Fun Fact Thread! (previously fun fact for the day, not limited to 1 per day anymore.)

[DDE]

6 hours ago, kerbiloid said:

If anybody had heard about this daughter before the scandal with her escape to the West after the father had gone.

His inner circle apparently had. There was a whole bunch of young Svetlanas there all of a sudden.

[kerbiloid]

1 hour ago, DDE said:

His inner circle apparently had. There was a whole bunch of young Svetlanas there all of a sudden.

https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Светлана#Антропонимический_взрыв_1920-х_годов

Anthroponymic explosion of 1920s.

Briefly: after the religiously limited set of names, in 1920s there was a mass trend to give non-religious names to children, taken from various sources, like literature, movies, and just constructed.

The woman above was named not after herself.
Probably, some of the 1925 movies was enough popular to cause a chain reaction of Svetlanas from top to bottom.

P.S.
But the progress didn't stop on that.

Spoiler

The music group, having created the "Steps of Shoigu" hit.

https://www.youtube.com/@OTYKEN/videos

Notice the girl in the middle name on the top picture, "Цвета / Tsveta".

https://otyken.ru/

Edited May 25 by kerbiloid

[Codraroll]

So Svetlana is the 1920's Russia version of Daenerys?

That name has always sunded a bit funny in Norwegian, because "Svett" means "Sweaty", so anybody introducing themselves as "Svetlana" would immediately bring to mind a perspirating woman named Lana.

[kerbiloid]

24 minutes ago, Codraroll said:

That name has always sunded a bit funny in Norwegian, because "Svett" means "Sweaty", so anybody introducing themselves as "Svetlana" would immediately bring to mind a perspirating woman named Lana.

You even don't know, how funny sounds Svenja in Russian.

[Codraroll]

1 hour ago, kerbiloid said:

You even don't know, how funny sounds Svenja in Russian.

There are definitely a lot of names out there that sound innocuous in their native language, but turn out to be a nasty word or even a slur in foreign languages. After all, a rule of thumb of emytology is that the shortest words in a language have been around for a long time, there are very many languages, and there are only so many sounds to combine short words from, so by necessity, some of the words that describe names in one language describe ... other things in other languages.

Examples of common Norwegian names that sound bad in English include:

• Bård (pronounced like "bored")
• Simen (pronounced like "semen")
• Odd (and due to the quirks of language, it is fully possible to be named Odd Person)
• Line (not a nasty word, but foreigners will pronounce it like in English, which is nowhere close to the Norwegian pronounciation)
• Asmund (names that begin with the prefix "ass-" tend not to work well overseas)

Additionally, due to wildly differing dialects in Norway, there are names that used to work well in one part of the country but turned out rather ... unlucky in others. The name "Bergsvend", which literally translates to "mining apprentice", was common around the Røros area, but less common nowadays as it is pronounced exactly like "Poop friend" in the Oslo dialect. Likewise, the name "Analius" (I really wonder if that will make it through the forum censorship) dropped drastically in usage once people began to realise what those first four letters mean.

I also knew a girl of Vietnamese descent who had her last name changed from "Do" to "Då" (same pronounciation), because "Do" means "toilet" in Norwegian.

[magnemoe]

53 minutes ago, Codraroll said:

There are definitely a lot of names out there that sound innocuous in their native language, but turn out to be a nasty word or even a slur in foreign languages. After all, a rule of thumb of emytology is that the shortest words in a language have been around for a long time, there are very many languages, and there are only so many sounds to combine short words from, so by necessity, some of the words that describe names in one language describe ... other things in other languages.

Examples of common Norwegian names that sound bad in English include:

• Bård (pronounced like "bored")
• Simen (pronounced like "semen")
• Odd (and due to the quirks of language, it is fully possible to be named Odd Person)
• Line (not a nasty word, but foreigners will pronounce it like in English, which is nowhere close to the Norwegian pronounciation)
• Asmund (names that begin with the prefix "ass-" tend not to work well overseas)

Additionally, due to wildly differing dialects in Norway, there are names that used to work well in one part of the country but turned out rather ... unlucky in others. The name "Bergsvend", which literally translates to "mining apprentice", was common around the Røros area, but less common nowadays as it is pronounced exactly like "Poop friend" in the Oslo dialect. Likewise, the name "Analius" (I really wonder if that will make it through the forum censorship) dropped drastically in usage once people began to realise what those first four letters mean.

I also knew a girl of Vietnamese descent who had her last name changed from "Do" to "Då" (same pronounciation), because "Do" means "toilet" in Norwegian.

As an Norwegian I agree about these, and Analius was not uncommon 100 years ago. 
Just having æøå in your name was an hassle, probably less now today with unicode. 

You still have stuff who translates poorly, either to bad worlds or to negative words like slow or unreliable. 

