Updates

While I was in London, I visited the Crown Jewels. One of the items on display was a “Coronation Spoon.” The card read:

The anointing is the most sacred part of the coronation ceremony. Holy oil is poured from the Ampulla into the Coronation Spoon and used to anoint the monarch.

From Messy: The Power of Disorder to Transform Our Lives:

After the fact, who can gainsay the call handler who says the ambulance hit the target rather than missing it by a second or two?

From What's Bred in the Bone:

The picture was a triptych, of which the central panel was five feet square, and the two flanking panels were of the same height, but only three feet wide.

A NY Times crossword clue was:

Cryptid in the Scottish Highlands

The answer was “LOCHNESSMONSTER.”

Not surprisingly, the book Broadway: A History of New York City in Thirteen Miles has an entire chapter entitled “Great White Way” which talks about how New York City’s Broadway got that name, and a period when other cities tried to copy the …vibe, that the Great White Way created for NYC.

In Broadway: A History of New York City in Thirteen Miles:

The 1811 Commissioner’s Plan was a product of the American Enlightenment, Cartesian in its insistence on straight lines.

I looked up Cartesian Geometry, and found this:

Usually the Cartesian coordinate system is applied to manipulate equations for planes, straight lines, and circles, often in two and sometimes three dimensions. Geometrically, one studies the Euclidean plane (two dimensions) and Euclidean space. As taught in school books, analytic geometry can be explained more simply: it is concerned with defining and representing geometric shapes in a numerical way and extracting numerical information from shapes’ numerical definitions and representations.

That doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to me, but it does tie it into Euclidiean geometry. I don’t know which is which, really.

From Superspy Science:

Bond and Tatiana escape the bad guys by hopping into one of their boats, conveniently laden with several large barrels of fuel, more than enough to take them from the Istrian peninsula across the Adriatic Sea to Venice.

I just finished Broadway: A History of New York City in Thirteen Miles, which talks quite a bit about Upper Manhattan, as it follows Broadway all the way up the city, from north to south.

From Broadway:

Broadway’s fourth mile in the 1890s meant endless streaming crowds of…nannies minding chuildren dressed in sailor suits and pinafores.

From Messy: The Power of Disorder to Transform Our Lives:

No wonder Jerome Wiesner, MIT’s president, felt trapped by the magisterial perfection of his office, and kept a messy bolt-hole in Building 20.

I found a similar word: “transmogrify.” The definition is remarkably similar to transmute. It shares a prefix, but there’s no clear definition of what “mogrify” means or where it came from, nor is it a word by itself.

Here’s the usage I found:

“Social Darwinism” isn’t simple a cliche. It’s magic, an alchemist’s trick that transmogrifies the gold of freedom into the the lead of Hitlerism.

I don’t have the name of the book in my notes.

From Spam: A Shadow History of the Internet:

This description is obviously ludicrous, a panegyric of pure function, while still being true.

In Spam: A Shadow History of the Internet, there’s a great analogy to explain Bayesian theory:

It can be briefly summarized by a common analogy using black and white marbles. Imagine someone new to this world seeing the first sunset of her life. Her question: will the sun rise again tomorrow? In ignorance, she defaults to a fifty-fifty chance and puts a black marble and a white marble into a bag. When the sun rises, she puts another white marble in. The probability of randomly picking a white from the bag – that is, the probability of the sun rising based on her present evidence – has gone from 1 in 2 to 2 in 3. The next day, when the sun rises, she adds another marble, moving it to 3 in 4, and so on. Over time, she will approach (but never reach) certainty that the sun will rise. If, one terrible morning, the sun does not rise, she will put in a black marble and the probability will decline in proportion to the history of her observations. This system can be extended to very complex problems in which each of the marbles in the bag is itself a bag of marbles: a total probability made up of many individual, varying probabilities…

Weirdly, I was looking back in my notes, and I found another reference from On the Move that I hadn’t worked through yet.

In St. Bernard Parish, the thin escarpment of delicate soil still extending east from downtown New Orleans and the levees of the Mississippi River, the population has decreased 39 percent.

I found this image on a social media post showing the difference in mileage on a route from New York to Moscow when traveled “straight” (really meaning around) as opposed to a great circle route. Basically, the top route only looks “straight” because the map is flat – it loses the context that you would be traveling in a half-circle, like the front of a human’s beltline.

