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August 6
August 6, 1926 is the day the silent film era ended; that’s when the Warner Bros. movie “Don Juan” opened, using the new “Vitaphone” sound system. People had been used to getting their sound from radios, and their visuals from movies, but those things were starting to merge. Television was first demonstrated around the same Continue reading
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Pauciloquitious
It’s slightly ironic that English has so many words for “not so many words.” Someone who prefers to keep their verbal expressions to a minimum could be called “terse”, “brief”, “taciturn”, “curt”, “succinct”, “trenchant”, “pithy”, “laconic”, “brusque”, “gruff”, “brief”, ‘abrupt”, “short”, “bluff”, or — and this is probably the best one, even though nowadays it’s Continue reading
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Lipogram
“This is a lipogram – a book, paragraph or similar thing in writing that lacks a symbol, particularly (but not always) that symbol fifth in rank out of our 26 script-signs (found amidst ‘d’ and ‘f’), which stands for a sound such as that in ‘kiwi’. I won’t bring it up right now, to avoid Continue reading
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There are 10 attitudes about numbers
“You can’t fool me, Raccoon,” said Dog. “There are not that many numbers.” “Yes there are,” insisted Raccoon. “There are more numbers than one, two, and ‘a lot’, Dog.” “Are not,” said Dog, laying back down in the grass. “I’ll prove it,” said Raccoon. “Look here, Dog, I’ll make some marks in the dirt. Listen Continue reading
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Math is Not What You Think
Math is not what you think Math is not what you think it is. I think that holds for everybody, even real mathematicians, whose understanding of it is vastly beyond what the rest of us can muster. Math is not just a different thing to different people; I think it’s even a different thing to Continue reading
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Leucipottomy
In the southern part of England there are areas where the rock underlying most of the hills is white and chalky. The famous “white cliffs of Dover” are the iconic example, but many hills and meadows around those parts are just as white underneath. This has been known to the residents since prehistoric times, and Continue reading
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August 5
The USS Maddox was a destroyer operating in the Gulf of Tonkin — Vietnam — in August 1964. Its mission was to “collect signal intelligence”, which when somebody else’s ship does, the US calls “spying”. They saw North Vietnamese gunboats on their radar, and on August 4, the US reported that the Maddox and the Continue reading
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Bombilation
Doc Savage is a character created by a publishing house rather than by an author. This is not as unusual as you might think. Doc Savage first appeared in 1933 in “Doc Savage Magazine,” which was not a comic book but really one of their predecessors. It was a “pulp magazine” containing prose stories, generally Continue reading
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Fewmets
Not too long after Izaak Walton wrote a heartfelt guide to fishing in “The Compleat Angler” in 1653, George Gascoigne penned “The Noble Arte of Venerie or Hunting” in 1575. Both books were what today we might call how-to guides. Among the handy pointers Gascoigne dispensed was this: “There is difference betweene the fewmet of Continue reading
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Enough Birthdays to Fill a Trunk
If you think about a Venn diagram where one circle is “people who use pencils,” another is “people with very nice luggage,” and a third is “nature documentary filmmakers,” right at the intersection you might find today, August 4. That’s because it’s the birthday of Nicolas-Jacques Conté (1755), John Venn (1834), Eugen Schuhmacher (1906), and Continue reading
About Me
I’m Pete Harbeson, a writer located near Boston, Massachusetts. In addition to writing my own content, I’ve learned to translate for my loquacious and opinionated pup Chocolate Bossypaws. I shouldn’t be surprised, but she mostly speaks in doggerel. You can find her contributions tagged with Chocolatiana.
Check out my other blog, Techlimitics, where I’m grappling with the nature of simplicity.
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peterharbeson@me.com