dissertation v/s thesis, thickskinned, zimbabwean dollar, music vocabularies, cattycorner

There doesn't seem to be much of a distinction made between the terms 'thesis' ("a proposition stated or put forward for consideration, especially one to be discussed and proved or to be maintained against objections" ) and 'dissertation' ("a written essay, treatise, or thesis, especially one written by a candidate for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy."). Even wikipedia isn't much help here:  "A thesis or dissertation is a document submitted in support of candidature for an academic degree or professional qualification presenting the author's research and findings. In some contexts, the word "thesis" or a cognate is used for part of a bachelor's or master's course, while "dissertation" is normally applied to a doctorate, while in other contexts, the reverse is true", though it notes that in the US, at least, a thesis generally refers to a MS and a dissertation refers to a PhD.

Had a bit of a debate with a (male) friend about the thickness of human dermal tissue as related to being male or female (ie, whether men are literally thicker-skinned). Turns out, he was correct, at least in mice: " In fact, the major difference is that the dermis in the male is much thicker than in the female whereas the epidermis and hypodermis are thicker in the female, thus resulting in total skin that is 40% thicker in the male ", somewhat attributed to the effects of the hormone androgen. Dermis refers to basal, inner layer of skin cells, and epidermis is the outermost layer (see here).

We were sitting around a reading the other night when Patricia noted in a magazine article about the Zimbabwe dollar inflation at 79.6 billion percent in mid-Novermber of 2008. This was met with googling, to determine if that was indeed the case -turns out, yes. Further, from the Zimbabwean dollar wiki article, "In the Guardian, on 18 July 2008, a report on Zimbabwe's inflation, said that an egg costs Z$50 billion (GBP 0.17, USD 0.32), and it showed adverts for prizes of Z$100 trillion in a Zimbabwean derby and Z$1.2 quadrillion ($1,200,000,000,000,000.00: approx. £2,100; $4,200) in a lottery.". As of 2009, the currency was devalued, and Zimbabwe now employs foreign currency, including US and Australian dollars, South African Rand, UK pounds sterling, Botswana pula, Indian Rupee, euro, Chinese yuan and Japanese yen.

Having noted on several occasions the simplistic language used in most top 40 hits, i was happy to see this recent study concerning working vocabularies of musicians. It looked at the 100 most lyric-dense songs of 93 musicians. Unsurprisingly, hip-hop artists and rappers top the list, with Eminem having a vocabulary of 8818 words, followed by JayZ at 6899 words. As far as non-rap goes. Bob Dylan came in at 4883 words. On the opposite end was Kenny G, with 809 words.

Apparently, the Queen of England was a notable breeder of Corgi dogs.

i was hanging out at the Farmers' Market a few weeks ago when fierce chickens came up in conversation. i referenced the Russian folk tale figure Baba Yaga and her chicken-legged house. In short, old world fairy tales are terrifying.

A friend recently linked this Madison police report of someone being arrested for slapping a police horse (also featuring Madison's tradition of 'Hippie Christmas'). Why would a person ever think that would end well? Other things the probably won't end well: here is a petapixel article titled "This new shotgun shell is for shooting down drones", and includes the note, "As you might expect, this new ammo is generating quite a bit of controversy. Over atAmmoLand, which published the press release, many commenters are pointing out that it’s a felony to shoot down drones, even if it’s hovering over your property". Yikes.

This NYTimes article covers known health risks of sugar versus artificial sweeteners. In short, sugar fuels lots of maladies including the obesity epidemic, but there aren't a lot of known caveats to using artificial sweeteners outside of  phenylketonuria. The questions seem to arise when studies are based on various rat and mouse models, which are predisposed to things like bladder cancer and some correlative-but-not-causitive cases with brain tumors.


Was reading an article a little while ago that used the word 'cattycorner' (meaning something in a diagonal), when i mentally noted what a strange word it is, and wondered over the difference between it and 'kittycorner'. Looking into it, these are regional dialects for the word 'catercorner', the origins of which have been lost to time but much speculated upon. From the wikitionary, " cater- +‎ corner, where cater- is of disputed origin. Liberman argues that this is a prefix meaning “crooked, angled, clumsy”, of North Germanic origin; compare cater-cousin. The verb cater ‎(“move diagonally, place diagonally, cut diagonally”) is attested from 1577 (Liberman proposes this as a backformation from cater-), and in 19th century Lancashire dialect, cater-cornered refers both to stone blocks that are out of square, and people who walk twisted (with one side in front of the other), especially if partially paralyzed. Further awkward and clumsy are of Scandinavian origin, and Old Irish cittach ‎(“left-handed, awkward”) is cognate to cater-words, also suggesting a Scandinavian origin.  ". Also of interest is this article which further describes cat-derived words, including cattywompus (when something is crooked, etc).