And dialects, my favorite one was visiting the mountainous  areas of central Norway there my mother had an friend. Serving some meatballs and I was asked if I wanted apples, I said I take them after the meal. 
But in their dialect apple was potato and sweet apple was apple. Literally translated. 

[kerbiloid]

4 hours ago, magnemoe said:

apple was potato and sweet apple was apple

That's rather strange, as the apples definitely were familiar long before the potato.

In XIX cent. Russia one of then-new potato nickname was "devil's apple".

Makes to find the center of symmetry.

[magnemoe]

4 hours ago, kerbiloid said:

That's rather strange, as the apples definitely were familiar long before the potato.

In XIX cent. Russia one of then-new potato nickname was "devil's apple".

Makes to find the center of symmetry.

Agree, its weird. and its not like potatoes is new either. 

[kerbiloid]

7 hours ago, magnemoe said:

Agree, its weird. and its not like potatoes is new either. 

How were the apples called in the Scandinavian sagas? Iirc, Idunn had some.

I can remember the einheries eating fried pork, but can't recall the potato garnish (much better than just pork).

P.S.
Found three articles, but can't realize which word is "apple".

https://no.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idunn

https://nn.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gudinna_Idunn

https://is.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iðunn_(norræn_goðafræði)

P.P.S.
Maybe it was a kenning?

"Apple" = "an Idunn's golden potato"

Edited May 26 by kerbiloid

[magnemoe]

22 minutes ago, kerbiloid said:

How were the apples called in the Scandinavian sagas? Iirc, Idunn had some.

I can remember the einheries eating fried pork, but can't recall the potato garnish (much better than just pork).

P.S.
Found three articles, but can't realize which word is "apple".

https://no.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idunn

https://nn.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gudinna_Idunn

https://is.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iðunn_(norræn_goðafræði)

P.P.S.
Maybe it was a kenning?

"Apple" = "an Idunn's golden potato"

No idea but the viking had apples even found as grave goods. 
Imagine this worked out might be that the attitude an location was not good for apples, pretty close to the tree limit so they only knew them from trade. 
Then you had the priests advocating for potatoes to farmers and they might become know as apples locally., 

[kerbiloid]

Just now, magnemoe said:

No idea but the viking had apples even found as grave goods. 
Imagine this worked out might be that the attitude an location was not good for apples, pretty close to the tree limit so they only knew them from trade. 
Then you had the priests advocating for potatoes to farmers and they might become know as apples locally., 

Yes, I mean something other.

If the potatoes were more familiar than apples to the date of the sagas' codification, it could mean that the sagas (perfectly written by experienced writers, not by a known Icelandic farmer) were written after XV cent, in XVII or even later, up to XIX.

Like it sems to other ancient/medieval epics.

So, an "Idunn's golden potatoes" kenning would be a thing.

Just the poet didn't realize in time.

[Codraroll]

3 hours ago, magnemoe said:

No idea but the viking had apples even found as grave goods. 
Imagine this worked out might be that the attitude an location was not good for apples, pretty close to the tree limit so they only knew them from trade. 
Then you had the priests advocating for potatoes to farmers and they might become know as apples locally., 

Apples were definitely a thing in Scandinavia even back then. Might have been a bit more exotic and fancy than today, but unheard of.

But potatoes were indeed "marketed" to farmers as "Earth apples" back when they were introduced.

[JoeSchmuckatelli]

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0921818122002466

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/11035897.2022.2086290

 

23 hours ago, Codraroll said:

Apples were definitely a thing in Scandinavia even back then. Might have been a bit more exotic and fancy than today, but unheard of

Trees in Scandinavia are kind of interesting.  At one time, birch and oak forests were present (early Holocene, 1.5 - 2 deg. Celsius higher than present) 

Apples during Roman warm / Medieval warm likely - but during the 500s(LAIA)?  Probably imported by the Rus via river trade through central Europe. 

Potatoes?  Aside from Chocolat, probably the best part of the Columbian exchange!  (Especially fried in tallow with plenty of salt added!) 

[darthgently]

When I was a teen and would-be budding artist in the 70s I was fascinated with Plato's geometric solids, especially the dodecahedron.  How 2D 5-gons perfectly fit to make a 3D dodecahedron still satisfies something very deep in my brain, it is so freaking elegant.

Needless to say the following vid really excited me.  (No Anton, that is not "kind of" a dodecahedron.  It is simply a dodecahedron.  I truly wish he could drop the content free filler words).

It also occurred to me how can we place so much confidence in climate models when we didn't even know about the massively influential carbon fixation  of these until so recently?  Look at these things!  How did we not see them before?  How much do we still not know?  More humility may behoove us.  Smugness in science has never faired well historically

Edited May 29 by darthgently

[kerbiloid]

The lunar outpost of Project Horizon (1959) was populated by crew of 12, but equipped with 4 nuclear reactors (2 x 40 kW, 10 kW, 5 kW).

The atom was never as comfy as then.

