Status-Q

[Original Link] Light relief in the run-up to the US Election.

Here’s something that’s been bothering me, and no doubt has kept you awake at night as well…

Take a look at the word for ‘hot’ in many European languages: chaud in French, caldo in Italian, calido in Spanish, calidus in Latin. So how did we end up with the word cold which means exactly the opposite?

Well, the answer, of course, is that our words for hot and cold have Germanic rather than Latin roots. Our cold is like the German kalt and the Norwegian kulde, but I can’t help feeling this must have caused confusion throughout history. Interestingly, the Germanic word apparently derives from the Latin as well, but the Latin for frost, gelu.

So now you know.

[Original Link] John Udell has some more interesting reasons for using
Mozilla/Firefox.  (Interesting, that is, if you’re an
XML/Javascript enthusiast.)

Blogs are wonderful things. John read mine, saw my posting saying how I bemoaned the absence of my old Sinclair Z88, and fished an old one out of a cupboard and gave it to me.

I can now take a photo of it using a digital camera, which I’d never seen when I owned my last one, and post it on the web, which I’d also never seen.

It seems funny now to think that I typed tens of thousands of words on one of these, including my final-year undergraduate dissertation in Computer Science, and yet never typed ‘www’, ‘.com’, or ‘.org’…

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The wonders of one-way mirrors. This rather interesting photo has been doing the rounds – nobody seems to know quite where it’s from…

[Original Link] We have a new website at Newnham Research, so you can now find out a bit more about what we’re doing.

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Good to see that Clive Sinclair’s still going strong. I want one of these things! (So, I should think, would my father, who has ankle problems and is unable to walk very far, but uses a folding bike almost like a wheelchair.)

The last Sinclair product I owned was a Z88 – a wonderful machine:

I have often wished I had kept it, so I’m intrigued to see that there’s
an organisation still selling them! I might be tempted…

There are also quite a few Sinclair C5s on eBay if anyone’s feeling tempted…

A friend sent me this:

While sitting at your desk, lift your right foot off the floor and make clockwise circles. Now, while doing this, draw the number “6” in the air with your right hand. Your foot will change direction and there’s nothing you can do about it.

Thought for the day:

Ikea is to B&Q or Home Depot as Lego is to Meccano

Oh, and talking of Troy, what’s this pronunciation of Menelaus as ‘Mennalouse’? Is it a Hollywood fad, or is it what they teach in schools now as well? I’m still recovering from the loss of Boadicea…