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.
Ontario and Québec have exit numbering systems that predate metrication, but only barely, so the switch wasn’t too hard.
Newfoundland and Nova Scotia have sequential exit numbers, not distance-based ones.
Alberta didn’t post exit numbers at all until 2004!
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.
Here’s what I came up with. The following is a normal American-style crossword puzzle — no cryptic clues this time — with 24 seven-letter answers. Once you’re done solving the crossword, write down the seven-letter entries and see if you can group them into six categories of four words each, like a jumbo-sized version of Connections. Good luck!
Answers (and a bit of trivia) can be found below the puzzle behind spoiler tags.
ACROSS
DOWN
Answers
Connections answer
The Connections categories of the seven-level words are as follows, in increasing order of difficulty:
Countries
Armenia, Denmark, Ecuador, Vietnam.
Chemical elements
arsenic, calcium, krypton, mercury.
Technically fruit
apricot, avocado, coconut, pumpkin.
Objects counted with -枚 in Japanese
acrylic, judo mat, seaweed, SIM card
It was quite the challenge to come up with four-word categories given the constraints of the crossword, and it was impossible to include any cross-category red herrings. But I’m quite satisfied that I was able to fit all 24 seven-letter entries into the Connections sub-puzzle; I originally thought I’d only be able to get four categories of four with the other eight being “miscellaneous”.
The last two categories are certainly harder to get than you’d normally see in the NYT puzzle, but I think they mostly hold up.
Crossword Trivia
To me, compiling a crossword is a great excuse to break out trivia I had filed away and to learn new things about the random topics that happen to fit in the grid. Here are some mildly interesting facts about this puzzle’s clues!
Trivia based on the crossword answers
1 across: Arsenic might be an essential trace nutrient
Arsenic is famously toxic, and was historically favoured as an assassination tool since it was hard to detect and mimicked the symptoms of cholera. But studies in rats, goats, and birds have demonstrated arsenic deficiency is possible when fed unnaturally low levels of the element. (Arsenic naturally occurs in groundwater at levels of a few parts per billion.)
17 across: Microsoft slang references an email system from the late 80s
Microsoft employees use “OOF” as shorthand for “out of office”, even though it doesn’t make sense as an acronym. Reportedly, it comes from the name of the auto-reply feature in a Xenix email system Microsoft hasn’t used since 1993.
25 across: Yuri Oganesson
Yuri Oganessian is a physicist whose discoveries were essential to the discovery of elements 106 to 118, and who led the international team in Dubna, Russia who first synthesized many of them.
The race for the periodic table is a fascinating story in its own right; the team at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory claimed to have first produced elements 116 and 118 in 1999, but the discovery was later exposed to have been based on data fabricated by Victor Ninov. Both elements were later synthesized for real in a collaboration between the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in the US and Oganessian’s Joint Institute for Nuclear Research in Russia.
Oganesson is the heaviest element synthesized to this date; only a handful of atoms have ever been produced. It sits at the bottom of the noble gases column on the periodic table, but it is theorized that it would actually be a reactive solid if it existed long enough for those to be meaningful descriptions.
Ada Lovelace is famous in computer science as the author of the first published computer algorithm (for Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine) and the first person to recognize that the machine could have applications beyond calculation:
Again, it might act upon other things besides number, were objects found whose mutual fundamental relations could be expressed by those of the abstract science of operations, and which should be also susceptible of adaptations to the action of the operating notation and mechanism of the engine. Supposing, for instance, that the fundamental relations of pitched sounds in the science of harmony and of musical composition were susceptible of such expression and adaptations, the engine might compose elaborate and scientific pieces of music of any degree of complexity or extent.
Less well known is Ada’s relationship to Lord Byron, the eccentric poet and famous philanderer. Lady Byron believed her husband to be insane and left Lord Byron shortly after giving birth to Ada (the marriage lasted one year). She strongly encouraged Ada’s scientific and mathematical studies in the hopes that she wouldn’t take after her father.
52 across: Osu!!
