Miscellanea, mostly etymologies and meanings of words. 3/17 A Radiosonde is an atmospheric instrument carried by balloon which transmits measurements by radio; an SDR is a software defined radio. https://blinry.org/50-things-with-sdr/ 4/7 The name of Liszt's Années de pèlerinage II, "Au lac de Wallenstadt", derives I think from Lake Walen in Walenstadt, Switzerland, from the Proto-Germanic root walhaz. https://www.vaguelyinteresting.co.uk/strangers-in-their-own-land/ Matutinal, meaning pertaining to the (early) morning, from the Latin Mātūta, goddess of the morning, and māne, morning. Webster's describes a byway as a secluded, private, or obscure way; a path or road aside from the main one. He cites George Herbert's poem Perirrhanterium; a perirrhanterion was an ancient holy water pool. 4/13 Greek phoînix from Egyptian boinu "grey heron", for its morning flight and yearly migration. Early instances: Hesiod's Precepts of Chiron (8th c. BC), Herodotus (5th c. BC). Cloisonné is a type of metalwork decoration where material of different colors are connected with gold wire. étincelle (v. étinceler); moelleux, moelle (moe pronounced moi); éblouir, chouchou, chouchouter, lueur (« clarté diffuse ») The comb jelly has eight cilia ("combs"), strands which undulate in the water and propel the jelly along. The light's refractions produce a rainbow effect, although each part of the cilium keeps its same color. Ctenophora, the phylum, is from kteis "comb" + phero "carry". Cilium, eyelid, later eyelash. https://ocean.si.edu/ocean-life/invertebrates/jellyfish-and-comb-jellies Two Oceans pg. 56 Luminescent, iridescent, fluorescent, phosphorescent are from -ēscō verbs, meaning "to become" (-eō stative + -scō inchoative). The nouns lumen "light", iris "rainbow", fluor "flow". 4/14 https://computer.rip/2024-03-09-the-purple-streetscape.html Fluorescence: photons bounce off at a lower frequency. Phosphorescence: photons are absorbed, changing spin states of electrons, and discharged slowly (e.g., glow in the dark). White LEDs can be blue with a phosphor coating that emits red or green. The combination of the blue and red/green creates white, but as the phosphor wears off the color reverts to blue or purple. Also: why LEDs flash/blink. Yod coalescence is how the sequences dy, ty, sy, and zy become dj, tch, sh, and zh. Examples from Wikipedia: nature, soldier, pressure, measure; examples in most dialects include educate, azure, and issue; in others, also due, tune, and resume. Pronunciations on Wiktionary of "been" (p.p. of "be"): "bin" General American, Received Pronunciation (*) "ben" General American, particularly Great Lakes, Midwest "been" Received Pronunciation, US dialectal I think I often say "bn" with syllabic n. https://weepingwitch.github.io/sudoku http://makea.fish/ Modus tollens: modus tollendō tollēns: "the mode where the denying denies". 4/22 The gunwale, gunnel, is the timber at the upper edge of the side of a wooden ship. A "wale" is a thicker plank along the side of a ship which provides integrity; a gunwale is therefore a wale that a gun would rest on above deck. Coxswain, coxon, coxen, cox: the helmsman of a ship. Quay (wharf): "key", "kay", "kway". 4/23 Hebdomadaire is an adjective meaning weekly: contrast the adjectives quotidien, hebdomadaire, mensuel. 4/26 Rīdiculus mūs, a phrase that sticks in my head, learnt from this article on interesting choices in hexameter: https://antigonejournal.com/2023/10/hexameter-endings/ 4/28 gopher://baud.baby links to a lot of Gopher things. The community seems to have more content about Gopher than of anything else, but I'll look for some regular life thoughts. "Ether was variously regarded as a purer form of fire or of air, or as differing in kind from all of the four elements. By some it was imagined to be the constituent substance, or one of the constituents, of the soul." (OED) 5/1 Obliterate comes, as could be guessed, from a verb ob-līterō, oblitterō: to take words off a page. Wiktionary says the verb is derived from the supine oblitum from oblinō "to daub over". A History of the English Language, Baugh & Cable. https://docenti.unimc.it/carla.cucina/teaching/2017/17413/files/baugh-cable-a-history-of-the-english-language I found this looking up the old past tense "clomb" of climb. "The problem is, is that..." http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/001123.html https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=4269 https://arnoldzwicky.org/linguistics-notes/isis-is-is-double-is/ https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=3361 The Ingenious language: 9 reasons to love Ancient Greek. Katabasis, journey to the underworld: Orpheus, Odysseus, Persephone. 