Monday, February 19, 2024

Bit of Nonsensical (i.e. Fictional) Natural History

The Tennessee water cricket is not found in Tennessee but rather in a few spots along the Calabash River in Sardinia, N.S.W.

The correct name of the horse is hortsh, and they are all named Horace--at least in Lower Slobovia.

The fitchin is a fish--at least in Japan, where everything is a fish, except rice and a few vegetables that grow around Shinto shrines.

Sorry, folks, just being silly. I have always believed the world needs more silliness.

Monday, February 13, 2023

The Pharmaceutical Industry Discovers the Letter "Q"

The pharmaceutical industry uses computers to generate possible or suggested names for new drugs, and has been doing so for a long time.

The computers are programmed with algorithms so as to respect some of the laws or constraints of English--for example, permitted sequences of letters.

For a long time, it seems, the computers were not allowed to use the letter q in any proposed drug names. In English, the letter q is almost always followed by u (the exceptions are merely a couple of words which come from other languages).

Now, however, that seems to have changed, and we are seeing drug names with q in them:

Rinvoq. Here that final q evidently could be a k or ck.
Cibinqo. Here, although no u follows the q, evidently the pronunciation is just as if the word in fact ended in quo.
Kisqali. Same comment as above.
Qulipta. Evidently this is to be pronounced with the initial syllable being "kew".
Uqora. Here, as with Cobinqo, we evidently need to pretend that there's a qu rather than just q.

It's anybody's guess why the pharmaceutical industry has started using such weird names. Maybe all the good ones have been used already.

Copyright © 2023.

Some Thoughts (Humorous) on American Sports: Team Names, etc.

I was thinking about the names of sports teams. You know, they usually are connected in some way to the city where the team is resident, e.g., Detroit Pistons (referring to the auto industry, with its cars which have--or at least always had--piston engines), the Houston Oilers (there is a lot of oil around Houston). Here are a few new ones that I'm suggesting.

Flushing (Queens, NY) Toilets
Barking (Surrey, U.K.) Dogs
Alaska Glaciers
Maine Lobsters 
Los Vegas Roulette Wheels 
Charleston Chews 
Boston Baked Beans
Seattle Airliners
Wisconsin Dairymen (There is a Wisconsin team known as the Green Bay Packers. I have no idea--and my excuse is that I am not a native of this part of the world--whether there is or ever was any packing going on in Green Bay.)

Some other thoughts related to sports:

I like to say--jokingly, of course--that (Chicago) Cubs grow up to be (Chicago) Bears.

If the (Chicago) White Sox got mixed up in the laundry with the (Boston) Red Sox, you'd get the Pink Sox.

Polo is played on horseback, right? Then I guess sea horses are used for water polo.

There was a basketball player called Meadowlark Lemon. There is a baseball player named Darryl Strawberry. So--although they were on different teams and even different sports--we've had a strawberry and a lemon. Makes me wonder what other fruits[*] there might be…….

___________

* I strongly want it understood that the use of the word "fruit," though acknowledged as a slang term for a gay person, is in no way meant here to imply any derogatory comment on LGBTQ people.

Copyright (c) 2023



[*]

Monday, January 2, 2023

SUVs Are Killing Pedestrians

 SUVs keep growing in popularity in America. Also, accidents in which pedestrians are struck by vehicles have been increasing. Now, connect the dots.

What connects the dots is a study that shows that SUVs—and pickup trucks, which are also gaining in popularity—have a significant zone immediately in front of them where something in the road would not be visible to the driver. This is because their hoods are higher.

So, owning and driving an SUV puts pedestrians at greater peril; not to mention the fact that SUVs have a greater impact on the environment. They burn more fuel, on average, than cars and thus emit a greater quantity of greenhouse gases.

The American road is on track to become nearly all SUVs as the major American car makers are dropping their sedan models. There is sort of a push-pull operating here: The car makers claim that buyers demand SUVs, but SUVs are more profitable to build, so auto makers are more than happy to switch their product lines, more and more, to SUVs. You cannot any longer buy a sedan from Ford or Chevrolet, both of which built several good small sedan models.

SUVs are not as popular in Europe. I frankly don't understand why they are so appealing to drivers, but one theory I have is that, as American cars grew smaller (look at, for example, the length of '60s cars and compare that with more recent models), people reacted against that by finding large vehicles in the form of SUVs.