Osu (押忍) is an informal acknowledgement mainly used by people involved in martial arts. It’s also associated with cheer squads, and is referenced in the Japanese title of the Nintendo DS rhythm game series known in the west as Elite Beat Agents. It’s believed to be an extreme contraction of oyahō gozaimasu (おはようございます), or “good morning”, with the kanji 押 (“push”) and 忍 (“endure”) having been assigned after-the-fact.
54 across: Falling coconuts don’t kill that many people
There is an urban legend that hundreds of people are killed by falling coconuts each year. That statistic is completely unsubstantiated, but there is a seed of truth to it: a 1984 paper by Dr Peter Barss reported nine cases of serious head injuries caused by falling coconuts in Papua New Guinea.
68 across: Europe’s spaceport is in South America
Here’s a great trivia question: with what country does France have the longest border with? Is it Spain? Germany? No — it’s Brazil. That’s because of French Guiana, an overseas department of France between Brazil and Suriname on the north coast of South America. It’s part of the EU and Eurozone but not the Schengen Area.
French Guiana’s location right next to the equator made it the perfect site for the Guiana Space Center, built in 1968 after Algeria won its independence from France. The spaceport is operated by the European Space Agency (ESA) and the French and EU space agencies. The space sector is a significant fraction of the Guianese economy.
69 across: The giant stones of Yap
Yap is an island in Micronesia famous for its inhabitants’ use of large stone disks as a medium of exchange for ceremonial gifts. Rai, as the stones are known to the northern Yapese, have their owners recorded in oral histories as they are impractical to physically transfer.
They are valuable in part because there’s no limestone on Yap; the stones were quarried on Palau and transported 400km by boat. Supply of rai greatly increased after European contact, as did the disks’ individual sizes, but production stopped with the arrival of the Japanese in 1914 and many were lost to typhoon and World War II.
1 down: Avocados probably did not coevolve with giant ground sloths
A paper from the 1980s suggested that avocados might have co-evolved with giant ground sloths, who were large enough to eat and scatter the large seeds. But more recent research has that’s probably not true: avocados were smaller before human cultivation, and giant ground sloths didn’t live anywhere near there anyways.
In response, Hank Green hyperbolically exclaimed on TikTok: “Ice is a rock, water is lava, and you are a lava monster. I guess??“
24 down: Tatami mats are interesting mathematically
Ten years ago I wrote a post summarizing some of the math behind traditional tatami patterns, so go check that out.
47 down: The United States has a lot of biomes
Back in high school, I participated in the Great Canadian Geography Challenge, and this crossword clue is my favourite question from provincials that I still remember two decades later.
Corn, beans, and squash (including pumpkins) are the three sisters of North America. This nutritionally-complete combination of crops is key to the cuisine of indigenous peoples across the continent. They featured prominently in the myths and diet of the nations of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, for example.
59 down: Legendre’s constant
In 1808 Adrien-Marie Legendre conjectured that the prime-counting function π(x) asymptotically behaves like
π(x)≈ln(x)−Bx
for some constant B≈1.08366. Decades later, it was proved that the conjecture was right but the constant was wrong — in fact, B is equal to exactly one.
Hilariously, the only known contemporaneous image of Legendre is a random watercolour caricature by Julien-Léopold Boilly.
Legendre’s only known portrait (left) looks like a grumpy Super Saiyan
Beethoven. It was sketched on the same page as an equally funny image of
Joseph Fourier.
61 down: The seconds pendulum was almost the definition of a meter
The meter was originally defined as one ten-millionth of distance from the North Pole to the Equator through Paris. The main competing proposal was to use the length of a pendulum with a period of two seconds.
By sheer coincidence, the two numbers are almost exactly the same — the seconds pendulum has a length of about 0.993 meters (plus or minus less than a centimeter, depending on where you are on the Earth).
“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:
Wasserstoff (Hydrogen); “water stuff” is a literal translation from Greek.
Kohlenstoff (Carbon); “coal stuff” is a literal translation from Latin.
Stickstoff (Nitrogen); “suffocation stuff”, apparently because it’s the non-oxygen part of air, is a German original.
Sauerstoff (Oxygen); “sour stuff” is a literal translation from Greek.
