Things you were shockingly old when you learned

The German dude who worked with us definitely had a killer deadpan, which he laid the groundwork for by being very serious the rest of the time.

Also he did the thing where having a very good sense of humour doesn't mean that you're actually funny a lot of the time - it means you hit your mark when you try, in contrast to EG one of our other colleague who would bound in like a setter in the brush in the sense that there was a joke somewhere in there, when a lot of the times the joke was just "that sounded a bit gay".

That's a great depiction of contrast, right there

Was slightly mindblown when I discovered this.

The two parts to the word “helicopter” are not “heli” and “copter”, but “helico” meaning spiral, and “pter” meaning one with wings, like pterodactyl.

— Karthik Balakrishnan (@karthikb351) March 5, 2018

Shit

a spiral with wings

beautiful

helicoter

nice - I still get weird looks from fellow biomed research people when I refer to "apo-tosis". The Aussie default is "ay-POP-tosis"

morphology ftw!

Stonehenge, the Alamo, the Amityville House... I discovered today that the railroad trestle on the Murmur album cover isn't exactly in downtown Athens, but it's not exactly out in the middle of nowhere either.

https://i.imgur.com/CIKp3b9.jpg

Granted, that area probably looks a little more populated today than it did in 1980, but still. I always imagined that you'd have to ~~ walk, through the woods ~~ to get there.

it's walking distance from the old church where they were living for a while ... that area is close to downtown, but most of what you see in the photo was undeveloped land in 1980

the trestle itself is half torn down now

When I was there in '94 it still basically looked like the cover but more kudzu. I think there was another (steel) trestle around Athens with "So Central" written on it.

I am 36 and I only learned last week that Tupac Shakur was born and raised in NYC and Baltimore, and didn’t move to Cali til he was almost done with high school. Also he was friends with Biggie up until he made Hit Em Up, which apparently he did just to sell records. It’s kind of blowing my mind to think the California Love guy was actually an East Coaster, and the whole East Coast/West Coast beef started just from dude being a shitty friend

he was also an art school kid

This I had heard, but man it does fit in perfectly with the rest of all that bullshit, huh

a friend of mine had his locker

in his house?

at the art school he went to

the California Love guy

California Love was a Dr Dre solo single that Suge had Pac put a verse on after the fact

I didn’t know that. That was some brilliant marketing.

I've been learning much these last couple weeks, heh

that Americans drop the first "i" in their pronunciation of aluminium. I thought it was just Trump fucking up the English language again until I looked it up. It was an accident that began with an advertising literature typo in 1892.

An American Thing.

TIL that the original Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy theme tune is an Eagles song!

t was an accident that began with an advertising literature typo in 1892.

Not quite true to say it began that way, as aluminum is the original name

we're not dropping the i, we don't have one to drop

the etymology is consistent w/ suffixes for other elements—you wouldn't call it "platinium"!

You wouldn't call it chromum either.

Sodum just wouldn't work at all tbh.

cadmum

Scandum and titanum

Yeah the more common worldwide spelling basically derives from an incorrect correction imo, which uses similar logic to the last few posts

(That logic being that a lot of other elements end -ium so they all have to, which is wrong and bad)

Nevertheless, element names ending in -um were not unknown at the time; for example, platinum (known to Europeans since the 16th century), molybdenum (discovered in 1778), and tantalum (discovered in 1802). The -um suffix is consistent with the universal spelling alumina for the oxide (as opposed to aluminia); compare to lanthana, the oxide of lanthanum, and magnesia, ceria, and thoria, the oxides of magnesium, cerium, and thorium, respectively.

America gets something right :-O

Not sure where I thought it came from but Heineken as a Dutch beer. Just seen a poster linking it to Amsterdam recently.
Possibly had linked it to the Scandinavian stuff that tends to be ok.

probably

there was a jazz club on the street i grew up on, and a hotel where people like, oh idk ella fitzgerald, louis armstrong, and duke ellington stayed.
holy crap! i feel like this is something my dad might have told me when i was too young to get it but now i am shockingly old enough and i get it!

Sir Humphry Davey made a bit of a mess of naming this new element, at first spelling it alumium (this was in 1807) then changing it to aluminum, and finally settling on aluminium in 1812. His classically educated scientific colleagues preferred aluminium right from the start, because it had more of a classical ring, and chimed harmoniously with many other elements whose names ended in -ium, like potassium, sodium, and magnesium, all of which had been named by Davy.

What do you expect from Humphrey "Davey" Davy

ha! that erroneous "e" is my doing, the c+p didn't include his surname.

The correct spelling is with an ‘e’ so

yankee defensiveness aside, sounding out "aluminium" is more satisfying but can't do that in public w/o it sounding like "punch me"

Not sure where I thought it came from but Heineken as a Dutch beer. Just seen a poster linking it to Amsterdam recently.
Possibly had linked it to the Scandinavian stuff that tends to be ok.

― Stevolende, Saturday, March 10, 2018 11:13 AM (two hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Over there, they pronounce it Heinekenium.

xp lmao

punchime

that Americans drop the first "i" in their pronunciation of aluminium. I thought it was just Trump fucking up the English language again until I looked it up. It was an accident that began with an advertising literature typo in 1892.

― calzino, Saturday, March 10, 2018 6:46 AM (two days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

We don't drop the "i" in pronunciation, we drop it all together and don't spell it with two "i"s at all. It's aluminum here.

do you savages eat Asda brand beans out of a tin with your bare hands as well? Jokes of course, don't want to dig myself in any deeper here.

No, we eat them out of a tn.

Don't know if this exactly belongs here but it only just occurred to me that bars push cocktails because they are higher markup than straight liquor. All the add-ons are much cheaper per ounce than the liquor.

yes and no? if there's a lot of markup, sure, but fancy cocktails have significant prep time

just pouring booze in a glass with little or no garnish is pretty economical

yeah I guess that's true