TIL: Today I Learned

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I imagine a Scotsman's liver to be kinda like an oily jelly-shot.
It is a bit dark, but as alcoholic liver sclerosis is much like that induced in geese when making pate de foie gras it could be really nice.
 
So Scottish liver is actually delicious? Then why is the flesh eating sea creature leaving it untouched?? You know the evidence is starting to stack up against this monster horse of yours, Arakhor.
 
It's still more credible than good ol' Nessie!
 
Fun fact: Nessie only eats the liver of her victims.
 
How do you know Nessie's gender?
 
Nessie is clearly short for Vanessa. Your Scottish credentials are slipping. :p
 
TIL: The Loch Ness Monster's name doesn't derive from her living in Loch Ness.
 
But the lake was named after Vanessa. It's all connected.
 
Is there a lighthouse in the lake? For phantom ships beaming up to there? And a lighthouse which has a fog horn too ;)

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Today I learned that there's a name for all those overambitious RPGs from small, mostly European studios with limited resources that focus on gameplay and depth, but don't have the budget to be what they should be and end up as really rough diamonds with janky mechanics, poor controls/UIs/camera and production values ranging from "Come on, it's current year" to "OK, I guess".

It's Eurojank.
 
TIL that dichloromethane is not compatible with a dilute solution of ruthenium tetroxide dissolved in bleach. Just barely had time to throw the bottle into the bathtub as it began erupting like an organic volcano, spraying black goop (bleach/RuO2/RuO4?) all over the bathtub. I had read of its ability to oxidize all sorts of organics but knew it was compatible with chloroform, so the incompatibility with dichloromethane/methylene chloride surprised me.
 
TIL that the story "The yellow wall-paper" is pretty brief. Still very nice, yet i sort of expected more development on the paper.
Maybe with good female writers (my favourite greek short story is by Penelope Delta, and it is very similar in tone to this) it happens that there is less interest in details and there is more of a general allusion rather than a sinking inside the pattern of whatever wallpaper the story is about. It can be juxtaposed a bit to the novella "The figure in the carpet", by Henry James, or (for shorter stories) with Borges, where the opposite is going on.
 
TIL that India annexed a small Bhutan-like country to its north in 1975 and that Bhutan was afraid of awating the same fate, as they similarly were under Indias thumb.
And that Bhutan's execution of its happiness index involved kicking out millions of Nepalian immigrants in the 90s who live in Nepalian refugee camps to this day because Nepal refuses to give them citizenship.
Also by Bhutan law you have to wear traditional clothing in public.
And tourists have to pay a daily 200$ fee just to be there.

A wondrous country.
 
TIL: Machine Learning is difficult when working with real data.
 
TIL Vidalia onions have a protected designation of origin.
 
Actually searching something else, I stumbled on John Marshall during the time the US constitution was on the drawing board in Virginia (1788)

With Madison and others they were seeing what they could learn or use from the example of the Dutch Republic, "the Republic of the Seven United Netherlands", 1581-1795 with seven states.

The issue they saw was that the states had too much power and that this had leaded after two centuries to a rich aristocracy on the one hand and a slowly declining power of the republic as a whole on the other hand.
So... they choose for a stronger federal government.

I wonder how these founding fathers would now look upon the distribution of wealth in the US after two centuries
 
It sounds like very dark comedy when I read that article.
 
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