Today I Learned #3: There's a wiki for everything!

[Arakhor]

I notice that he said "Toron'o", but the children said "Toronto".

 

[PhroX]

I worked (remotely) on a project based in Toronto, and I could swear the locals pronounced it closer to Tronno....

 

[Samson]

When I was there, they taught me is was pronounced more like Tron-uh.

 

[Arakhor]

Because why have a name if you can't swallow half of it, eh?

 

[Kyriakos]

Interesting.

 

[Samson]

TIL more democrats live in bubbles than republicans (quite hard firewalled for me):

 

[r16]

only one guy in the echo chamber today , "disclosing" Bill has failed in a couple of things and there will be retribution and her divorce will protect a lot of assets .

 

[Valka D'Ur]

I notice that he said "Toron'o", but the children said "Toronto".

Because why have a name if you can't swallow half of it, eh?

There are many dialects and accents in Canada. Stompin' Tom Connors is probably the only musician whose boot is listed as one of his instruments. The other two are listed as voice and guitar. I wonder if maybe Wikipedia shouldn't have listed his stompin' board instead, but when he started out, he stomped on the floor. He only started using a board when there were complaints that he'd damaged the floor.

 

[EgonSpengler]

TIL more democrats live in bubbles than republicans (quite hard firewalled for me):

Shockingly, I live in a hugely Democratic-leaning neighborhood. According to their tool, only 4% of my neighbors are Republicans.* You don't have to go far to find "purple" neighborhoods and towns, though.

That map of Ohio's 11th district is just insane. I swear, this country could look so much different if this absurd gerrymandering were eliminated. But I doubt we'll ever know.


* Questions, questions... How are they sorting people by party? People who are registered with a party? If so, how do independents and "undeclareds" factor in? Vote distribution in an election? If so, which election?

 

[Samson]

Shockingly, I live in a hugely Democratic-leaning neighborhood. According to their tool, only 4% of my neighbors are Republicans.* You don't have to go far to find "purple" neighborhoods and towns, though.

That map of Ohio's 11th district is just insane. I swear, this country could look so much different if this absurd gerrymandering were eliminated. But I doubt we'll ever know.


* Questions, questions... How are they sorting people by party? People who are registered with a party? If so, how do independents and "undeclareds" factor in? Vote distribution in an election? If so, which election?

The paper they reference is paywalled, and sci hub is fairly well blocked here so I cannot look. From the abstract:

we measure individual partisan segregation by calculating the local residential segregation of every registered voter in the United States, creating a spatially weighted measure for more than 180 million individuals.
​

I guess that means registered as on or the other party. I have ranted about that before, I do not understand why anyone would want to make their political allegiance as public as that, it cannot be a representative sample. In particular, people who live in "bubbles" of the opposite allegiance would be expected to be less likely to register their true allegiance.

 

[Lemon Merchant]

You've lived here how many decades, not to know how to pronounce the capital of Saskatchewan?

Who the hell thinks of Saskatchewan for heaven's sake? It's like Lichtenstein, it never enters your mind. I've never been there, nor do I think that I want to go. The only reason I even know about Regina's existence is that I would fly over it from time to time, and I had never heard it pronounced until the other day when someone corrected me. The only other city I know from Saskatchewan (which I actually had to look up to make sure I spelled the provincial name right) is Saskatoon, and that is only because it is the same name as an edible currant or berry or something that people around Red Deer rave about. I have obviously never tried one. But then, I have never tried poutine either, so I can't call myself a good Canadian, I guess.

The only interesting thing I found out about Saskatchewan was that it is so flat, you can watch your dog run away for three days. I suspect that is humour. The curvature of the Earth being what it is...

I probably can't pronounce Iqaluit properly either. I guess that makes me a really bad person, no? I guess if I just cared more about minutiae, my life might be more full and rewarding, but since right now I'm trying to keep people alive (despite themselves at times), I'll have to leave that excitement behind for a while.