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.
Cricket is played on an oval field with a rectangular pitch in the middle. Two players on the batting team stand on either side of the pitch; the eleven players on the fielding team take up positions around the field.
This wide angle shows nine of the England fielders in red (two are out of
frame to the right), two New Zealand batters in black, and two umpires.
Runs
The cricket ball is bowled overarm by a player on the fielding team and can bounce once. The batter hits the ball and switches ends with the other batter, scoring one run each time this happens.
A typical delivery is bowled and hit for a single run. The batter can choose
not to run if they don’t think they’ll make it in time.
If the batter hits the ball all the way to the boundary of the field, they score four runs automatically.
If they hit the ball really hard over the boundary, they score six runs.
A ball hit into the stands is worth six runs — but the crowd has to give it
back so the same ball can be used for the whole innings.
Wickets
The goal of the fielding team is to get the batters out (“take their wickets”) before they score lots of runs.
The batter is out caught if they hit the ball and a fielder catches it before it hits the ground.
Out caught is the most common form of dismissal in cricket.
The batter is out bowled if they miss and the ball hits the wicket behind them.
Some games have fancy stumps and bails that light up when the wicket is
broken.
The batter is out leg before wicket if they use their body to block the ball from hitting the wicket.
A batter is out LBW if the ball would have gone on to hit the wicket after
hitting their body. Ball-tracking technology is used to judge LBW appeals that
are sent to the third umpire.
The batter is run out if they run and the fielding side breaks the wicket before they’re safe.
To be safe, the batter’s bat or body must be touching the ground behind the
white line. In this case, the batter is out because she didn’t quite get her
bat grounded in time.
The batter is out stumped if they come too far out, miss the ball, and get run out by the wicketkeeper.
The wicketkeeper may stand close to the wicket for slower balls to make it
easier to effect a stumping.
Overs
Every six balls, the fielders switch ends and a different player from the fielding team comes on to bowl. Six balls is also called an over.1
Each team gets to bat for 20 overs2 or until they have lost ten wickets. Whichever team has the most runs after both sides bat wins.
Extras
There are a bunch of rules that govern how the ball should be bowled. A violation results in a do-over, except the batting team is awarded an extra run and gets to keep any runs they scored off the illegal delivery.
A wide is signalled if the umpire judges that the ball was bowled too wide or too high for it to be reasonably hit.
The umpire signals a wide by stretching their arms out.
A no ball is signalled if the delivery is illegal for another reason, usually because the bowler stepped too far over the white line.
If the bowler’s front foot lands entirely on or over the white line, the
delivery is a no ball.
A batter cannot be dismissed for being caught, bowled, stumped, or LBW off a no-ball. Depending on the competition, the batter may be awarded the same immunities for the next ball as well — this is called a “free hit”.
Positions
A typical team roster has some specialist batters who usually don’t bowl, some specialist bowlers who aren’t expected to get lots of runs, and some all-rounders who are good at both batting and bowling.
There are two main bowling styles: fast bowlers rely on the speed of their deliveries while spin bowlers deliver slow but tricky balls.
Each team has a wicketkeeper who stops the balls that get past the batter. You can recognize the wicketkeeper as the only fielder who wears gloves.
Fielders can be deployed anywhere, subject to a few restrictions.3 . Commentators describe fielding positions using funny names like slip, gully, mid-off, square leg, and third man.
Scoreboard
A typical TV broadcast overlay displays the following information:
The batting team’s current run total and wickets lost.4
The number of overs completed or the number of balls remaining.
The current batters’ names, runs scored, and balls faced, with some indication of which batter is facing the next ball.
The current bowler.
This overlay indicates that England are batting and have scored 101 runs for
the loss of 2 wickets. It is the 12th over in a 20-over match. Beaumont has
scored 47 runs off 39 balls and is facing the current ball. Jones has scored
23 runs off 10 balls. The current bowler is New Zealand’s Kasperek, who has
taken 1 wicket and given up 24 runs in 2 overs this match.
