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Moveable Horns?
If you visit Yale University, you might view the portico of Davenport College, or even catch a glimpse of the official banner of the university’s president. If you do, you’ll see a yale. Not, mind you, a Yale — that would be a direct descendant of Elihu Yale, who was a governor of the British… Continue reading
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Beached
If you find yourself on a desert island without a boat, what you are is “stranded.” On the face of it, that seems like an unusual term to use for that situation; why not “trapped” or something? By the way, if your pirate crew got tired of always having to let you win at Scrabble… Continue reading
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A shot heard ’round the world?
Before a “big shot” was a person — like in “Unless the memory plays us a trick, Al Capone is the ‘big shot’ of Chicago gangland” (1930), it was literally a shot. One that was, and I suppose this would be obvious, comparatively large. Guns were probably invented in China around 1000 CE. They took… Continue reading
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Alexis Clairaut
Just about everybody has heard of Isaac Newton, who figured out a lot of stuff that’s pretty basic to modern science and engineering. But just because Newton came up with his his principles and observations didn’t mean that everybody simply said “Oh, yes, that’s a better way to understand the universe.” It’s science, after all,… Continue reading
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Can ye?
To be “canny” means being prudent or knowing about something. It originated in Scottish and in northern English dialects as a modification of the word “can,” as in “able to.” The word entered literary English in the 1600s and at first tended to be applied to Scots themselves. The common stereotype of Scottish people even… Continue reading
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“To the lighthouse”
During the reign of Ptolomy II, between about 280 and 247 BCE, the Ptolemaic Kingdom built the Lighthouse of Alexandria on Pharos, a little island in the Nile delta. Because of its location the lighthouse came to be called the Pharos of Alexandria. It was one of the seven wonders of the ancient world, and… Continue reading
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Obscurity? Where?
Sometimes you run across a word that’s so obscure, obsolete, or forgotten that it doesn’t even appear in the best dictionaries. Adoxography is one example; it’s pretty difficult to find a definition, and you have to go back to the early 20th century to find any examples of it. Nevertheless, “adoxography” — the method of… Continue reading
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Boondoggles
A “boondoggle” is something you expect to hear about in connection with some wasteful, politically motivated project touted by some senator or representative in Washington, DC. It’s usually intended to provide public funds to the politician’s state or district, but doesn’t provide much benefit beyond that. One recent boondoggle — that in this case didn’t… Continue reading
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May 10
On May 10, 1967, a very strange flying machine crashed pretty spectacularly in a dry lake in the western US. It was the Northrup M2-F2, and it had just finished a test flight, gliding down from 45,000 feet (14,000 m) at a speed of about 450mph (720 kmh). The pilot was Bruce Peterson. The strangest… Continue reading
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Meanwhile, back at the ranch…
Remember the movie The Big Lebowski from over 25 years ago? It’s a strange film — a comedy that seems to be about a kidnapping, but is also about a case of mistaken identity, as well as being about bowling and…well, some other stuff. The movie was written, directed, and produced by Joel and Ethan… Continue reading
About Me
I’m Pete Harbeson, a writer (among other things) located near Boston, Massachusetts. In addition to writing my own content, I’ve learned to translate for my loquacious and opinionated pup Chocolate Bossypaws. No surprise, 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. You can also find some of my minor software projects at GitHub. Nothing very impressive. I mostly write tiny utilities in Python.
I find myself suddenly de-corporatized (their choice, not mine). To help keep the lights on, buy me a coffee!
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