 

[Ajidica]

Who the hell thinks of Saskatchewan for heaven's sake?

I always thought Saskatchewan was pronounced "Middle of Nowhere", or perhaps "Absolutely No Reason to Visit".

 

[Valka D'Ur]

Who the hell thinks of Saskatchewan for heaven's sake? It's like Lichtenstein, it never enters your mind. I've never been there, nor do I think that I want to go. The only reason I even know about Regina's existence is that I would fly over it from time to time, and I had never heard it pronounced until the other day when someone corrected me. The only other city I know from Saskatchewan (which I actually had to look up to make sure I spelled the provincial name right) is Saskatoon, and that is only because it is the same name as an edible currant or berry or something that people around Red Deer rave about. I have obviously never tried one. But then, I have never tried poutine either, so I can't call myself a good Canadian, I guess.

The only interesting thing I found out about Saskatchewan was that it is so flat, you can watch your dog run away for three days. I suspect that is humour. The curvature of the Earth being what it is...

I probably can't pronounce Iqaluit properly either. I guess that makes me a really bad person, no? I guess if I just cared more about minutiae, my life might be more full and rewarding, but since right now I'm trying to keep people alive (despite themselves at times), I'll have to leave that excitement behind for a while.

Oh, for...

Okay, I don't speak Gaelic. All I know of Irish accents is what I hear when I watch or listen to the Irish Rovers, or the time when I met and spoke to them after a concert here. If I ever visited Ireland there are many things I would not know. If I decided to live there, I would make the effort to learn (as one of my nursing student clients ended up doing, back in the '90s; she's one that I had for the four-year program here, and she came over to tell me about her decision and say goodbye).

I don't pronounce "Iqaluit" with the same accent as a native Inuktitut speaker would. But I can pronounce it with a generic Canadian accent (and don't have to look it up to know how to spell it, at least in English).

I've never been to Saskatchewan, either. Saskatoon pie is one of the best kinds of pie on the planet (my other favorites are blueberry and key lime), and we had our own saskatoon bushes in two of the places I've lived in. It's a shame you never tried it. It's delicious.

Yes, it's humor that Saskatchewan is so flat you can watch anything receding from you for three days. They do have hills there, but not foothills or mountains like we have. There's a reason it's called a "prairie province."

I guess we're both bad Canadians. I'm not into poutine, either. Never tried it, because it looks and smells revolting.

As for minutiae... you brought it up. I just expressed surprise that anyone would not know one of the basic geography-related facts that any schoolkid here would know, and that anyone who's lived in Western Canada for any reasonable length of time would not have heard.

I always thought Saskatchewan was pronounced "Middle of Nowhere", or perhaps "Absolutely No Reason to Visit".

I almost went there once. Way back when I was still active in the SCA, there was an event that Marion Zimmer Bradley was scheduled to attend, and our branch was excited at the thought of meeting the person who basically created that organization (with the help of some fellow SF/F authors) back in 1966. But it turned out that she was unable to attend due to illness, so we didn't go.

The SCA branches in Saskatchewan used to be part of the Kingdom of the Middle. But because they were so far away from the nearest American branch, they applied to join our kingdom (at that time we were part of An Tir - Oregon, Washington, part of Idaho, BC, Alberta, and the Territories).

Anyone who finds "Regina" too hard should try the SCA name for the branch there: The Shire of Sigelhundas.


Fun fact touted by the new K-12 draft curriculum here (a curriculum designed by a bunch of right-wing faith-based people who are not only not teachers, but not even Canadian): Regina - the capital of Saskatchewan - can be found on a map of Alberta. And one of the exercises kids are supposed to do in their social studies assignments is locate gravity on a globe. Apparently gravity isn't something we all have. Who knew?

 

[Samson]

Spidervirus, Spidervirus!
Does whatever a spider can.

A virus has pinched genes from a spider and uses them to infect bacteria.

