The Pythagorean theorem states that, for a right triangles with side lengths a, b and hypotenuse c:
a^2 + b^2 = c^2.
There are many proofs, but my favourite for its geometric simplicity is the following rearrangement of a square with side length a+b.
The popular image of a tall, narrow iceberg is wrong:
While it’s true that only ~ 10% floats above the surface of the water, the “classic” orientation is unstable and would actually not be found in nature. An elongated iceberg would not float on its head, but instead on its side.
Generally, icebergs will float so their long axis is parallel to the ocean surface. See for yourself with this iceberg flotation simulator!
The British Foreign Secretary recently announced an agreement that will restore sovereignty over the Chagos Archipelago to Mauritius. I don’t have enough context to understand what this means to the Chagossians in exile, but I can say this has huge implications for geography trivia — the sun will finally set on the British Empire for the first time in over four centuries!
This news may also have a big impact on the internet. Up until now, the Chagos Islands were part of an entity called the British Indian Ocean Territory, which was assigned the country code IO and the top-level domain .io. Domains ending in .io have become popular in the tech world: high-profile examples include CodePen, Swagger and Jenkins, the official Rust package repository, the Azure Container Registry, and lots of GitHub Pages sites.
When the British Indian Ocean Territory ceases to exist, IANA policy says that all .io domains should also be eventually extinguished, as happened with .yu and .cs. However, the .su top-level domain still exists for the Soviet Union, so it would not be unprecedented for IANA to make an exception and keep .io around.
Today is National Day for Truth and Reconciliation in Canada. With the day off comes an opportunity (and responsibility) to learn about residential schools, through which the federal government and Canadian churches separated children from their families and subjected them to abuse and neglect in loco parentis.
[R]econciliation, in the context of Indian residential schools, is similar to dealing with a situation of family violence.
Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada
Although the first residential schools were first established pre-Confederation, their story is shockingly and depressingly recent: residential school populations were at their highest from the 1920s to the 1960s, and some continued to operate well into my own childhood.
My reconciliation activity this year was to read Honouring the Truth, Reconciling for the Future, and I can recommend it and the other publications of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission to my fellow settlers.
In 2007, New Zealand paint company Resene decided to name this specific shade of teal “zomp”.
The Kama Sutra (कामसूत्र) is an ancient Hindu text about sensory pleasure. Although it’s best known in English for its most risqué chapters, it also contains a list of sixty-four arts whose knowledge makes a person popular and attractive.
1. Singing.
Kama Sutra Chapter 3
2. Playing on musical instruments.
3. Dancing.
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28. A game, which consisted in repeating verses, and as one person finished, another person had to commence at once, repeating another verse, beginning with the same letter with which the last speaker’s verse ended, whoever failed to repeat was considered to have lost
In modern times, the twenty-eighth art is primarily practiced by bored children on road trips and is known by many names like word chain or shiritori. I had no idea it was over 1700 years old!
The word “distribute” is etymologically the opposite of “tribute”.
early 15c., distributen, “to deal out or apportion, bestow in parts or in due proportion,” from Latin distributus, past participle of distribuere “to divide, deal out in portions,” from dis- “individually” and tribuere “to pay, assign, grant,” also “allot among the tribes or to a tribe,” from tribus (see tribe)
Etymology of “distribute”
In geography, a tributary is a stream or river that feeds into a larger body of water; for example, the Thompson River (Snek’w7étkwe) is a tributary of the Fraser (Sto:lo). When a river bifurcates into multiple downstream branches, such as the North and South Arms of the Fraser, those branches are called distributaries.
In case you ever have need for a large-ish prime number, here are a few that are easy to remember:
Diggy, my best furry friend of twelve years, passed away this week. He was full of sass, love, energy, mischief, curiosity, and affection, and will be deeply missed.
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You know what a fire hydrant looks like. You pass by them every day, and they’re all painted to be a highly visible red. Or is it yellow? Wait, maybe they have other colours on them too?
(more…)Most ice cream trucks in Canada and the United States use music boxes made by a single mom-and-pop company in Minneapolis. If there’s a particular ice cream truck song that annoys you all summer, you have the Nichols Electronics Company to blame.
(You could always ask the your local driver if they’re able to switch it up — if they have one of the Omni models, they could change it to one of thirty-one other songs.)
Historically, ice cream truck music boxes were a sonic callback to late 19th-century ice cream parlors and soda fountains, which had coin-operated music boxes before phonographs were invented and jukeboxes could become a thing.
Highway exits in Canada are generally numbered based on the distance (in km) from the beginning of the highway. But what about before Canada went metric? Did all the exits have to be renumbered?
As it turns out, my assumption that distance-based exit numbering is not as widespread or as recent as I thought.
My daily routine nowadays includes two word puzzles: the Puzzmo/AVCX crossword and the The New York Times’ new game Connections. That’s inspired me to see if I could create a hybrid of the two.
(more…)“Hydrogen” in German is Wasserstoff, which sounds hilarious except it’s just a literal translation of the Greek hydro-gen!
Most chemical elements are more or less the same in German and English. The fun exceptions are:
German also has Natrium (Sodium), Kalium (Potassium), Wofram (Tungsten), Quecksilber (Mercury), and Blei (Lead).
Cricket has a bit of a reputation for being hard to understand, but it’s actually a simpler game than the most popular North American sports.
Here’s everything you need to know to enjoy a cricket match in 600 words or less.
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I recently attended a Seattle Mariners game as part of a Microsoft event. It was my first time at a baseball game, so I recorded a bunch of observations about the experience.
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A while ago I arbitrarily decided that I needed a favourite three-digit number (don’t ask) and ended up choosing 216. It’s a nice cube number — 6×6×6 — and can also be expressed as a sum of three smaller cubes:
6^3 = 5^3 + 4^3 + 3^3
Baskin-Robbins famously sells 31 flavours of ice cream at a time. But because a standard freezer holds an even number of buckets, they actually display 32 slots and have one flavour appear twice.
My favourite etymology fact is that “helicopter” is helico-pter — Greek for “spiral wing”. It’s obvious when pointed out, but I’d never have realized it on my own since in English it’s always broken down as heli-copter!
Relatedly, Magic: The Gathering has a creature type called Thopter, which is a rebracketed abbreviation of the word “ornithopter” (from ornitho- meaning bird, and pter meaning wing).