Today I Learned #2: Gone for a Wiki Walk

[aimeeandbeatles]

Today I learned about Fontgate. Basically some forged documents used a font that wasn't (easily) available at the time.

Pakistan's government is in trouble. And its fate may hinge on a Microsoft font. Judicial investigators probing the financial assets of the country's Prime Minister and his family allege his daughter (and apparent successor) forged documents to hide her ownership of overseas properties. How did they reach that conclusion? The documents from 2006 submitted by Maryam Nawaz (daughter of PM Nawaz Sharif) were in the Calibri font. That font, according to the investigation team's leaked report, wasn't publicly available until 2007.

A cursory glance at the history of Calibri reveals it became the default font on Microsoft PowerPoint, Excel, Outlook, and WordPad in 2007. However, Microsoft's website states that version 1.0 of the font was available to download separately as far back as 2005. And, according to font consultant Thomas Phinney, Calibri was also available as part of a Windows pre-release in 2004.

These technicalities could prove critical if the country's Supreme Court decides to take further action. But that hasn't stopped the allegations from whipping up a frenzy in the Pakistani media and Twitterverse. "Calibri" is still trending in the country, with Twitter users using the term "#fontgate" to deride the government.

 

[r16]

similar in the conspiracies of New Turkey . They "discovered" secret documents showing Military preparing for a coup , send their victims to jail and steal their investments . So , there was a list of companies , written in Calibri because as mentioned it is standart in maybe 2004 or 5 . The Police obviously ignored the same defence that Calibri wasn't in use back then with a thing that such files automatically updated self , time to time . There were actually a company or two that had changed their names in the intervening years and "correctly" named in their later versions , proving that fortune telling or clairvoyance was a particularly strong thing in the now dead Turkish Military , too .

 

[aimeeandbeatles]

Today I learned about the Erfurt latrine disaster.

An accident in Erfurt, Duchy of Thuringia, caused the deaths of at least 60 people in 1184. A number of nobles from across the Holy Roman Empire were meeting in a room at the Church of St. Peter, when their combined weight caused the floor to collapse into the latrine beneath the cellar and led to dozens of nobles drowning in liquid excrement.[1]

 

[AmazonQueen]

Today I learned about the Erfurt latrine disaster.

I note King Henry who arranged the meeting survived. Conspiracy theory time.

 

[EgonSpengler]

TIL that it's good that we can't hear the frequency bats use for their sonar, because in terms of volume, they're as loud as smoke detectors. If we could hear them, they'd drive us, erm, batty.

 

[aimeeandbeatles]

If we could hear them, they'd drive us, erm, batty.

You did that on purpose didn't you.

 

[AmazonQueen]

TIL that JJ Williams and JPR Williams were known by their initials because otherwise there would've been 2 John Williams on the same team.

 

[Zkribbler]

There's a scene in Soul Surfer in which a little girl is a supermarket parking lot points at Bethany and asks, What happened to her arm? [It was bitten off by a shark.] TIL, the supermarket in question is Foodland, where I was asst mgr in the early 70's.

 

[Kyriakos]

I note King Henry who arranged the meeting survived. Conspiracy theory time.

It's not like he survived by accident; the floor was made of stone where he stood.
And I really doubt those other nobles had heard of mechanics.

 

[Berzerker]

'New cases of polio linked to the oral vaccine have been reported in four African countries and more children are now being paralysed by vaccine-derived viruses than those infected by viruses in the wild, according to global health numbers.'

https://www.theguardian.com/global-...tries-caused-by-mutation-of-strain-in-vaccine

 

[hobbsyoyo]

Been listening to Joe Rogan experience eh? Him and Alex Jones (and one other guy I don't know) spread misinformation about that on a recent podcast. To his credit, Joe apparently did try and fact check the information but ultimately failed and accepted to their narrative unchallenged.

 

[Hrothbern]

TIL that Diana and Artemis had likely predecessor huntresses in the stone age.

There were more women hunters in the Stone Age than previously thought. This is evident from the discovery of a 9,000-year-old tomb on the Peruvian plateau.

