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 and 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 the inexpressible (άρρητος) numbers.
When you feel how depressingly
Piet Hein
slowly you climb
it’s well to remember that
Things Take Time.
“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.
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.
Book Recommendation
Honouring the Truth, Reconciling for the Future, by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada
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 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.
Kama Sutra, Chapter 3
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.
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:
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”.
[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.
David Cain
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 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.
Julius Caesar’s given name wasn’t “Julius”. That was his full family name — the Caesars being a branch of the Julia family. His personal name was Gaius.
In his time, he was referred to as Gaius Caesar or simply Caesar by himself and his contemporaries.
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 silicone pioneer James Franklin Hyde in the 1970s.
Hyde may have been inspired by the spiral chart published by Theodor Benfey in the same journal a few years earlier.
A lot of intuitive categories we use for plants — trees, bushes, berries, vegetables, and so on — are not based on phylogenetics:
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.
As another example, cabbages, maple trees, and roses, all members of the rosid clade, are more closely related to each other than they are to their asterid cousins lettuce, holly trees, and sunflowers.
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.
To address the Unicode Consortium’s emoji selection criteria, you’ll find proposals arguing things like mermaids are 522% more popular than goblins or that teapots are not too similar to teacups. Older emoji didn’t go through the same kind of selection process, which is presumably why there are three separate emoji for optical computer media: 📀 💿 💽.
You can find most emoji proposals linked from their Emojipedia page.
Book Recommendation
The CRC Handbook of Chemistry and Physics
This is less of a book and more of a tome of random facts and figures, from the speed of sound in various media to the chemical composition of the human body. Other section headers include:
My sixth-grade teacher’s copy was one of the most fascinating objects of my childhood, and it still makes me giggle with delight.
If you see a coyote in Vancouver, the officially recommended course of action is to yell “Go away coyote”.
Here in Vancouver, Parking By-law 6059 requires grocery stores to provide
…one additional space for each additional 20 square metres of gross floor area up to 2300 square metres
each of which must be
a minimum of 5.5 m in length and 2.5 m in width.
Put another way, the law requires a 14m² parking space for every 20m² of supermarket floor space.
Adding the necessary lanes to allow cars to get in and out, this law practically guarantees that grocery stores will be more parking lot than store.
In the late ’60s, the Canadian government bought the rights to the English lyrics of O Canada for a dollar. The music and original French lyrics had already passed into the public domain.
Ironically, the copyright to the English lyrics would have expired anyways by the time the National Anthem Act gave official status to O Canada in 1980.
Crayola has a trademark on the smell of its crayons. It’s officially registered as
A unique scent of a pungent, aldehydic fragrance combined with the faint scent of a hydrocarbon wax and an earthy clay.
In Canada, a trademark can be just about anything distinguishing, including “a word, a personal name, a design, a letter, a numeral, a colour, a figurative element, a three-dimensional shape, a hologram, a moving image, a mode of packaging goods, a sound, a scent, a taste, a texture and the positioning of a sign.”
You can get a really good approximation of a sinusoidal curve from twelve equally-spaced line segments of slope 1/12, 2/12, 3/12, 3/12, 2/12, 1/12, -1/12, -2/12, -3/12, -3/12, -2/12, and -1/12, respectively.
This approximation, known as the rule of twelfths, rounds but otherwise uses exact values along the curve.
I learned this from a kayaking instructor, since it’s particularly handy for estimating tides.
According to dimensional analysis, the time it takes to properly roast a whole turkey is proportional to its weight to the ⅔ power. My old mathematical modelling textbook specifically recommends 45 minutes per lb2/3 when cooked at 350℉.
A precise formula has been derived for a spherical turkey of uniform thermal conductivity and density, though this is somewhat less practical for chefs.
Since the ’50s, Alberta has engaged in a deliberate effort to prevent rats from entering the province. Fortunately, rats can’t survive in the wild in Alberta, so they have pest inspectors regularly check every premise within a 29 x 600 km control zone from Montana to Cold Lake. Pet rats are illegal.
The rat-free status of Alberta led to a Wikipedia edit war over whether the province should appear on a map of the brown rat’s habitat.
The official title of Chief Mouser to the Cabinet Office is held by a cat in charge of keeping mice under control at the UK Prime Minister’s office at 10 Downing Street. The current incumbent is Larry.
Muji apparently doesn’t have a bug bounty program.
Vessel Finder is a map showing the current location of container ships, cruise ships, fishing boats, and other nautical vessels. It aggregates data from automatic identification systems which all sufficiently large boats are required to be fitted with.
International law requires all ships to display a wheelhouse poster describing the “general particulars” of the vessel.
That’s such a great phrase — it ought to catch on more widely!
The head of a sunflower is actually hundreds of smaller flowers working together to attract pollinators. Each large yellow petal is its own individual flower, and the bits in the middle are tiny five-pointed flowers if you look closely.
Sunflowers share this property with the rest of the family Asteraceae, including daisies, dahlias, dandilions, and dozens of “damned yellow composites”.
