auto-antonym, Bye Felicia, Alan Turing and running, Swedish Fish, hide-n-seek, cumin

Lots of stuff.


Directly after posting last, Kate B. was reading the post and kindly noted that 'factoid' is one of those words with two opposite meanings (a sort of auto-antonym); a common use of factoid is to mean a small bit of usually trivial information, and the other being an invented fact that has the illusion of truth. Another example of this as denoted by Kate is peruse; it can mean either to scan briefly, or to examine something very carefully. Look, the English language confuses everyone.

A few months ago, i was taking a shortcut through one of the undergrad areas in town, and someone had placed a mattress by the curb, spray painted in red the with the words "Bye Felicia".  Because i was in a hurry and it was cold, i didn't take a picture, but i made up all sorts of stories in my head about why someone would spray paint that on a mattress to discard it (for instance, the mattress belonged to a ex-flatmate who moved on but left a mattress, or it was the name of someone with whom the painter had a particularly acrimonious breakup, or someone just named their old mattress... the list goes on for a while). Anyway, i was reading something online the other day that featured the same words in a dismissive fashion, which reminded me of the mattress, and googled it. It's a meme referencing a line from the movie Friday, turns out. i liked my elaborate stories WAY better.

Recently saw The Imitation Game, about the English mathematician and 'father of the computer' etc, Alan Turing. Something i didn't realize was that he was a highly competitive distance runner. As wikipedia notes, " While working at Bletchley, Turing, who was a talented long-distance runner, occasionally ran the 40 miles (64 km) to London when he was needed for high-level meetings,^[54] and he was capable of world-class marathon standards.^[55][56] Turing tried out for the 1948 British Olympic team, hampered by an injury. His tryout time for the marathon was only 11 minutes slower than British silver medalist Thomas Richards' Olympic race time of 2 hours 35 minutes. He was Walton Athletic Club's best runner, a fact discovered when he passed the group while running alone". The part about running to London for a meeting is my favorite.

It must be noted here, i've been really, really enjoying the excellent mock-horror podcast series Welcome To Night Vale, about the supernatural goings-on of a small desert town. Because there are only 60-something episodes at time of writing, i've been rationing them pretty carefully.

Speaking of rationing, i have very little discipline regarding the candy Swedish Fish, and usually can only stop eating them when the bag is empty.The original variety seem to be a completely artificial flavor that i can only describe by red; i googled around to see if anyone can historically pin a flavor to them with little success (and it should be noted that the assorted sort are listed on the website as "just like the red ones. only with more colors."). However, i did come across this Brief History of Swedish Fish article.

It was 'Pi Day' (3/14/2015, corresponding to 3.1415) last weekend, and here is an article about how many digits of pi one needs to memorize to be considered 'special' (more than 9, apparently - i've only got 5 memorized).

My brother and i used to play hide and go seek in the clothing departments of various chain stores (much to our mother's dismay);  this article recently surfaced about IKEA banning games of hide and seek in stores after a group of 32000 signed up for a game on Facebook in the Netherlands and a woman arranged a game played by about 500 in Belgium. This is AMAZING.

This recent NPR article tracks the spice cumin (comino, as it appears in my spice cupboard:) ) through history, into various cultures. Something i don't know that i believe, but can offer no alternative is this, " In English, at least, cumin has a singular distinction – it is the only word that can be traced directly back to Sumerian, the first written language. So when we talk about cumin, we are harkening back to the Sumerian word gamun, first written in the cuneiform script more than 4,000 years ago.". Surely there's another word...?

What's remarkable to me is that this article about a person supposedly scanning their cat on the photocopy in Steenbock library made it to Time.com, despite being fake - the campus newspaper tracked down the picture on a 2008 website (and posted a correction that someone was just pranking the library). How is someone photocopying their cat worthy of national attention?

And in the spirit of faux personal statements/job descriptors (created using this bogus job description engine);

jess ardent is a resident pontificator who uses differential calculus to create unorthodox paradoxes of mansplaining in post-zombie invasion societies