[darthgently]

Today I learned that Johanne Kepler really did (overdid?) his due diligence trying to make Tycho Brahe's tuning of Ptolemy's epicycle model of planetary motion work. He didn't find prior art easy to let go of and breezed past momentary considerations of the ellipse a few times in his research as being too obvious to have gone undiscovered by others. This is a good example where the best part is no part (in this case the epicycle mechanism).  

Still, it is a special moment to appreciate the mathematical and cultural elegance of Kepler's tweaked interim epicycle model that described an ellipse perfectly

 

 

Edited June 4 by darthgently

[DDE]

The ultimately unnamed hospital in Khovrino, Moscow was built starting 1980, but outfitting began to slow down in 1985 and ground to a halt in 1992. As it turned out, the brutalist monstrosity was built on poorly-drained swampy soil and was rather quickly sinking into it.

Fans of the Resident Evil games successfully christened it the Khovrino Umbrella. Until knocked down by the long-abovementioned CrushMash demolition company in 2018, it was quite the magnet for trouble, with two confirmed murders, one suicide, at least one accidental death, plus up to hundreds of lesser injuries per month due to all sorts of adventure seekers, as well as a rumored battle between the police and a Satanist ring.

[JoeSchmuckatelli]

4 minutes ago, DDE said:

a rumored battle between the police and a Satanist ring

Elevator pitch for the next Steven Segal movie? 

[DDE]

40 minutes ago, JoeSchmuckatelli said:

Elevator pitch for the next Steven Segal movie? 

Too soon. At least one human sacrifice case on the books, plus a strong foreign policy element - the second-in-command of a certain "opposition" unit based in [neighboring country name redacted] was the leader of the Temple of the Black Sun, Moscow's chapter of the Order of the Nine Angles.

[JoeSchmuckatelli]

@DDE

Reminded me of the saying that writing fiction is hard because it has to make sense - where real life is not similarly constrained 

[kerbiloid]

4 hours ago, DDE said:

Fans of the Resident Evil games successfully christened it the Khovrino Umbrella

It's not Resident Evil's Umbrella.

It's Ultraviolet, 2006

Spoiler

But yes, still with Milla and a virus pandemy.

***

Plot change, scenery replacement.

3 hours ago, DDE said:

Temple of the Black Sun, Moscow's chapter of the Order of the Nine Angles.

Happily, not Ordo Templi Orientis.

Edited June 7 by kerbiloid

[DDE]

85 million years ago separate the "canon" Stegosaurus from the T-Rex.

67 million years separate the T-Rex from unicycles.

It's less anachronistic to depict a T-Rex fighting a Stegosaurus than to depict a T-Rex on a unicycle.

Spoiler

 

[JoeSchmuckatelli]

1 hour ago, DDE said:

less anachronistic

Interesting timing. 

The Civ 7 teaser just dropped, which got me thinking about how annoying I find the end game of Civ.  I mean, you spend so much time trying to get a spearman and an archer across the map that by the time you do they have musketeers and a minute later you are putting stealth fighters on the map. 

And yet the truth is that 100 years ago many nations still had horse mounted cavalry. 

 

Spoiler

In the interwar period many cavalry units were converted into motorized infantry and mechanized infantry units, or reformed as tank troops. The cavalry tank or cruiser tank was one designed with a speed and purpose beyond that of infantry tanks and would subsequently develop into the main battle tank. Nonetheless, some cavalry still served during World War II (notably in the Red Army, the Mongolian People's Army, the Royal Italian Army, the Royal Hungarian Army, the Romanian Army, the Polish Land Forces, and German light reconnaissance units within the Waffen SS).

 

The pace of change in the last 400 years looks like the hockey stick graph. 

Ofc - to your point - if we simply graphed tool use over time the last 2 million years does, too. 

 

 

[Beamer]

Cleopatra was born closer in time to the moon landings than to the building of the Great Pyramid.

[magnemoe]

On 6/9/2024 at 3:26 PM, DDE said:

85 million years ago separate the "canon" Stegosaurus from the T-Rex.

67 million years separate the T-Rex from unicycles.

It's less anachronistic to depict a T-Rex fighting a Stegosaurus than to depict a T-Rex on a unicycle.

  Reveal hidden contents

 

Yes, like Cleopatra lived closer to our time than the construction of the pyramids. 
Now the last two centuries has been crazy. HMS Warrior was launched in 1860 and marked the start of armored iron warships, Dreadnought launches in 1906, 46 years later less than 46 years after that the age of the big gun ships was over. Yes they was around, the US kept the Iowa's until past 2000 but no new was build. 
Much the same with flight, less than 50 years from first flight to supersonic, but all growth is an S curve except it don't go back but you start slow, get massive capabilities and growth then its slows down because its harder to carry on, increasing difficulty takes time and increased cost order of magnitude couple with reduced demand as existing product is good enough.