Spoiler How it could have happened :

(a) The eukaryotic cell can harbour multiple microbes capable of horizontal gene transfer. Genetic transfers between eukaryotes and bacteriophages can, in theory, occur (b) directly between eukaryotic chromosomes and phage genomes; (c) indirectly between eukaryotic and Wolbachia chromosomes; or (d) indirectly between eukaryotic chromosomes and intermediary entities, such as eukaryotic viruses and other intracellular bacteria.

Completely unrelated, the Pitcairn Islands were the first democracy to have female suffrage in 1838:

Captain Elliott’s feeling was to ‘least involve my own government’, and the best way to achieve this was to prescribe self-government for the islanders. He therefore said the island was to be governed by a magistrate

‘to be elected by the free votes of every native born on the island, male or female, who shall have attained the age of eighteen years; or, of persons who have resided five years on the island.’​

 

[Samson]

The earliest largest-scale ritual landscape anywhere in the world is in Saudi Arabia

A vast site in north-west Saudi Arabia is home to 1000 structures that date back more than 7000 years, making them older than the Egyptian pyramids and Stonehenge in the UK.

Made from piled-up blocks of sandstone, some of which weighed more than 500 kilograms, mustatils ranged from 20 metres to more than 600 metres in length, but their walls stood only 1.2 metres high. “It’s not designed to keep anything in, but to demarcate the space that is clearly an area that needs to be isolated,” says Thomas.
​

Paper New Scientist

Spoiler More pics :

 

[Birdjaguar]

TIL that finding the Titanic was not what it seemed.

https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/robert-ballard-man-who-found-the-titanic-cmd/index.html

...But there was the small matter of raising the funding required to support such a costly and significant expedition. Only in recent years has Ballard been able to be completely honest about the now-declassified events that led to his discovery of the infamous wreck. The expedition was part of a secret US military mission to recover two wrecked nuclear submarines, the Thresher and Scorpion, which had sunk to the bottom of the North Atlantic Ocean.

Before agreeing to the mission, which was signed off by then US President Ronald Reagan, he asked if he could search for Titanic when he'd completed the top secret task. While he was never explicitly given permission to look for the infamous wreck, Ballard says he was told he could pretty much do what he wanted once he'd found the nuclear submarines. "I must say, it was hard for me because I couldn't tell the truth for many, many, many years about who really paid for this," he admits.
"It was a top secret mission I was on in the height of the Cold War. We were duking it out with the Soviet Union and this [the Titanic search] was a cover."

After completing the assignment with 12 days to spare, Ballard and his team set out in search for Titanic on Argo, a deep-sea vehicle with a remote-controlled camera that transmitted live images from the bottom of the sea to a control room on Knorr, the towing research vessel they were on board. On September 1, 1985, they realized they'd located debris from the sunken ship that hit an iceberg off the coast of Newfoundland during its maiden voyage.

 

[Berzerker]

https://www.baseball-reference.com/players/m/mayswi01.shtml

The Say Hey Kid turns 90 today. I got to watch him as a kid when his career was on the decline before he left the Giants.

 

[Lemon Merchant]

Oh, for...

What??

Okay, I don't speak Gaelic.

It's not about speaking Gaeilge. Regina is an English name. Just ask the Queen.

 

[Farm Boy]

guess that means registered as on or the other party. I have ranted about that before, I do not understand why anyone would want to make their political allegiance as public as that, it cannot be a representative sample. In particular, people who live in "bubbles" of the opposite allegiance would be expected to be less likely to register their true allegiance.

Primary voting.

Good chart.

 

[Samson]

Primary voting.

Good chart.

So when they say "Primary voting is registered voters", that means "You can only vote in the Primary if you are prepared to tell the whole world which party you support"? That sounds completely broken. You know in this country big aristocratic landlords would get their tenants to write their name on their ballots so they could check they voted for them? That is why we have strict laws such as you are not allowed to take a selfie in the polling booth, to stop that kind of thing. I am a bit surprised you did not inherit that with the rest of the system.