5/3 Going postal, meaning to go insane, from the multiple incidents of post office employees shooting people in their workplaces... 5/5 Learning about the chemistry of coral reefs. (To be continued.) A test (< L. testa) is a name for the hard shell of sea urchins and other marine organisms. Testacea, testacean, testate. "Anthropogenic ocean acidification over the twenty-first century and its impact on calcifying organisms." https://doi.org/10.1038/nature04095 I thought that carbon dioxide dissolved into water to form carbonic acid, but instead carbonic acid dehydrates to carbon dioxide, and carbonate and carbon dioxide form bicarbonate. https://worldoceanreview.com/en/wor-1/ocean-chemistry/acidification/when-carbonate-formation-loses-equilibrium/ Dissolved inorganic carbon (DIC). https://serc.carleton.edu/eslabs/carbon/6a.html This website has an interesting graphic showing which parts of the ocean are carbon dioxide sinks and which are carbon dioxide pumps. Biota, βιοτή, βιότος, βίος 5/7 A mudlark is someone who sifts through the banks of rivers for treasures or trinkets: in the thread linked below, "sorts" from the Doves typeface, which was thrown into the Seine, are recovered from its banks. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40270586 Maunder: (OED) to move, act, talk in a dreamy, idle manner. Hamartia, the fatal flaw of a character in a tragedy. "Tash, the inexorable!" The Fault in Our Stars The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock La Commedia Divina (canto 27): "io credesse che mia..." Julius Caesar Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird Laden, past tense of lade: to load, to put a burden or freight on or in (Websters). Another reminder to myself that "diaeresis" is dai-ER-e-sis. 5/9 In the Iliad, the (mythical) Myrmidons were a fierce group of people who lived in Thessaly and were led by Achilles to war. By extension, a myrmidon can be a follower or bodyguard, a member of a gang, a police officer, etc. F. farine, L. farīna are flour, thus farinaceous "relating to flour" in Dickens "of a peppercorny and farinaceous character". 5/13 To adumbrate (ad + umbra) can be to foreshadow, symbolize, outline, sketch, describe, or (rare) overshadow. Von Neumann ("noiman")'s Elephant: "with four parameters I can fit an elephant, and with five I can make him wiggle his trunk." Deleterious, simply meaning harmful, in a subtle way. 5/17 Dict. de l'Académie Française : génie « se dit des gnomes, sylphes, ondins, et autres personnages fantastiques : Les génies des forêts. » A sylph is a spirit of the wind or the forest, the term coined by Paracelsus with unknown origin, possibly from sylvestris (< silva) and nympha. https://archive.org/details/lesconfidences00lama/page/204/mode/2up « Il y a plus de génie dans une larme ... » Litterae "literature": litterās Graecās senex didicī. Rappeler, rencontrer. Lambda — « un citoyen lambda, une personne que rien ne distingue dans sa catégorie ». Dirge, a song sung in lament to commemorate the dead. Cortège, a train of people in procession. 5/19 "Dux, ducis" and "dūco, dūcere": mentioned in Allen and Greenough 17 Vowel Variations; ChatGPT suggested it could be PIE ablaut, although of course that could mean anything. Could ask on Latin SE. 5/23 Oe, ey, (poetic) words for a small island. 