Ross Churchley

Vancouver’s 1986 centennial had a mascot: Tillicum the sea otter.

The Vancouver Archives has a ton of hilarious photos of Tillicum.

The name Tillicum means “friend” or “people” in the Chinook jargon, a pidgin language used to mediate trade between white settlers and First Nations. Chinook words were then considered the safe choice for naming things without a specific First Nation gifting a name.

Allspice is just one spice, namely the dried fruit of the Pimenta dioica plant. It’s called allspice because the English thought it combined the flavours of cinnamon, nutmeg, and clove.

There’s an obvious joke in there about English cooking, so I fact-checked it. While the average 17th-century village shop only offered four spices, well-stocked grocers had up to nineteen.

Numbers like $\pi$ and $\sqrt{2}$ are irrational. But does that mean they’re unreasonable or just that they lack a ratio?

The Ancient Greek ἄλογος is even more ambiguous. Λόγος is used by Euclid to mean ratio, but it could also mean word, speech, story, idea, or reason reason. So ἄλογος could also mean speechless, unspeakable, unexpected, or non-reasoning.

Modern Greek mathematicians now call $\mathbb{Q}$ the inexpressible (άρρητος) numbers.

When you feel how depressingly
slowly you climb
it’s well to remember that
Things Take Time.

Piet Hein
“T.T.T.”, from Grooks 1

Book Recommendation

Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software by Charles Petzold

Code is an approachable book that succeeds at an absurdly ambitious goal: to guide a motivated reader from “what is binary?” all the way to “build and program an Intel 8080 microprocessor out of Radio Shack components” without skipping any steps in between.

The book is remarkably self-contained and uses old tech (like the telegraph) to illustrate timeless principles, so it still holds up 20+ years after it was written.

Most Chinese languages, such as Mandarin and Cantonese, pronounce 茶 along the lines of cha, but Min varieties along the Southern coast of China and in Southeast Asia pronounce it like teh. Almost all languages use variants of one or the other, depending on who they got their tea from.