Content-Type: text/shitpost

• Spanish for “tumbleweed” is “la rodadora”.

• There is a really cool-sounding museum in Ciudad Juárez called La Rodadora espacio interactivo (Tumbleweed interactive space). New place on my should-visit list!

• Townsville, Australia is not a joke. It is named for Robert Towns.

Montana is the U.S. version of Inner Mongolia.

The last thing I remember from my dreams this morning is someone informing me, very authoritatively, that there are three things that Alexander the Great really wants.

I don't remember the first two but the third was bow-tie pasta.

Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen
Had a very shiny nose.

Today I learned that Reddit has an r/notinteresting forum.

Amused, I checked into it, and was disappointed to discover that it was not interesting.

Disappointed?

It's kinda funny that we still have “happen”, “happy”, “mishap”, “hapless”, “haphazard”, and so on, but the original word “hap” is completely gone.

“Pissburgh”.

I did this twice.

I am so, so sorry.

I don't know why you would care, but here are the additions I have made over the years:

    #
    # MJD additions
    #
    <Multi_key> <p> <i>                             : "π"    U03c0   # GREEK SMALL LETTER PI
    <Multi_key> <e> <p> <s>                         : "ε"    U03c0   # GREEK SMALL LETTER EPSILON
    <Multi_key> <grave> <grave>                     : "ʻ"    U02BB   # MODIFIER LETTER TURNED COMMA (Okina)
    <Multi_key> <o> <equal>                         : "ő"   U0151   # LATIN SMALL LETTER O WITH DOUBLE ACUTE
    <Multi_key> <O> <equal>                         : "Ő"   U0150   # LATIN CAPITAL LETTER O WITH DOUBLE ACUTE

    <Multi_key> <O> <1>                             : "①"   U2460   # CIRCLED DIGIT  ONE
    <Multi_key> <O> <2>                             : "②"   U2461   # CIRCLED DIGIT   TWO
    <Multi_key> <O> <3>                             : "③"   U2462  # CIRCLED DIGIT  THREE
    <Multi_key> <O> <4>                             : "④"   U2463   # CIRCLED DIGIT  FOUR
    <Multi_key> <O> <5>                             : "⑤"   U2464   # CIRCLED DIGIT  FIVE
    <Multi_key> <O> <6>                             : "⑥"   U2465   # CIRCLED DIGIT  SIX
    <Multi_key> <O> <7>                             : "⑦"   U2466   # CIRCLED DIGIT  SEVEN
    <Multi_key> <O> <8>                             : "⑧"   U2467   # CIRCLED DIGIT  EIGHT
    <Multi_key> <O> <9>                             : "⑨"   U2468   # CIRCLED DIGIT  NINE
    <Multi_key> <O> <0>                             : "⓪"   U24EA   # CIRCLED DIGIT  ZERO

    <Multi_key> <bar> <minus>                       : "⊢"    U22A2  # RIGHT TACK
    <Multi_key> <bar> <equal>                       : "⊧"    U22A7 # MODELS

    <Multi_key> <i> <n>                       : "ϵ"    U03F5 # GREEK LUNATE EPSILON SIGN

    <Multi_key> <bracketleft> <bracketleft>     : "⸢"    U2E22  # TOP LEFT HALF BRACKET
    <Multi_key> <bracketright> <bracketright>   : "⸣"    U2E23  # TOP RIGHT HALF BRACKET

    <Multi_key> <slash> <backslash>   : "∧"    U2227  # LOGICAL AND
    <Multi_key> <backslash> <slash>   : "∨"    U2228  # LOGICAL OR
    <Multi_key> <hyphen> <comma>      : "¬"    U00AC  # NOT SIGN
    <Multi_key> <tilde> <tilde>       : "¬"    U00AC  # NOT SIGN

    <Multi_key> <G> <H>     : "Ȝ"    U021C  # LATIN CAPITAL LETTER YOGH
    <Multi_key> <g> <h>     : "ȝ"    U021D  # LATIN SMALL LETTER YOGH

It turns out that the file I was given already had sequences for Ő and ő, but only with the <equal> before the letter, not after, which meant that 50% of the time I couldn't find it.

Following Tony Finch's suggestion I have been using ⸢ and ⸣ (square quotes) as scare quotes.

I sometimes think about adding sequences for Greek letters other than π and ε, but it's really not the right place to solve the problem.

My computer environment came equipped with a giant .XCompose file full of useful abbreviations, many of which I use frequently. It is much easier to commit to spelling ‘Sierpiński’ correctly when there is an easy and natural way to type the ‘ń’.