In Spam: A Shadow History of the Internet, in a discussion of Nigerian 419 email scams:

[the details in the emails are] as evocative of remote and unknown sites of money and power as some invented Damascene castle of Galician dungeon must have been in the first centuries of the Spanish Prisoner con, which is the urtext of what is played out in this emails.

The book Spam: A Shadow History of the Internet used the word often to discuss the community shaming of the first spammers in the history of the internet.

On someone’s LinkedIn profile, I saw this entry:

Director, Global Content Marketing (Secondment)

I’m reading that as they were seconded to that role temporarily (they had only been in it for four months).

I found an entire website devoted to explaining the different pride flags: Pride Flag Identification Guide . There are a lot of them.

From a NY Times article.

Bolger is a broad man, with lank, whitish, chin-length hair and a dignified profile, like a figure from an antique coin. One of his favorite places is Walden Pond – he met his wife there, on one of his early-morning constitutionals…

You have to assume this man wasn’t defecating in the woods regularly, so it must mean a walk in this instance.

From How Big Things Get Done:

Heuristics are fast and frugal rules of thumb used to simplify complex decisions. The has it’s origin in the ancient Greek word Eureka! …

Found this in London.

In a NY Times op-ed about a woman who lost her fiance, I found it (again) used anthropomorphically.

We we walked in public, it was Steve who people turned to heliotropically.

From “Let Me Down Easy” by Gang of Youths:

From On Paper:

Zhang’s stunning success is rooted in having the perspicacity to recognize the critical need and for developing an ingenious strategy to exploit it.

From a footnote in Trillion Dollar Coach:

A hagiography is a biography that idealizes the subject.

From On the Move:

Very few scientists have looked at what happens when the hot temperatures projected for the United States intersect with rising humidity – an especially miserable combination described as “wet-bulb temperature” (measured by wrapping a water-soaked cloth around the bulb of a thermometer and blowing air over it).

I both read the book Shogun and watched the miniseries on FX. They used the word “barbarian” a lot, but I think it was just a modern translation. I don’t think the Japanese in 1600 would have known the word, because I’m not sure they would have known about the Barbary Coast, which was on the other side of the world.

(However, the Portuguese Jesuits play heavily in the plot, so perhaps they introduced the word?)

From On the Move:

In parallel, chemical companies saw enormous opportunity in the excess ammonia developed for World War II munitions, just as land-grant universities were spearheading research around how specific nutrients interact with crop growth.

From On Paper: The Everything of Its Two-Thousand-Year History:

A recognized authority on incunabula – books printed before 1501…

I found this image which asked people in various states if they considered themselves part of the “Midwest.”

I found a page called: What’s Going On With ‘Nonplussed’?:

And to make things worse, some of the beginnings of words which appear to be prefixes aren’t prefixes at all, even if they seem to function in the same manner.

Why are we bringing this up? Well, we didn’t want to tell you in this way, but we didn’t want you to hear it from someone else, either. There’s a new sense of nonplussed that people have been using, and…well, we’d just like to give you fair warning in case our descriptivist nature causes us to take action. This new sense appears to stem from a mistaken belief that the first three letters of nonplus are there to indicate that someone is something other than “plussed” (although what being plussed would entail here remains a mystery).

The gist is that “non” is not a prefix in this situation.

An image I found on some weird Facebook group.

From On Paper:

Anticipating the likelihood of Yankee chicanery (agreement concealing the actual figures could easily be finagled sub rosa)…

Someone posted a Confederate war monument to Reddit. It’s located a couple hours outside Dallas.

Following the war between the states (1861-1865), many confederate veterans who had so faithfully fought to defend their homes and country against the ravaging yankee invaders found little left on their return and set out for a new life in Texas. During the 1870’s these courageous pioneers settled northwest Comanche County. These veterans established farms, school; and Churches and brought the blessings of Anglo-Saxon civilization to the frontier. to the honor and memory of these brave patriots this memorial is dedicated by their grateful descendants…

That summarizes the average lost cause perspective.

Note the language:

• “the war between the states”
• “ravaging yankee invaders”
• “courageous pioneers”
• “the blessings of Anglo-Saxon civilization”
• “brave patriots”

It was placed in 2005. Here it is on Google Maps.