The overlay often shows other relevant information, which may include the current run rate (average runs per over), the target score needed for the team batting second to win, and/or an indication of any special fielding restrictions.
Conclusion
That’s all you need to follow and enjoy a cricket match! All that’s left to learn is some jargon, the names of the players, and the details of whatever tournament or competition you want to follow. You’ll pick up all of those as you go.
If you want to watch cricket, most series are carried in Canada by subscription streaming service Willow TV. You can also follow live text summaries and scorecards on sites like ESPN Cricinfo.
Footnotes
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.
The stadium experience
This was my first time attending any professional sport in person, so I didn’t have any idea what to expect. I checked the stadium rules in advance and found I could bring my camera, but not my camera bag or any of my larger lenses. Fortunately, my wide-angle lens and 20–55mm kit lens — both barely within the regulations — were enough to get some interesting photos.
A big part of the ballpark experience is being able to wander around the stadium; I spent at least half the game exploring rather than sitting in my assigned seat. There’s a lot to look at and do in the stadium, and as long as you’re not blocking anyone’s view during an at-bat, there’s remarkable freedom to walk around the aisles and see the field from different angles.
Baseball is complicated
Many of the Microsoft employees at the game — including myself — are more familiar with cricket than with baseball. Cricket has a reputation in North America for being hard to understand, but when I compare my beginner’s guide to cricket with our deliberations our section had to understand what was going on, I realized that baseball is much more complicated.
Can you decipher these scoreboards?
Answer key (bottom section)
Balls, strikes, and outs are fundamental to the game, relatively easy to explain to a newcomer, and mercifully unabbreviated on the bottom right of the scoreboard.
Each team’s current score is the total number of runs under the “R” column; columns 1–9 show how many runs were scored in each inning. The “H” column counts the number of hits resulting on a runner on base due to the batting team’s efforts; the “E” column counts the number of errors by the fielding team that allowed their opponent to get a runner on base.
I had no idea what the acronym “MVR” stood for until a colleague expanded it to “mound visits remaining”; this refers to a kind of time out the fielding team can take to discuss strategy or switch pitchers.
Answer key (side sections)
The sides of the scoreboard display the current lineup of each team with jersey numbers and positions; the highlighted name tells you whose turn it is to bat. The batting lineup shows one other piece of information for each player:
For players that have not yet batted in the inning, it shows the batting average.
For players that have batted already in the inning, it shows a cryptic acronym that tells you the result of their at-bat.
For pitchers (who do not bat), I think it shows the pitcher’s earned runs average (ERA) which is its own whole thing.
On the right-hand side of the first scoreboard, we see that the name highlighted in yellow is the current batter, Seattle’s Dominic Canzone, who wears number 8 on his jersey, plays left field, and has a batting average of .219.
The three Seattle players above Canzone have already batted this inning. Center fielder Raleigh had a single (recorded as “1B”), as did right fielder Raley. First baseman France is listed as having a “P3” which is apparently the acronym for “out after hitting a pop fly which was caught by the first baseman.”
Answer key (middle section, first scoreboard)
The middle of the first scoreboard shows the statistics of the current batter. I had to look up most of the stats on Wikipedia:
Abbr
Value
Stat
Meaning
G
15
Games
Number of games the batter has played in this year.
AB
32
At-bats
Number of opportunities the batter had to bat, more or less, except that walks and some other outcomes don’t count towards this statistic.
2B
1
Doubles
Number of hits on which the batter was able to safely reach second base.
3B
0
Triples
Number of hits on which the batter was able to safely reach third base.
BB
3
Bases on balls
Number of times the batter was awarded first base after four called balls. (Better known as “walks”.)
SO
11
Strikeouts
Number of times the batter was called out after three strikes.
SB
0
Stolen bases
Number of times the player was able to steal a base. There are a bunch of rules about when a runner can steal a base and when something is scored under this statistic.
CS
0
Caught stealing
Number of times the player was tagged out while attempting to steal a base.
AVG
.219
Batting average
Percentage of at-bats where the batter hit the ball and safely reached a base.
R
4
Runs
Number of times the batter scored a run by crossing home plate.