Elleke Bal November 4, 2020, 8:00 PM
Men on the hunt with spears and women scurrying around looking for edible plants. The division of labor of hunters and gatherers was undisputed for a long time. But the find of a woman buried on the Peruvian plateau some 9,000 years ago with hunting equipment around her, raises the question of whether women were not much more active in hunting big game than thought. American archaeologists who investigated this tomb link another ten excavations in the American continents to female hunters who apparently did not stand at Stone Age countertops. They will publish their research in the journal Science Advances on Thursday.

On the Peruvian plateaus of the Puno district, archaeologists found the grave of a woman who lived to be 17 to 19 years old. Near her thigh lay some twenty tools such as stone arrowheads, a knife, choppers and materials for skinning hides — everything you needed to kill and chop an animal. She was also surrounded by bones of deer-like animals. In one of five other graves at the same site, of a 25- to 30-year-old man, were similar materials.

No exception
Archaeologists generally accept that arrowheads found in men point to a hunter's grave, write the scientists led by Randall Haas at the University of California at Davis. "But they are less willing to admit this in the case of women." The scientists think it is high time to do so from now on. Could that one woman have been no exception? That is not very likely, say the scientists. They studied 107 other excavation sites from the same period in North and South America. 429 people were found in those graves, 27 of whom were buried with weapons. Among them were 11 women.

The chances of women participating in the hunt in the late Pleistocene and early Holocene were quite high, the archaeologists say. Probably the early hunter-gatherers needed all the help they could get to make a living from the hunt. In addition, children were not necessarily raised by their own parents, so mothers were also free to take up the spear and go out with it.

Ultimately, the hunt would become more masculine again from about 6,000 BC, the researchers conclude. The later weapons such as bows and arrows were more often operated by men, and there were more possibilities for division of tasks. But that female hunters also deserve a place in the history books, that is certain.

https://www.trouw.nl/wetenschap/dez...was-geen-verzamelaar-maar-een-jager~b3997aa1/

Here the original article in Science Advances: https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/6/45/eabd0310

 

[Hrothbern]

Watched a video that turned out to be all in Dutch in the first half. It was kinda unsettling. Not because of the subject matter, which I couldn't really understand, but because the Dutch sounded so similar to English that my brain thought I should be able to understand it even though I couldn't. If a TV were playing a Dutch show and I wasn't watching or listening but just hearing it in the background, I'd probably assume it was English. It's an uncanny valley of language.

Plus, written down it looks like German that's been deliberately misspelled for meme purposes.

The Frisian, Saxon language along the coast of North Belgium, Netherlands to Denmark spoken by people still living in the area from where people invaded the British isles before, during and after Roman era.
Many words although meanwhile written somewhat differently have the same roots.

The similarity of the intonation pattern, the music of a language, plays I think a role here.
When you learn a language as child you learn the music before you fill in the rest in that music structure.
When you learn a second language that music is important again.
The music of English is relatively close to the North Germanic languages like what is now Dutch, Danish.
French has another intonation pattern than English. Just the word intonation is already a good example because in the intonation is done differently. French people breaking their tongue on that know it.
The from French imported word intonation gets the music of English.

 

[EgonSpengler]

TIL (technically, it was last night) that "DeKalb" - as in, DeKalb County, Georgia - is properly pronounced "de cab."

TIL Dominique McElligott, who plays Queen Maeve in The Boys, is Irish. From Dublin. She's also blonde, irl.

 

[aimeeandbeatles]

Today I learned (almost completely by accident) that the Windows 10 calculator has a whole bunch of converters built into it:

 

[Takhisis]

I note King Henry who arranged the meeting survived. Conspiracy theory time.

You have reminded me of Terry Pratchett's surprising fascination with stories about killing people in the bog, preferably with a spear.

 

[aimeeandbeatles]

Today I learned that larch trees are deciduous conifers. They have needles, but lose them in the fall.

 

[Zkribbler]

Disneyland's opening day was a disaster!

 

[The_J]

Today I learned that larch trees are deciduous conifers. They have needles, but lose them in the fall.

I read it as "delicious", and was reading through the wiki article to figure out how they're used for food o_O.

 

[W|M]

conifer nuts are delicious at least