Things you should have known about but until recently, you didn't.

There are 3 "tallest" mountains:

- Everest by altitude at ~8.9km
- Mauna Kea by total height (base to summit) at ~10km
- Mount Chimborazo by distance from the centre of the Earth at ~6,384.4km
 
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Hiijinx said:
Road numbers - the fewer digits, the bigger/busier the road. Eg A1 vs A10

Also, the first digit in the name refers to where the road originates from which usually makes it quite easy to tell where it is. For examples the South east begins with the number 2 (A27, M23, A259, M27,M25 etc)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Britain_road_numbering_scheme
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The major motorways of the UK start north of London and then move in a clockwise direction around London. M1 to Edinburgh, M2 to Dover etc. The M7 was supposed to replace the A7 from Carlisle to Edinburgh but was never built.
 
PardonTheWait said:
I don't think this is anything that anyone should know as such, but I was really interested to find it out.

The word escalate didn't exist until after the invention of the escalator, and that's where the word is from. I found it really interesting that such a widely used word actually came from the machine, not the other way around.
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Ah, but that in itself is from the French escalade, which drives from the Latin scalare "to climb".

I'm curious to know whether the expression esprit d'escalier predates the escalator.

I love etymology (no sarcasm, I really do)
 
Devrij said:
Ah, but that in itself is from the French escalade, which drives from the Latin scalare "to climb".

I'm curious to know whether the expression esprit d'escalier predates the escalator.
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Doesn't that expression mean thinking about the perfect reply but too late.....Or something like that.
 
mattyg said:
Doesn't that expression mean thinking about the perfect reply but too late.....Or something like that.
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Indeed, but it literally means "the spirit of the staircase". The feeling you get when you come up with the perfect retort only upon leaving (apparently nobility always had their party rooms upstairs so to be on the staircase meant you had left, according to a Wikipedia article so pinch of salt on that one)
 
Watched a documentary about the chimp Washoe. Blew my mind!

Was a language experiment to teach great ape species sign language. Psychologists brought her up like a human child socially and never spoke in front of her, just used sign language. She learnt 350 words and did not just imitate but understood and improvised words she did not know through a combination of signs. This was interesting because she mapped real words to her understanding of the object eg. Watermelon was described as 'candy - drink' and swan was described as 'water - bird'.

She asked questions as well as answered them and even went on to teach other chimps some sign. Washoe showed great self awareness and developed real social bonds with the researchers, who were essentially her friends and carers. A very well documented event which shoes this was when one of the researchers had been away for several weeks due to a miscarriage.

One of Washoe's caretakers was pregnant and missed work for many weeks after she miscarried. Roger Fouts recounts the following situation:

'People who should be there for her and aren't are often given the cold shoulder--her way of informing them that she's miffed at them. Washoe greeted Kat [the caretaker] in just this way when she finally returned to work with the chimps. Kat made her apologies to Washoe, then decided to tell her the truth, signing "MY BABY DIED". Washoe stared at her, then looked down. She finally peered into Kat's eyes again and carefully signed "CRY", touching her cheek and drawing her finger down the path a tear would make on a human (Chimpanzees don't shed tears). Kat later remarked that one sign told her more about Washoe and her mental capabilities than all her longer, grammatically perfect sentences.[23]'

Washoe herself lost two children: one baby died shortly after birth of a heart defect, the other baby, Sequoyah, died of a staph infection at two months of age.
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I thought that Washoe wouldn't be able to live with other chimps due to being brought up away from them but she ended up doing so toward the later part of her life and fully integrated herself with them. Some learnt to sign some signs purely just from interactions with her.

I was going to watch 'Nim' the documentary film about the experiment that attempted to bring another chimp up with as much language development but it looks depressing as Nim was treated more as an experiment in a sterile lab all the time, with little social interactions and as a result, did not develop as much.
 
Tannoy is a brand of loudspeaker. Most people refer to a loudspeaker / public address system as a Tannoy

Whenever I hear someone say "put a call out on the Tannoy" I want to crawl up and die
 
EVH said:
Tannoy is a brand of loudspeaker. Most people refer to a loudspeaker / public address system as a Tannoy

Whenever I hear someone say "put a call out on the Tannoy" I want to crawl up and die
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Do you do the same when someone says they are going to hoover up?
 
I found out a few days ago that if you hold control and use the left and right arrow keys you skip to the beginning of the previous and next word.
 
"Things you should have known about but until recently, you didn't."


That the woman that has been sleeping with me the last 20 odd years is the wife. :o
 
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