6/2 Comprise, reprise, apprise, surprise are from past participles of French verbs: comprendre, reprendre, apprendre, surprendre, in turn from Latin compounds of prehendō: con-prehendere, re-prehendere, ad-prehendere, sur(French)-prehendere. An article on why the Pleiades are described in myths as having seven stars when only six are usually visible (a pair has grown so close that they appear as one star). https://arxiv.org/pdf/2101.09170 Why are there Seven Sisters? Ray P. Norris, 2020 The whimsical word pinniped (pinna "fin" + pes "foot"), which designates seals, walruses, and sea lions. A Wigner crystal is a crystalline lattice of electrons. 6/16 Some English reflexes of the Latin verb facere, facio, factus, meaning "to do, to make": affect efficient perfecta artifact fact pluperfect benefactor faction prefect confect factor profit confit factorial refection confiture factory reinfect defect factotum satisfactory deficit factum suffice disaffect imperfect sufficient disinfect infect trifecta effect manufacture efficiency perfect and many further compounds in -tion, -ive, -or, and the whole suffix -ify. Some Germanic words: sloom "slumber"; crofter, a farmer renting and tilling a small farm. https://dostoynikov.bearblog.dev/simple-photoblog/ https://minorshadows.net/ https://nomadicshaman.github.io/my-photo-blog/ https://github.com/andersju/1600pr.sh/blob/master/1600pr.sh My library, through which I had access to the OED, experienced a ransomware attack on Memorial Day weekend and is still not completely shipshape... so no Oxford English Dictionary for me. https://www.nasa.gov/image-article/earthrise-3/ Earthrise, a photo from Apollo 8 taken December 24, 1968, of Earth and the Moon's surface. https://science.nasa.gov/resource/voyager-1s-pale-blue-dot/ Pale blue dot, taken from Voyager 1 on February 14, 1990, with a pixel of Earth. https://www.nasa.gov/history/afj/ap12fj/a12-lightningstrike.html "Apollo 12 Lightning Strike Incident" -- "the flight was extremely normal for the first 36 seconds and after that it got very interesting." Bernard's Star, the star with the fastest known "proper motion" (motion of the star in the sky), 10.3 arcseconds per year. The words Convoiter and Covet descend from cupiditās ("desire") through that most tumultuous of filters, Old French. I thought that there existed a verb "to strow" with the forms "strow, strew, strewn", similar to "throw, threw, thrown", to justify the past participle "strewn" which is its most common use. But the real verbs are "strew, strewed, strewn" and "strow, strowed, strown". The verb legere (legō, lēgī, lēctum), gave us through its gerund the word "legend" ("to be read"). Similarly, Amanda from amāre, agendum from agere, memorandum from memorāre, propoganda from propogāre, Miranda from mīrārī. Possible books to watch or read or acquire: De minuit à quatorze heures A Month in the Country The Lives of Others The Name of the Rose In the Café of Lost Youth https://www.gutenberg.org/files/15364/15364-h/15364-h.htm "On the Pronunciation of English Words Derived from Latin" https://cseweb.ucsd.edu/~swanson/papers/science-of-writing.pdf "The Science of Scientific Writing" https://dannybate.com/2022/09/17/five-sound-changes Sound changes from Latin to Italian. 7/12 Asemic writing, in various forms and publications. The Voynich Manuscript: https://archive.org/details/TheVoynichManuscript The Codex Seraphinianus: https://archive.org/details/codexrotated (The former dates to the 1400s; the latter is a modern creation from the 1970s.) The movies that were in my web browser tabs: Andrei Rublev (1966) Breathless (1960) L'Avventura (1960) La Collectionneuse (1967) Mrs. Doubtfire (1993) People Will Talk (1951) "Promontory" has the accent on the first syllable. "Metamorphoses" properly has the accent on the penultimate due to the long ω in μεταμόρφωσις. Mahabharata, Ramayana; the PIE vowels *e, *o, *a all merged into /a/ in Sanskrit, which is why that sound is so prevalent. Information on Shakespeare editions and productions: https://www.waggish.org/critical-editions-of-shakespeare/ https://nullprogram.com/blog/2023/06/22/ 8/20 Continuing the entry from 6/16 (how horribly time flies...) I have cleaned up Gutenberg's text for "On the Pronunciation of English Words Derived from the Latin" and prepared it for HTML printing, and published it on my tilde