But some things were missing, and I have gradually added them over the years. Today I discovered that while it predefined sequences for þ and ð, it had none for ȝ. (This makes sense, as þ and ð are still used in modern Icelandic, and even appear in ISO 8859-1, whereas ȝ is obsolete.)

Early on I had to add a sequence for ‘ő’ so that I wouldn't have to misspell “Erdős”. You can see where my priorities are.

“Kennel” is (ultimately) from Latin canis.

I went searching for Thomas Caxton and instead I typed “caaxtron”.

ALL TREMBLE IN FEAR BEFORE CAAXTRON 9000 THE INVINCIBLE, PRINTER OF WORLDS

Trump is talking about using tanks to quell the George Floyd protests, but the Pentagon is getting cold feet:

As of Monday morning, 17,000 National Guard troops had been deployed in 23 states and Washington, DC. No state has requested federal assistance, however, subverting the normal process for domestic military intervention, Pentagon officials told The Beast.

I can't get over the word “subverting” there. What do the unnamed Pentagon officials think the “normal process” is, or should be?

I think Richard nixon would have looked better with a mullet.

People sometimes say that “there are no stupid questions”. I disagree.

If the question admits only stupid answers, I think that's pretty strong evidence that it was a stupid question.

A hapless loser on Math Stack Exchange asks:

What is the minimum number of people in a single room so that it can be said “There are two people in this room with birthday in January ”?

Possible answers include:

1. There is no minimum, because the room might contain any number of people, all of whom were born in November, and no others.

2. The minimum is 2, if both were born in January.

3. The minimum is 0, because you can say whatever you like, regardless of who is in the room.

One often hears the factoid that

In a year, the averge person swallows eight spiders in their sleep.

Of course, this is nonsense. The correct statistic is eight spiders per minute.

Today Twitter has drawn my attention to #คั่นกูEP11, which they claim has appeared in 496,000 tweets. This seems to concern episode 11 of a Thai TV series I hadn't heard of before.

I like these Twitter trending hashtags because they remind me how big the world is and how small my little corner is compared with it.

• Just as the umlaut mark was originally a tiny ‘e’ written above the vowel, and the Spanish ‘ñ’ was originally an ‘n’ with another ‘n’ above it, there's also a Greek diacritical mark which is a tiny iota written below a vowel.

• That wedding music that every movie soundtrack uses was written by Felix Mendelssohn as [part of the incidental music to A Midsummer Night's Dream](https://open.spotify.com/track/5LNwmPufnGLxEpcYgVhpRz?si=OWMQOoGiSgCK sA6HRkqgwA). Film producers have a profound, almost fervent respect for the works of the great composers of the past, because they are in the public domain.

According to U.S. to Argue It Never Left Iran Nuke Deal, in Bid to Force Arms Embargo, Report Says :

U.S.-Iranian relations have been bitter since the Islamic Revolution toppled the U.S.-backed Shah of Iran in 1979 and ushered in an era of theocratic rule.

That is a heck of a sentence there.

Some might observe that U.S.-Iranian relations had been bitter at least as far back as 1953, when the CIA and the U.S.-backed Shah of Iran toppled the democratically elected Iranian government in 1953 and ushered in an era of brutal dictatorship.

Ed Kilgore, New York Magazine:

With Bernie Sanders’s decision to suspend his presidential campaign, Joe Biden is not just the “presumptive” Democratic nominee, but the putative nominee: It’s in the bag unless something extremely weird happens.

Apparently “77-year-old man dies” is now “something extremely weird”.

• There is not only a Juneau, Alaska, there is also a Juneau, Wisconsin. The founders of the towns were cousins. The town of Milwaukee, Wisconsin was also founded by a Juneau.

• There is also a town of Alaska, Wisconsin.

• Unfortunately, no town of Wisconsin, Alaska.

• There is a Wisconsin Township, Minnesota, but the trail stops there.

• “Cock-throwing”, a sport in which a chicken was tied to a post, and players threw sticks at it with the goal of knocking it down or killing it, was practiced in England as early as 1409.

• A papal edict issued by Nicholas I in the 9th century required all churches to use only the image of a cock as their steeple weathervanes.

• Seven versions of La Vie en Rose charted in the U.S. in 1950.

• The 1954 film A Star is Born, starring Judy Garland, was itself a remake of a 1937 film of the same name. .

“Margaret” backward is “teragram”. A teragram is the same as a megatonne.