings, aurally searching for the distinctive phrases; surely in the glorious Ninth. While a great excuse to listen to Beethoven, the elusive piece escaped my searches. J.S. Bach, perhaps? Mozart?

IK, read the movie credits; but that felt like cheating. Luckily I watched a Polish movie about Native American exploitation that climaxed in a mock funeral featuring a rendition of the music I sought. The credits following that movie listed Purcell's "Funeral Music for Queen Mary". Case closed. I am listening to Beethoven's 9th Symphony even as I type.