website: https://simon.tilde.institute/latin.html Studying the whole tract helped to read the Metamorphoses (which has many unfamiliar names). My edition was translated by Raeburn and is quite readable, with accents on all the names so that their stresses are clear. For those interested, HathiTrust has scans of all the tracts of the Society for Pure English; I haven't read them but such a grand title must incite curiosity. https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uc1.b3226805&seq=1 I wanted to put here some links to prints and illustrations of the classics. Firstly, Gustave Doré's illustrations to the Divine Comedy: http://www.worldofdante.org/gallery_dore.html which interested me first. Then this spectacular and comprehensive gallery for editions of the Metamorphoses: https://ovid.lib.virginia.edu/ovidillust.html Xavi Bou's Ornithographies, which traces birds' pathes through the sky and is one of the best collections of artwork I've seen. "Chronophotography" is the science as a whole. https://xavibou.com/ornithographies/ 9/12 Strange attractors: https://youtu.be/Lw_SqFxHtH0 https://youtu.be/AzdpM-vfUCQ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33717135 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41415207 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8269080 https://mathworld.wolfram.com/StrangeAttractor.html https://mathworld.wolfram.com/LorenzAttractor.html https://www.dynamicmath.xyz/strange-attractors/ This interesting blog, with its extreme content-to-styling ratio: https://www.humprog.org/~stephen/blog-all.html For example, this article which I plan to digest fully: https://www.humprog.org/~stephen/blog/devel/writing-makefiles.html Passerelle, a footbridge, a gangplank, the bridge of a ship. These pages on aperiodic tilings which is far beyond my comprehension, but too detailed to lose to the depths of time. https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/quasiblog/aperiodic-followup/ The spade-toothed whale, Mesoplodon traversii, an extremely rare species of beaked whale. Specimens (specimina?) found in 1872, the 1950s, 1993, 2010 (a cow and calf), and 2024. Mesoplodon from Greek elements "meso" middle, "hopla" arms, "odon" teeth, for example "Mesopotamia" meaning between rivers (compare hippo-potamus, river-horse). Odont- in orth-odontics. Factotum, a word I mentioned earlier as being derived from the verb facere, more precisely a compound of fac ( imperative!) and totum "everything", especially in the phrase "domine, fac totum" with "domine" meaning lord, master. It may be interesting to scan this list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Latin_phrases_(full) 9/14 Deckled is the adjective used to describe binding books with an uneven paper edge. Webster gives for "deckle edge": "The rough, untrimmed edge of paper left by the deckle; also, a rough edge in imitation of this." 9/15 I was reading an old children's book of mine, The Secret Staircase, and was surprised to learn some words: caraway biscuits (caraway is a plant like fennel); a pinafore; the past tense "fitted" which seems to be British (OED doesn't mention the conjugations). 9/29 I was nerd-snipped by the following puzzle, to define three-fold composition using two-fold composition: https://franklin.dyer.me/post/212 With a hint from HN, I was able to find the solution: λhgfx. h(g(fx)) = c(cc)c where c = λgfx. g(fx). The combinator is called B3, Becard: https://www.angelfire.com/tx4/cus/combinator/birds.html This all reminds me that someday I'll have to read To Mock a Mockingbird. https://tromp.github.io/ and his shortest Y combinator, S S K(S(K(S S(S(S S K))))K). http://zacharyabel.com/sculpture/ Each one of these Mathematical Sculptures are fascinating. https://kidneybone.com/c2/wiki/StartingPoints 10/10 I wanted to print some code for myself using enscript; here is how I did it, in case I ever use this outdated utility again: enscript --margins=36:36:36:36 -o- file1.java file2.java | ps2pdf - - 10/16 I liked this article about "sundial cannons" (!): It's interesting to me how time was kept and inventions worked before