H
7
Hits
Number of times the batter hit the ball and safely reached a base.
HR
3
Home runs
Number of hits on which the batter was able to safely touch all three bases and cross home plate. (Usually by hitting the ball into the crowd.)
RBI
6
Runs batted in
Number of times the batter’s action allowed another player to score a run.
OBP
.286
On-base percentage
Percentage of the time the batter gets on base, including being awarded first base for a walk or being hit by a pitch.
SLG
.531
Slugging percentage
Average number of bases achieved per at-bat.
OPS
.817
On-base plus slugging
OBP plus SLG, for some reason.
Answer key (scoring decision, second scoreboard)
Now we just need to figure out what “FC, E5, No RBI” is supposed to mean. This was displayed on the jumbotron after the following play:
“FC” stands for “fielder’s choice”, meaning that the third baseman chose to try to get the out at third instead of throwing it to first. This means the hit doesn’t count towards the batter’s statistics. The “E5” means the scorer decided that the Seattle players were safe because of the third baseman’s error.
Finally, the run that scored during the play does not count as an RBI for the batter because if it weren’t for the error, there would have been three outs and the runner wouldn’t have scored.
Before I came to the game I watched a video about camera assignments at professional baseball games and I had fun finding the camera operators at high first, low first, and center field.
The camera operators at center field are responsible for filming each pitch.
I was walking around the concourse when the Mariners’ Ty France hit a home run. While the crowed erupted in cheers, I was excited for a different reason — I was in the perfect position to watch the cable-suspended camera move into position behind third base and film the runner crossing home plate!
The cable operated camera follows the batter along the third base line after a
home run.
Random people keep the ball rolling
To me, no sport is as compelling as all the logistics and anonymous work that goes on behind the scenes. For example, T-Mobile Park still has an analog scoreboard in addition to all the digital ones, which means someone has to be in charge of updating it.
Every time a player gets on base, their team’s batboy runs out to pick up their discarded bat and help switch their gloves. The home team’s batboy is also responsible for refilling the umpire’s stock of extra balls, which happens a lot — MLB teams go through about a hundred balls in a game!
The most exciting piece of logistics came between innings, when an army of men with rakes came out to smooth the base paths.
Take me out to the ball game?
I’m never going to be a person who regularly attends live sports: it’s too crowded, too noisy, and I don’t care enough about the action happening on the field. But I’m really glad to have gone once. It was a lot of fun to explore the stadium and see a few glimpses of what goes in to putting on a baseball game. Thanks Microsoft for bringing me to a fun event!
Footnotes
I recently went for a walk in təmtəmíxʷtən (Belcarra), and when I got to… wait, what’s that weird derelict building in the distance?
Is it an abandoned hotel? No, there’s no way to get there by land. An old naval fortress? No, the location doesn’t make any strategic sense. A hydroelectric dam? Where’s the water behind it?
As it turns out, it is a power plant! Buntzen generating station #2, completed in 1914, was built to supplement the output of BC’s first-ever hydroelectric plant up-inlet. Both stations were powered by water delivered by penstocks from Buntzen Lake, which in turn was supplied with water from Coquitlam Lake via a 4km-long tunnel.
Buntzen station #1 is still functional and supplies 60 megawatts of power to the Metro Vancouver area. Buntzen #2 was shut down at the turn of the millennium and serves as a historic curiosity for kayakers in səl̓ilw̓ət (Indian Arm).
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:
63=53+43+33
The Wikipedia article for the number has a diagram showing one way to reassemble a 6×6×6 cube into three smaller cubes, but I’ve been playing around looking for other, more aesthetically pleasing methods. Here’s one I found.
First, we break the 6×6×6 cube into its 4×4×4 interior, six 4×4×1 faces, twelve 4×1×1 edges, and eight 1×1×1 corners:1 i.e.,
63=43+6⋅42+12⋅41+8⋅40
Decomposing the cube according to its polytope boundaries.
The 4×4×1 faces can be combined with seven of the edges and one of the corners to build a 5×5×5 cube. The remaining five edges can be split into ten 2×1×1 chunks and arranged with the remaining seven corners to form a 3×3×3 cube.