An article in CNN calls this entire thing into question: What is an IPA? A deliciously happy accident of beer history or the colonial marketing of a frugal recipe?

While the beer shares a history with India and the British Empire, the IPA moniker owes more to national pride and business savvy than ingenuity.

Credit for popularizing the pale ales sent to India goes to a brewer named George Hodgson, who invented a hoppy ale he named after himself. […]

Hodgson had an exclusive beer contract with the British East India Company. He supplied the company – which in turn supplied India’s British – with Brown ales, porters and his October Beer, a “stronger, hoppier and more bitter cousin of the regular pale ale,” […]

In the 1820s and ‘30s, Hodgson’s competitors gave the October Beer style a new name, India Pale Ale, merely to evoke their patrons’ sense of imperialist pride.

In Once Upon a Tome I found this:

…guests were often left to circumperambulate in a nervous manner…

I looked it up.

to walk or go about or around, esp. ceremoniously

I found this quote about the movie Showgirls:

Elizabeth Berkley chews the scenery to shreds, and the supporting cast makes for a glorious wallow into a dumpster fire of debauchery against the backdrop of Sin City.

It’s an interesting way to say that she wildly overacts.

In an article about Boeing:

Like most neoliberal institutions, Boeing had come under the spell of a seductive new theory of “knowledge” that essentially reduced the whole concept to a combination of intellectual property, trade secrets, and data, discarding “thought” and “understanding” and “complex reasoning” possessed by a skilled and experienced workforce as essentially not worth the increased health care costs.

They seem to be used “neoliberal” here to mean an organization obsessed with financial performance to the exclusion of everything else.

I saw a Reddit post that said Croatia was mentioned in the Bible. Sure enough, in 2 Timothy 4:9-10:

Do your best to come to me quickly, for Demas, because he loved this world, has deserted me and has gone to Thessalonica. Crescens has gone to Galatia, and Titus to Dalmatia.

In a tabloid report about a celebrity having dinner.

The reality star and Kardashian ex hit up Catch Steak in Los Angeles Friday, and just check out the pics … looks like a pretty deep crew chowed down with the father-of-three.

The concept of “deep” when applied to a group of people seems to just mean “many.”

In the movie The Laundromat, a character mentions a Bible verse – Isaiah 61:1 – and says, “The theology of liberation, the Catholic Church used to call it.”

Here’s the verse:

The Spirit of the Sovereign Lord is on me, because the Lord has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim freedom for the captives and release from darkness for the prisoners.

In an article about King Charles’s cancer diagnosis:

The disclosure was a break with the family’s tradition of being reticent about making health issues public.

In a Reddit discussion of creepy towns (reprinted on Buzzfeed), someone mentioned this:

Belvidere, Illinois – A single highway completely encircles this north-central Illinois city. The Grange, a formerly secret society, runs the city behind the scenes.

I did some searching but couldn’t find anything about The Grange being a “secret society” or controlling Belvidere.

In Alias Emma (another spy novel, coincidentally):

The plan was to text Chernov from her number, inviting him to an afternoon assignation at the Four Seasons.

I discovered that Prince William Sound in Alaska is home to Bligh Island and Bligh Reef, named for the captain. This is odd because I can’t see that Bligh ever sailed anywhere near Alaska.

In a ruling over a case of prosecutorial misconduct, the judge said:

McAfee ruled that either Wade or Willis would have to leave the case, as an “odor of mendacity remains” over the circumstances of their relationship.

An entry of the newsletter “Noted” had this information:

Is “Bohemia…dead,” as the landlord in Rent claims? Is Bohemia even possible anymore? The real Bohemia – as its own self-governing realm – crumbled long ago. It was a kingdom in the Holy Roman Empire and survived as part of the Hapsburg empire. Today, Bohemia is subsumed within the Czech Republic.

In Hidden Potential, there’s a footnote after the phrase “The New Encyclopaedia Brittanica.”

Tradition demanded that, new or not, the book still be spelled using the diphthong…

I assume they were referring to the “ae” together.

From a NY Times article about car theft in Toronto:

The bread and butter of thieves are the most prosaic cars, like Mr. Wilson’s Honda CR-V, or Ford F-150 trucks.