Things you were shockingly old when you learned

an isingimbel is a coffee martini made with onion skins

AKA 'cowboy coffee'... also how traditional New Orleans coffee was made, using egg whites to settle the grounds

egg shells, not whites

― andrew m., Wednesday, August 23, 2023 9:40 AM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

actually, you can use the egg white. same concept as using an egg white to clarify homemade stock.

sorry i see we've already covered that

an isingimbel is a coffee martini made with onion skins

I had no idea isinglass was so interesting tbh. Also I had no idea it existed so

the "tera" in like terabyte is the same as the tera in teratology

it means monster!

🖼

An electron’s mass is about one rontogram, Jupiter weighs two quettagrams and the diameter of the observable universe is one ronnameter. This is what representatives from 100 countries at the General Conference on Weights and Measures decided on Friday as they adopted four new SI unit prefixes.

Metrologists and metric system enthusiasts can rejoice as there are now official prefixes for extremely large things – ronna and quetta (1027 and 1030) – and for very small stuff – ronto and quecto (10−27 and 10−30).

This is the first time in over 30 years that the CGPM added to the prefixes for the International System of Units (SI) after it approved zetta, yotta, zepto and yocto in 1991. While the last change was aimed at chemists who wanted to express units in the Avogadro’s number range, this year’s update is driven by the need for big numbers in digital information. Data scientists are already using prefixes at the top of the range – yottabytes, for example – so a new one was urgently needed.

‘It was high time,’ said Richard Brown from the UK’s metrology institute, the National Physical Laboratory, in an interview with the Associated Press. Brown, who proposed the change, explained that the names had to start with the letters r and q, the only ones not taken yet by other symbols or prefixes in the metric system. ‘There’s a precedent that they sound similar to Greek letters and that big number prefixes end with an a, and smaller numbers with an o,’ Brown told the Associated Press.

There are now no more letters in the Latin alphabet left in case more prefixes are needed, but this likely won’t become a problem anytime soon.

The superscript didn’t c&p properly obv that should say 10^27 &c

"Originally 'quecca' had been suggested for 10^30 but was too close to a profane meaning in Portuguese"

how many lottabytes in a fuckobyte?

not using "lorra" is Cilla erasure

Hellabytes

look forward to this being a round on UC next series

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p0dwlxl9

I think I must have known this at some point but I'd forgotten that Murdoch no longer owns Sky

The only thing I ever directly heard of being made of isinglass is curtains.

Only time I've ever heard of these is in "Surrey With the Fringe on Top", wtf are they?

I just learned that Long Cool Woman isn’t by CCR, but the Hollies

still unclear to me whether her dress is black or red #protomeme

OK now I understand what "monster, monster" is, I only ever saw it as that skit in the Fast Show and was quite baffled, which I suppose anyone else would be by a skit saying "megalo megalo" or something.

ps on isinglass, at first i was 'huh that's saruman's place did tolkien take the name from some proto-germanic script about fish bladders? because of course he would.'

_The only thing I ever directly heard of being made of isinglass is curtains._


Only time I've ever heard of these is in "Surrey With the Fringe on Top", wtf are they?

Bob Weinstock?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5mbCuFn3EH4

wiki:

In the musical Oklahoma!, the song "The Surrey With the Fringe on Top" describes the surrey as having "isinglass curtains you can roll right down" although here the term refers to mica, commonly used for windows in vehicle side screens (but totally inflexible).[13][14]

hard to verify the source here, but sounds like it could be a case of Songs where the songwriter confuses A with B

having said that, a GIS for "isinglass curtains" brings up lots of images / retailers of the flexible plastic coverings that you'd put on a e.g. a boat

i would read a whole 33 1/3 book about Surrey

Bonnie “Prince” Billy took the photo on the cover of Slint’s ‘Spiderland’.

Can you surrey? Can you picnic?

Bonnie “Prince” Billy's dad took the photo on the cover of Slint’s ‘Tweez’.

So it was the Old Photographer not the Young Photographer then (Jacobite joke).

and bonnie "prince" billy himself is sitting in the tweez car

Robert Burns wrote a version of "John Barleycorn" which was the model for most subsequent versions of the song. It was Burns who came up with that snappiest of lines, "John Barleycorn must die".

I think a few of Slint toured as Oldham's backing band in the early 90s when There Is No-One What Will Take Care of You came out.

this week my external cd drive died.
i still have a cd drive in an old XP machine that rips cds, but it's not connected to the internet of course.
so, i have been using that and manually adding all the metadata which is a proper pain.
then i find out about mp3tag.

The surname Tedesco means 'German' in the Italian language. Its plural form is Tedeschi. Carla Bruni's original surname was Tedeschi -- the only person I've ever heard of with this name apart from Susan.

The word for (a) German is interesting in that it’s a completely different unrelated word in many major languages. For example:

English: German
Spanish: alemán
Italian: tedesco
Polish: Niemiecki
Finnish: Saksa

German: Deutsch

The Finnish word is obviously derived from Saxon - like the Scottish Gaelic word for English speakers, Sassenach.

Yes, although I researched that and found ‘Deutsch’ is distantly related to “tedesco.’ There was a word in Old German that was the ancestor of both those words.

xp

“Theodiscus” was the original word, attested Tobin 786 AD and meaning something like “of the people.” The French “teuton” is from the same root.

*attested to in

It's "Nemyetski" in Russian, which literally translates to "one who does not understand" or, maybe more accurately, "one who does not speak an intelligible language" (i.e., a barbarian).

a further connection to Susan Tedeschi is that the surname Allman ultimately derives from Norman French 'aleman,' which means ...

interesting discussion tho!

I have a curator friend whose last name is Tedesco— she’s wonderful

Don't you mean wunderbar?

Ha, excellent joke!

I was thinking Dutch was an externally imposed name people gave to a group that calls itself something else. Think they call themselves Nederlanders as in people from the Netherlands which is also what translates as Pais-bas in French.
Wikipedia has it as a splitting of the original designation derived from theodiscus into Diets for the group of languages that became what the English call Dutch and Fresian etc and Deutsch for the languages still thought of as German. Both derived from Germanic sources.
I had thought it was purely external and Brits had called a group by a term belonging to another one they'd mistaken them for. Does happen a bit. Insular country and all those people from over in that direction are all the same after all. Dutch just being an anglicisation of Deutsch like. & easier to say than Netherlander

I've noted on seeing Dutch written that it looks about halfway between English and German.

has no-one heard of Tommy Tedesco?

*raises hand*

Til about the Soviet air force disaster plane the TU 55. It was a single pilot bomber that was dangerous to fly, even more dangerous to land and killed loads of pilots, everything about it seemed designed to kill the pilot - even the ejector seat fired the pilot downwards out of the bottom of the cockpit! But the funny part was the pilots called it the "booze carrier" because the coolant system used an alcohol/distilled water blend that was not dissimilar to Russian vodka, so if they managed to survive a flight they'd drain the remaining gallons of alcohol out the craft to sell on the black market.

I remember hearing the story among a bunch of other stuff about ineptness, poor training and corruption in the Soviet armed forces.
Not sure to what extent that was propaganda during the end of the cold war and pre the dissolution of the USSR.
I think there was one book I always meant to read on the subject and may be several others by now. Think i heard about it or the subject in general as a news item in the late 80s.