Rearranging the pieces into smaller cubes.
The final three cubes.
There are many more ways to construct three cubes from the pieces of a 6×6×6 cube. What’s your favourite?
Footnotes
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.
(They might also use it for a vegan version of a flavour, which isn’t an exact duplicate but isn’t counted as a distinct flavour either.)
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).
[M]ost of the things we buy have to be paid for twice. There’s the first price, usually paid in dollars, just to gain possession of the desired thing, whatever it is: a book, a budgeting app, a unicycle, a bundle of kale. But then, in order to make use of the thing, you must also pay a second price. This is the effort and initiative required to gain its benefits, and it can be much higher than the first price.
The implication of this sign is that some of the birds in the park are not considered wildlife. Are pigeons wildlife?
It’s easy to confuse the flags of Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand if your eyes don’t know what to look for.
I had always distinguished between the two by the colour of the stars in the Southern Cross, but that’s sometimes hard to tell at low resolution. There’s a much easier way to tell them apart: AUS has a giant extra star in the lower left quadrant.
AUS 🇦🇺
NZL 🇳🇿
Today I learned the reason why Vancouver has two impressive-looking historic train stations: they were built by two different companies to serve as the terminus of two different railways.
Anyways, neither station is currently used by the company that built it, with Waterfront Station serving as the regional public transit hub and Pacific Central Station used by Via Rail, Amtrak, and various intercity bus companies.
Footnotes
The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom calls your attention to the sky… but there’s more weird stuff up there than just the floating islands.
If you look into Hyrule’s sky at night, you’ll see the stars do not move while the moon races from one horizon to the other.
This means that the cosmology of the Zelda universe is significantly different from our own; if Copernicus was Hylian he’d have to give up on the heliocentric model.1
That’s not the only astronomical oddity in Tears of the Kingdom. The sun’s position at sunrise and sunset doesn’t make sense. On Earth, the sun doesn’t always rise and set exactly in the east and west. In the (boreal) summer, the sun rises and sets further north, providing us in the Northern Hemisphere with more hours of sunlight each day.
Here in the Vancouver summer, the sun currently rises 38° north of east and sets 38° north of west. In Tears of the Kingdom the sun rises around 4:00 and sets around 9:00,2 so you’d expect them to happen at similar angles instead of due east and west.
This is more evidence towards a geocentric model of Hylian cosmology, since the timing and position of sunrise and set can be explained if the sun orbits a point directly above Hyrule.
The strangest phenomenon I noticed is the fact that moon only appears at night. Sure, we culturally associate the moon with night, but in reality it’s out during the day half the time. This is what gives the moon its phases; the closer the moon is to the sun in the sky, the less of it appears illuminated to us on Earth. If the moon always rises and sets at the same time of day, its phases cannot be explained as the reflected light of the sun!
The simplest explanation would be that Link is observing the rotation of a moon with one luminescent side, but I looked closely and the half-moon has the same face as the full moon. This means that, like Earth’s moon, the Hylian moon is tidally locked3 and always shows the same face.
A model for the cosmology of the world of Zelda.
My best theory is that the moon is made of a fluorescent material and is orbited by a small body that emits ultraviolet or other high-energy light in the non-visible spectrum. Do you have an alternative headcanon theory?
Footnotes
Julius Caesar’s given name wasn’t “Julius”. That was his full family name — the Caesars being a branch of the Julia family — and his personal name was Gaius.
In his time, he was referred to as Gaius Caesar or simply as Caesar by himself and his contemporaries. Calling him “Julius Caesar” would have been redundant since every Caesar was a Julius.
The Romans had a lot of traditions around names. Gaius Julius Caesar inherited his name from his father, grandfather, and great-grandfather.
Caesar’s great-nephew Gaius Octavius Thurinus also took the name Gaius Julius Caesar when he inherited the assassinated dictator’s estate. To prevent confusion, he’s often called Octavianus, meaning “the guy formerly known as Octavius”. The emperor Caligula, Octavian’s great-grandson, was also named Gaius Caesar; we know him by a nickname he received as a small child.