electricity (I know, I am very young), and I enjoyed that the cannon was restored in 1986. https://www.amusingplanet.com/2017/02/the-sundial-cannon-of-atvidaberg.html https://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/Relativity/SpeedOfLight/c.html which, apart from being interesting history, introduced to me the wonderful word "celerity" < L. celer "fast" which also gives us ac-celer-ātiō, etc. 10/20 Palindrome < Greek παλίνδρομος < πάλιν "back again" + δρόμος "run". palindromes = concat . iterate (>>=drome) $ atoms where atoms = "" : (map (\n->[n]) ['a'..'z']) drome s = map (\l -> l : s++[l]) ['a'..'z'] 10/31 Ēlabōrātus, "worked out", from ex + labor (-ōris) + -āre. An interesting example of how English's pronunciation of Latin can obscure etymologies ("labor" being pronounced with a different A sound than "elaborate"). 11/12 For my robotics team, I've just completed a deep dive into a new area of math: Lie theory. Here's how it factors in. A change in robot position and orientation is modeled by the Lie group SE(2) — the special Euclidean group in two dimensions. Our robot velocity (linear and angular) is modeled by the corresponding Lie *algebra*, se(2). The exponential map takes us from se(2) to SE(2), following the arc of the robot as it rotates and moves in a changing direction. The inverse, called the logarithmic map, takes us from SE(2) to se(2), which solves for the starting velocity which, in one unit time, will take us to our desired position (while taking into account our desired rotation). In actual math, SE(2) and se(2) are both represented by matrices, and the matrix exponential, defined using the normal e^x Taylor series, is the operation for the exponential map. The inverse matrix takes us back from SE(2) to se(2), which is the logarithmic map. By expanding the inversion matrix and using some trigonometric identities, I was able to derive the formulas used in our robot library (WPILib). 12/6 The primordial nerd snipe: https://xkcd.com/356/ https://www.mathpages.com/home/kmath668/kmath668.htm https://lenseswaenen.github.io/2021/03/14/nerd-sniping.html https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/2072/on-this-infinite-grid https://www.marquette.edu/maqom/baalyamm.pdf 2025 1/21 This is so cool! https://blog.demofox.org/2017/11/26/dissecting-tiny-clouds/ 2/3 Di rigori armato il seno; contro amore mi ribellai Ma fui vinto in un baleno; in mirar due vaghi rai Ma fui vinto in un baleno; ahi, in mirar due vaghi rai Ahi; che resiste puoco a stral di fuoco Cor di gelo di fuoco a stral. For my differential equations class, I have been writing a little code in Haskell. It's quite well suited to mathematical and symbolic things. rungeKutta f h (x,y) = (x+h, y + h*s/6) where s = k1 + 2*k2 + 2*k3 + k4 k1 = f x y k2 = f (x+h/2) (y+h*k1/2) k3 = f (x+h/2) (y+h*k2/2) k4 = f (x+h) (y+h*k3) 3/10 Fortran is pretty cool! It's good to learn different languages, and although I don't expect to encounter Fortran code while studying EE, it might come up (and I'm interested in numerical computing anyway). I'm reading Brainerd's "Guide to Fortran 2008 Computing." It's just very interesting to see what the early scientific community thought was important to build into the language. For example, the "t" edit descriptor moves to a certain column in the output line. You can print items out of order typeset at different columns and Fortran will assemble them into a correct output line. (And it doesn't use \r or terminal cursor positioning as I half dreaded it might.) The book does a good job of motivating Fortran as an interesting and useful language for modern programmers, but I know that I'm being shielded from a vast army of obsolete Fortran lore. 3/23 My FRC team is doing pretty well, although the code to control the robot (I'm a programmer) is starting to get messy. Since I'm graduating, I think I'll do a rewrite in the offseason, and I have some interesting ideas: I'll do a C++ base with the core in Scheme (using s7), and separate out I/O in the style of AdvantageKit. I might even be able to run a REPL on the robot and do some dynamic code rewriting.