Not all 26 letters of the alphabet appear on BC license plates: the province doesn’t issue standard licence plates with I, O, or Q. Letters U, Y, and Z were also absent until 2025.
The first three are too similar to 1 and 0 to be allowed (there is a relevant xkcd). Presumably, U was excluded to minimize the number of accidental rude words.
Originally, the motor vehicle branch was only able to print plates using 10 different characters at a time, so Y and Z missed out just because there wasn’t enough room for them.
Mount Baker was named by George Vancouver after his third lieutenant. Joseph Baker may have been the first on Vancouver’s ship to spot the obvious giant mountain, but he wasn’t even the first European to do so.
A year earlier, the Spanish expedition led by Manuel Quimper had mapped the area and called the peak la gran montaña del Carmelo.
If either explorer had cared to ask the indigenous groups they were around, they might have recognized Mount Baker by the name kwelshan, the term used by the Lhaq’temish (Lummi) people around Bellingham and the San Juan Islands, or swáʔləx̣, reportedly used by the nəxʷsƛ̕áy̕əm̕ (Klallam) people on the Olympic Peninsula.
The mountain itself is surrounded by the traditional lands of the Nooksack and Upper Skagit peoples. The Nooksack use kwelshán for the high open slopes of the mountain and kweq’ smánit for the glacier-covered summit.
At first they deployed a man with a stick. The groundsman approached one buzzing batch, decided his mode of attack would not work, and returned defeated.
Andrew Fidel Fernando / Cricinfo
on a cricket match delayed by bees
If I could begin to be
Rebecca Sugar
Half of what you think of me
I could do about anything
I could even learn how to love
“Love Like You”, from Steven Universe
“May you live in interesting times” is typically claimed to be a Chinese expression, but it actually originated with the British. Joseph Chamberlain — Neville’s dad — used the phrase “interesting times” frequently in speeches:
I think that you will all agree that we are living in most interesting times. I never remember myself a time in which our history was so full, in which day by day brought us new objects of interest, and, let me say also, new objects for anxiety.
Joseph Chamberlain
Jens von Bergmann has run the numbers on land use in various municipalities in Metro Vancouver. The City of Vancouver in particular has lot of land tied up in streets and detached housing.
| Use | CoV land |
|---|---|
| single-family detached houses and duplexes | 34.0% |
| roads and right-of-way | 28.1% |
| recreation, open space, and natural areas | 15.2% |
| commercial | 3.9% |
| low-rise apartments (residential or mixed-use) | 4.1% |
| high-rise apartments (residential or mixed-use) | 1.9% |
The word pea was originally pease in the singular and peasen in the plural. Eventually, speakers understandably interpreted the -s in pease as the plural suffix rather than just a sound in the original Latin pisum/pisa and Greek πίσον, and the English singular pea was born.
For example:
Take grene pesyn, an washe hem clene an caste hem on a potte, an boyle hem tyl þey breste, an þanne take hem vppe of þe potte, an put hem with brothe yn a-noþer potte…
Harleian manuscript 279
Obviously, pianos do not sing.
Judge George H King
in Rupa Marya v. Warner Chappell Music
on the copyright of “Happy Birthday”
Rubber duck problem solving describes the phenomenon where you realize the solution to a problem in the middle of explaining it to someone else. The name stems from apocryphal stories in which stumped engineers are advised to get help from inanimate objects, including a literal rubber duck.
When I started measuring out our local grocery store, which I don’t think of as being that big, I was blown away by how much more space was parking lot rather than actual store. That was kind of a problem, because we were originally just going to model real cities, but we quickly realized there were way too many parking lots in the real world and that our game was going to be really boring if it was proportional in terms of parking lots.
Stone Librande
on designing SimCity (2013)
When the Ontario cities of Fort William and Port Arthur amalgamated in 1970, residents voted for a new name for their new city.
| Candidate name | Votes |
|---|---|
| Thunder Bay | 15,870 |
| Lakehead | 15,302 |
| The Lakehead | 8,377 |
This table should be included under the dictionary entry for “vote splitting”.
Image Evolution is a very interesting Javascript tool based on Roger Johansson’s Evo-Lisa idea. It uses a genetic algorithm to represent images as a collection of overlapping polygons.
Ever wonder why LaTeX doesn’t provide a way for printing the title and author once \maketitle has been issued? I did. So I asked a question on the TeX StackExchange and received an interesting answer. Turns out it’s an artifact of the times when memory was in such short supply that saving a few bytes was worthwhile.
Solutions to problems
are easy to find;
the problem’s a great
contribution.What is truly an art
Piet Hein
is to wring from your mind
a problem to fit
a solution.
“Last Things First”, from Grooks 3
We have lots of different snakes. The quality of your work determines which snake you will fight. The better your thesis is, the smaller the snake will be.
Luke Burns / McSweeney’s
on defending your thesis
The trouble is that when the person at the other end of the helpline goes to check this out, very often the mouse has gone elsewhere.
The Chairman of Committees
on the mouse problem in the House of Lords
Did you hear the one about the geology costume contest?
The gneiss guise finished last.