The standard Periodic Table is an iconic data visualization, but it’s not the only way to represent the relationships between elements. This beautiful “ribbon” version was designed by James Hyde in the 1970s.
James Franklin Hyde was a pioneer in the silicone industry, so it’s appropriate that periodic ribbon puts the element silicon in the center and highlights its relationships to the other elements.
Hyde may have been inspired by the spiral chart published by Theodor Benfey in the same journal a few years earlier.
Between cabbage, lettuce, maple, and holly, two plants are in the rosid clade (related to roses) and two are in the asterid clade (related to sunflowers). Can you guess which is which?
I would have guessed that the trees might be related to a woody rose bush, while the leafy greens would be closer to broad-leaved sunflowers. I would have been wrong. Plants are much weirder than that.
As it turns out, a lot of the categories we use to think about plants — trees, bushes, berries, vegetables, and so on — are not particularly unique from an genetic perspective. Biologist Georgia Ray explains:
On the evolutionary tree of plants, trees are regularly interspersed with things that are absolutely, 100% not trees. This means that, for instance:
The common ancestor of a maple and a mulberry tree was not a tree.
The common ancestor of a stinging nettle and a strawberry plant was a tree.
And this is true for most trees or non-trees that you can think of.
Because of this, there are plenty of plant lists you can play “One of these things is not like the others” with where the intuitive answer is very different from the phylogenetic answer.
If you shuffled all the plants on this taxonomy tree, I would not be able to
tell the difference.
Footnotes
Every new emoji starts with a formal proposal justifying why it should exist. The proposal for 🫵 starts with four pages of the history of people pointing at the viewer in art.
Only a few emoji are accepted every year, but anyone can submit suggestions for new emoji. For example:
You can find most emoji proposals linked from their Emojipedia page. Here are a few interesting or funny submissions I’ve seen. (All quotations cleaned up.)
One of the oldest drawings to explore this perspective of the pointing finger is that of Pontormo, an Italian painter of the 16th century. A handful of Baroque examples can also be found.
In 1914, influenced by a cigarettes ad and by advertisement rhetoric in general, the British graphic designer Alfred Leete created the first recruitment poster of its kind. Since then, the number of remixes of those posters — in particular of James Flagg’s 1917 “Uncle Sam Wants You” poster — have grown immensely.
The yo-yo has been around for at least 2,500 years, but reached new popularity in the 1920s when Pedro Flores popularized a new method of attaching a string to the axle that allowed the yo-yo to “sleep”.
Since then, several yo-yo booms have swept the world, often on 7 year cycles of boom and bust. Some may say that the yo-yo has its ups and downs.
Currently, emojis only depict people assigned female at birth in a role of pregnancy. If emojis are designed in a manner to be as inclusive as possible this emoji should present its gender more ambiguously.
Additionally, a major gap in the emoji inventory is a manner to depict satisfaction after eating a great meal.
The oldest known example of a knitted object dates back to 11th century Egypt but the complexity of the design of those ancient Egyptian socks suggest that knitting was not new, even then.
The interest in dinosaurs is even stronger than the Google Trends comparisons suggest. People do not search for news on dinosaur attacks, as they would on sharks, lions, snakes, and alligators. The prudent individual rarely searches for dinosaur-skin shoes, nor do they look for an available source of local dinosaur sushi.
Books about dinosaurs range from nonfiction descriptions of the now-extinct animals, to fictional thrillers, like Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park, to the 488 (!!) books identified as “Dinosaur Erotica” in Amazon’s Kindle store.
The CRC Handbook of Chemistry and Physics is a 2600-page tome of random facts and figures, from the speed of sound in various media to the chemical composition of the human body.
My sixth-grade teacher’s copy was one of the most fascinating objects of my childhood, and it still makes me giggle with delight.
To give a taste of what the book is like, here’s an abridged version of section 15-39 “Density of various solids”. The idea that someone would need a handy reference for the density of cardboard, sandstone, butter, and thirty-eight different kinds of wood is hilarious — but they must be the most interesting person in the world!
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