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.

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.

Every day at five o’clock in the evening, many cities in Japan perform a test of their emergency broadcast systems. To avoid alarming or annoying their residents, the test consists of a pleasant melody to mark the end of the day.

I recorded the melodies in Tōkyō and Kanazawa: the children’s song “Yūyake Koyake” (夕焼小焼) and the classic Westminister Quarters, respectively.

When I bought stuff at the Tōkyō Pokémon Center, I was surprised to see a PIN pad with the numbers in a random order!

It’s presumably a security feature — to prevent fingerprint smudges from revealing your PIN — but it sure is weird not being able to rely on muscle memory!

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.

Megan Thompson-Munson

Generally, icebergs will float so their long axis is parallel to the ocean surface, which you can try for yourself with this iceberg flotation simulator.

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 more risqué chapters, it also contains a list of sixty-four arts whose knowledge makes a person popular and attractive.

1. Singing.
2. Playing on musical instruments.
3. Dancing.
…
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.

Kama Sutra, Chapter 3

In modern times, the twenty-eighth art is called word chain or shiritori and is primarily practiced by bored children on road trips.

The word “distribute” is etymologically the opposite of “tribute”.

In geography, a tributary is a stream or river that feeds into a larger body of water; for example, Snek’w7étkwe (the Thompson River) is a tributary of stal̓əw̓ (the Fraser River). 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:

• 314159 ($\lfloor \pi \cdot {10}^5\rfloor$)
• 8675309 (Jenny’s number)
• 1000000007 (a billion and seven)
• 2147483647 ($2^{31}-1$, i.e. INT_MAX)
• 11111111111111111111111 (twenty-three ones)
• 1000000000000066600000000000001 (Belphegor’s prime)

Most ice cream trucks in Canada and the United States use music boxes made by a single mom-and-pop company that can play 32 songs (two of which are The Entertainer).

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 British Columbia are generally numbered based on the distance (in km) from the beginning of the highway. But this is less universal than I thought. Alberta didn’t have exit numbers at all until the early 2000s and Nova Scotia still uses sequential numbering.

“Hydrogen” in German is Wasserstoff (“water stuff”), which sounds hilarious except it’s just a literal translation of the Greek hydro-gen!

The words Kohlenstoff (“coal stuff”) for carbon and Sauerstoff (“sour stuff”) for oxygen are also direct translations. Stickstoff (“suffocation stuff”), the word for nitrogen, is a German original.

Baskin-Robbins famously sells 31 flavours of ice cream at a time, but 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, not heli-copter: it’s Greek for “spiral wing”.

It’s easy to confuse the flags of Australia and New Zealand (Aotearoa) 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 🇳🇿

Vancouver’s two historic train stations were built by two different companies to terminate their two different railways. Waterfront Station was built in 1914 for the CPR, while Pacific Central Station was built a few years later for the CNR.