Month: October 2023

Say what you will, but the Arabs have a knack for design. I often hear that their transition from the desert to civilization happened too quickly, and supposedly this creates problems. I completely disagree. If people truly strive to create a pleasant living environment around them, then in thirty years the best will become even better, and the mediocrities will go sell vegetables at the market. And the reverse path, a fall from civilization to savagery, I fear we may yet see in our lifetime.

P.S. I really like the slide bolt in the toilet.

I apologize, but friends, either make the $20 portions smaller, or the door wider

Interestingly, of the entire globe, satellite internet will not work over just a small piece of Western Africa.

Sitting on the plane, it’s a 15-hour flight, updating the world map in my head and turns out there’s quite a few changes. It turns out the Republic of Congo and the Democratic Republic of Congo are two different countries, separated by the Congo River. Also, it turns out Swaziland is now Eswatini, which is still Swaziland, but in the Swazi language.

It turns out that in our homeland, Arabic numerals did not exist at all until the 18th century.

There was a cunning system based on Cyrillic and symbols. There is even a converter program http://info-7.ru/Titlo/Titlo.shtml Darkness, legion, leodr, vran, deck. Sources: http://hbar.phys.msu.ru/gorm/ahist/cyrik.htm also here http://www.pravpiter.ru/zads/n018/ta013.htm.

Especially interesting is that our ancestors for some reason needed such unimaginable numbers as 10 to the power of 48 and next to it 10 to the power of 50. These are klada, ten vrans and darkness of dark, ten decks. For instance, in the Apocalypse: “The number of the horsemen was two hundred million (Ancient Greek δισ-μυριάδες μυριάδων); and I heard the number thereof” (Rev. 9:16). Not only are various kladas and darkness of dark simply huge numbers, but their powers differ only by a couple of orders of magnitude. Interestingly, maybe scientists have figured something out over something simple.

“…APRICOT. This word originates from the Latin praecoquum /prekokvum/ — “early”: this name was given to various early-ripening fruit varieties. Of course, when a word transitions from one language to another, some sounds often get replaced; but where did the initial ‘a’ sound come from? The history of this word is as follows. It was first borrowed by the Greeks, who replaced the Latin suffix with their own: prekokkion; then the Greeks lent it to the Arabs. In Arabic, there were no ‘p’ or ‘o’ sounds, and the Arabs replaced them with ‘b’ and ‘u.’ Moreover, an Arabic word cannot start with two consonants — and a vowel appeared between ‘b’ and ‘r’; the ending was dropped. Finally, they added the Arabic article al at the beginning: resulting in al-barquq. As the Arabs moved from the east of the Mediterranean to the west, they introduced this word in Spain; the Spaniards made it their own: albaricoque /albarikoque/. It then reached the French: abricot /abriko/, and the Dutch: abrikoos /abrikoos/; from the Dutch, it was adopted by the Russians….”

(“The Book on Language”)

Looks totally like magic

Here you all are talking about healthy eating, organic foods. Well, in the May 1956 issue of Saturday Evening Post, I found an advertisement from the company Cyanamid, which manufactures the antibiotic chlortetracycline. The ad itself talks about how tasty chickens with chlortetracycline are.

came to the kitchen to make tea

picked up the teapot

saw Nadya

took a photo of Nadya

and the teapot

and automatically made myself a coffee

Watched the first season of Ted Lasso and realized who it all reminded me of. Elon Musk’s story at Twitter. The resemblance would be squared if Musk had made Lex Fridman the CEO of Twitter—they almost agreed to it. Twitter (X) at the end of the first season isn’t great, but it’s not dead either

Look, I found a place where you could call and ask in the manner of the joke “Is this the laundry?”, because in the photo is the American Institute of Laundering. It has long since deceased. I found an article about it in the Saturday Evening Post from January 1960. Now there are even no traces left.

For example, it describes how the institute conducted testing of various things and discovered that foam inserts in bras were the cause of fires. The foam rubber in the bra’s construction easily caught fire after drying. Generally, that’s what they were up to.