Things you were shockingly old when you learned

Eheh, I4ve just "measured" VERY roughly with a tape measure on a map and Spain's Atlantic coastline IS longer than Portugal's !

(my method may make a geographer want to die, though)

Joke for science nerds:

In the name Benoit B. Mandelbrot, what does the 'B' stand for?

Benoit B. Mandelbrot

Xp
Is some of it technically in the Bay of Biscay or something like that?

Oh it's the old mercantor projecter thingy again.

mercantor projecter

Let's call the whole thing off.

Wait, the Bay of Biscay IS part of the Atlantic !
So after checking some figures : the total coastline of Spain is 4872km with 2058km on the Mediterranean which leaves 2814km on the Atlantic.
Portugal's coastline is 1793km.
So Spain's Atlantic coastline is more than 1000km longer than Portugal's !

Xp
I'm on my phone rn!

Well glad this Portuguese guy's musings on the differentiation between national characteristics of 2 neighbouring countries thanks to the heat of the water in their relevant seas has kept you going for so long.

Was only one of a number of revelations that I heard last night . Went to a geeky science competition thing so there were another number of things related to that. He was just an audience member at the reception afterwards.

portugal is fractally wigglier than spain, the clue is in the name

vessels abandoned at sea can be left that way, cf the vessel washed up off cork last week

the can theoretically be claimed (scrap value would conservatively be a million on the one in question) but the local registering authority must be informed and (irish jurisdiction at least) will then seek owners and allow a year and a day, which youd presume would almost certainly turn something up.

once abandoned they go 'dark', no signal, no traceability. there's not, to the expert with whom i conversed's knowledge (dmac sr) any real record of what is floating around the atlantic waiting for you to crash into, hence even today two men on overnight eyeball watch is the standard practice on any of his boats (not sure whether there's an official protocol tbh)

two pleasing if scary mid-ocean thing that have gone from "old salt's tall tale" to "very scientifically real threat" since my boyhood have been
i: the rogue wave
ii: the giant squid

by contrast sadly diminished: the Sargasso Sea!!

lol @ me on that same thread, unchanged since records began:

luckily there are still FREAK WAVES and GIANT SQUIDS!!!!

― mark s, Saturday, 3 September 2011 17:45 (eight years ago) bookmarkflaglink

Another thing I don't remember hearing directly before is that Guiness won't supply bars with barrels unless they also take the glasses for the pints. the bar the reception was in apparently has a manger that doesn't like having labels and logos very visible.
I had wondered why a tap simply said Rotating Craft Beer (possibly Ale) instead of having some tage related to which one it was.
Initially thought it was a brand title but doh, no it is a different type each barrel. Had a nice bitter stout yesterday.

& now wondering if that is a way that a certain clientele drinks its craft beer, no loyalty to brand but pot luck on which type it's going to get. & the novelty is the novelty?

Had previously thought that different glasses which seem to have been proliferating recently were a promotional thing that had its own impetus where people actually wanted to get their pint in whichever glass, possibly for the novelty.
& every brand seems to have its own glasses these days.

Eheh, yeah I don't know why this question which I had NEVER thought about (although going to Spain and Portugal regularly) was suddenly so exciting...
Well, at least, I know the answer now which is basically the idea of this thread !

And to be fair it didn't take me that long... around 10 min (with a lunch break in-between) !

massive thread side-eye from mandelbrot's unquiet shade

Today's ironic development, just came from a talk on Aquaculture given by somebody from Marine Science dept in GMIT. One of his office mates is the Portuguese guy I was talking about 2 days ago. So this guy who was talking about relative heat of seas works in Marine Science. Thought it was just an observation made by someone in another field.

He's no geographer, that's for sure !

So apparently it's Dan Aykroyd, not Dan Ackroyd

https://mirabiledictudotorg1.files.wordpress.com/2019/02/cathy-ack.jpg

You oughta know by now.

Lolololol

Anthony Perkins's wife Berry (who was also Marisa Berenson's sister) died on 9/11 on American Airlines Flight 11.

He led an interesting life.

Perkins reportedly had his first heterosexual experience at age 39 with actress Victoria Principal

aka Victorian Principles

that the accent in "telepathy" is on the 3rd syllable, not the second

#wordsyoureadinbooks

i've absolutely heard both out loud tho?

I’ve only ever heard the second, source?

and prob 90% of the time, i hear it on the 2nd, and also, everywhere i have now checked online is also 2nd lol i am confused

(xp)

accent on path in telepath, accent on lep in telepathy <-- how I break it down to an extent

sorry I meant "telepathic" not "telepathy"

I was just informed of this by a coworker, so grain of salt etc.

oh yeah it's def telePATHic

sleeve had you been saying/thinking te-LEH-puth-ick?

there is no wrong way to say anything if you can reasonably be understood and anyone who wont take a step towards you in such instances should be beaten and hung imo this is how we start to heal the wounds of the world

agreed in all cases except for ppl saying hung instead of hanged

Unlucky men are hanged, lucky men are hung.

Drag em hadrian

i can accept this

My embarrassing geography-related example is that Denmark isn't, and has never been, an island. I can't even really remember why I thought it.

Could be because a large part of its landmass consists of islands, where the majority of Danes live, and the capital is on one of those islands too.

Yes.

Irish presence in the Roman army, under the category atecotti. Apparently 3 units in the armies of each of the 2 major parts of the Roman Empire the East and the West.
I was at a lecture by a guest speaker done for the local university's Classics dept. Th espeaker was suggesting also that the ogham alphabet seemed to be devised with an order that suggested familiarity with the latin alphabet. He went on to say that this was probably someone who had been in the Roman Army. I don't have all of his evidence and workings but this does sound like something worth looking further into.

I have taken a couple of classes in Irish recently and noted how far from phonetic the use of letters in spelling appears to be. I would have thought that if you were going to borrow a way of representing sounds as letters you would at least attempt to stick to what those letters denoted in the language you were taking them from. There has been several hundred, or close to 2 thousand years for things to drift away from their original values but still seems to be a major element of non correlation. Also viewing things from a knowledge of English is possibly a distorting mirror in itself.
Anyway I was just sitting there in the class going how am I ever going to learn to spell phonetically. & maybe that isn't the way you spell in the language. Which is even more confusing.
I had wondered at what point the alphabet had been borrowed and what was in use before hand. I was aware taht the monks in the West coast here had been among the most learned scholars on Latin and Greek in the 8th century from a History module that I did at the University 20 years ago.

The speaker was also saying that it was likely that there were a bunch of people permanently located on Irish soil or whatever it was called at the time. He said there were 2 locations on the East Coast where it was likely there were people placed to trade for commodities with the locals which would then be shipped back to Roman occupied Britain.

I missed the very beginning of the talk but i think he was saying that faced with the amount of cost it would take to invade Ireland and then keep an occupying force there was prohibitive. & it was probably better to try to trade with them.

He also had a suggested etymological source for the word Scotti in a gaelic word meaning broken or exiled or something similar describing groups of people who had been exiled for various reasons from their home tribes in Ireland to places in the West coast of what is now the UK. & that that terminology was later extended to the peoples they were exiled from in what is now Ireland.
There was also the other term for a population of this Island in that word atecotti or its myriad alternative spelllings

the existence of “millennial pink”

^ underrated Tori Amos album

For a long time I thought that the band name Kraftwerk was a playful spelling of "craftwork" rather than an actual German word.

It means Power Plant doesn't it?
Which might be kind of antithetical to what one's first assumption as a different language speaker would be.

I have never to this day considered that the game Scrabble is named for clutching at the letter tiles when you grab them from the unused pool.