Things I learned while looking up other things, 2025.07.11
Dear friends,
Usually I try to write these over a few days, or at least early in the morning when there's a light fizz of caffeine burbling through the old synapses and I am (yet again) optimistically overplanning the number of things I can accomplish in a day. But here we are well after 8 pm PT! Reader discretion is advised.
One of the things I didn't do today (it wasn't on my to-do list) was test the criticality of a plutonium core while holding the spheres apart with a screwdriver; something Louis Slotin did in 1946. The screwdriver slipped; there was a "flash of hard radiation", and Slotin died nine days later of radiation poisoning. Slotin was supposedly the person who proposed using the word dollar for "the interval of reactivity between delayed and prompt criticality ... Stable nuclear reactors operate between 0 and a dollar; excursions and nuclear explosives operate above a dollar." (Wikipedia)
Silent agitators are stickers used by the IWW to encourage workers to join. If you work for a wage and do not have the power to hire or fire (and you're not a cop or a landlord) you too could join the IWW.
The French version of the name "Tiffany" is "Tiphaine", which is superior to the English spelling in just about every way. One Tiphaine of history was the wife of Bertrand du Guesclin. She, evidently, was "able to predict to her husband his lucky and unlucky days". He is supposedly the origin of the phrase that is the Spanish version of "I was only following orders": Ni quito ni pongo rey, pero ayudo a mi señor. (I don't read Spanish and had to rely on machine translation to look into that; it also appears in Don Quixote. Corrections from people who actually do speak Spanish welcome!)
The guy who wrote The Blue Lagoon (Henry de Vere Stacpoole) founded the Penguin Club, which was "dedicated to protecting seabirds from the harmful effects of oil".
A rare account of a sniglet breaking containment.
A phrenonym is "a moral quality taken as a proper name".
The comic book character Herbie Popnecker can "carry on detailed conversations with animals and sometimes even inanimate objects (who all know him by name), quickly reach any location (including other galaxies) by walking through the sky, become invisible, cast spells, summon spirits from other dimensions, quickly dispatch all enemies with ease, and travel through time."
Stay well!
Your friend,
Erin