Things I learned while looking up other things, 2025.03.11
Dear friends,
Thanks to an Australian colleague I learned that there is an Australian term for part of a place setting that hasn’t been used (and so can be put away without being washed): sunbeam. Delightful and useful!
Presented without comment: “John Lilly, a neurophysiologist and psychedelic researcher who once used LSD to investigate dolphin communication, famously abused ketamine until he believed that he was contacted by an extraterrestrial entity who removed his penis.” [from The Atlantic]
“People were prohibited from buying or reading The Interpreter [one of the first English law dictionaries] and Cowell’s book is said to have been publicly burnt by the hangman on 26 March 1610.” (Are we still doing hashtags? Yes? Okay, then #DictionaryGoals.)
“The Dinosaur Choir recreates the vocalizations of extinct dinosaurs using CT scans, 3D fabrication, and physically-based modeling synthesis. Musicians produce sound by blowing into a mouthpiece, which drives a computational voice box and resonates through a 3D-printed reconstruction of a dinosaur’s skull and nasal passages.”
“Hockett's Design Features are a set of features that characterize human language and set it apart from animal communication.” They include human-only features such as ‘prevarication’ (lying) and ‘reflexiveness’ (the ability to use language to talk about language).
They really knew how to deliver a cutting burn in the eighteenth century: “He [Ralph Abercromby] took the unusual step of publicly criticising the command of his predecessor, The 2nd Earl of Carhampton, for bequeathing an army "in a state of licentiousness, which must render it formidable to everyone but the enemy".
For more than two years, Elise and Otto Hempel left more than two hundred postcards around Berlin, urging people to “refuse to cooperate with the Nazis, to refrain from donating money, to refuse military service, and to overthrow Hitler”. (Related: a good template you can use [with a free Canva account] to share info and resources with your community.)
Interpol has a Forestry Crime division. (Also, the TLD .int “is considered to have the strictest application policies of all TLDs, as it implies that the holder is a subject of international law.”)
In the category “historical novels I would like to read”, the Chinese diplomat Gan Ying did not complete his mission to reach Daqin (Rome) in 97 CE: he stopped at the seaside because Parthian sailors told him that “the voyage to cross the sea might take a long time and be dangerous”.
Stay well!
Your friend,
Erin