Copyright (c) 2023

Thursday, May 26, 2022

Guns, Yet Again

 I have blogged about the problem of gun violence in America, over and over, to where I am tired of writing on that subject and have resolved,  more than once, to say no more about it.

Yet mass shootings, particularly  school shootings, incredible and of course tragically, continue. And, they're even getting worse. Last year there were 270 school shootings, the most since 1970.

I believe the chief cause of the high rate of homicides in America is the prevalence of guns. (Yes, you can kill people with a knife, but if you intend to kill a number of people, a gun is much more efficient.) The United States has the loosest gun laws in the world. Coincidence?

You don't hear too much about the experience of Australia. The national government of Australia created an incentive for Australian citizens to turn in their guns. The result? Homicides decreased 97%. Ninety-seven percent!

Yet, time after time, it seems we absorb these experiences with little or nothing happening. Why, in heaven's name? Other countries shake their heads in disbelief and probably are even afraid to visit the United States.

The reason is because we have a powerful gun lobby—the NRA, other gun owners' organizations, gun manufacturers—and legislatures and governors—chiefly Republican—who have thwarted meaningful gun control.

True, we have the Second Amendment to the Constitution. Yet jurisprudence has held that the gun-owning right is not absolute and can have limitations imposed. At one point--for a few years--assault rifles were illegal. Then that law expired and was not renewed.

Sunday, April 10, 2022

Origins of a Few Words From Our Techie Society

For a couple hundred years, England was ruled by Danish or Viking kings. One of them was known as Harald Bluetooth (one surmises that he had a blue tooth). Why that should be a suitable name for a communication protocol--well, you are free to guess.

Widget was a term for a hypothetical or fictitious product of a manufacturing company. For example, a business-school test might have a question like, "If the XYZ Corporation manufactures widgets and they can produce 1000 widgets an hour…."

The name Google probably was suggested by the word googol, uttered by Milton Sirotta, the nephew of the mathematician Edward Kasner and used by Kasner to denote the quantity 1 followed by 100 zeroes.

Copyright © 2022

Monday, February 7, 2022

Climate Change/Global Warming

One of the reasons I'm rather pessimistic about the prospect for our world's beating the global warming/climate change problem is that not enough is being done about it. We hear the world's politicians talk about it but any action being taken is at some point going to be seen to have been too little, too late.

Americans (for one) don't appear to be changing their habits, and I don't really hear anyone urging them to. Where are the leaders urging people to drive less? To not buy big and thirsty SUVs? (The equation is simple: more fuel consumed = more greenhouse gases being emitted.) And who has—or would have—the bravery to discourage Christmas lights in the name of saving energy? Anyone who did so would be accused of being anti-religion or even anti-God (show me where in the Bible we are commanded to string electric lights upon our houses to celebrate the birth of Christ).

Electric vehicles are expected to do much to reduce production of greenhouse gases; but so far, in most countries, the penetration of EVs into the car market has been rather insignificant--on the order of 3% to 6% of car sales. One reason is that electric cars suffer from a serious price disadvantage. And, I do not see any great numbers of charging stations in my area. On the other hand, "range anxiety"--the fear of drivers that they will be traveling and their car's charge will be running out when they are not near any place where the car could be charged--might be diminishing because electric cars' range (on a charge, that is) has been increasing.

I myself have given some thought to getting an electric car. If I got one it would probably receive all or nearly all of its charging in my garage. But, to have and use only 110 V charging is very slow; and to install a faster, 220 V charger in my garage I'd have to buy a charger and pay an electrician to wire it into my house wiring--for a total cost of nearly $1000. 

I'm sure electric cars are the wave of the future, but it's going to be a while before they are truly common. Better, cheaper, lighter-weight batteries must be developed, and I don't think anyone is sure when that will  happen.

Another thing, on a somewhat different note: Rainforests, as we hear often, are a very important repository of carbon, and cutting down and/or burning these trees not only reduces the amount of carbon that can be absorbed from the atmosphere, but the burning of the trees releases carbon that has been locked up perhaps for centuries. Yet in Brazil, the trees of the Amazon rainforest, one of the most important on the planet, are being cut down and burned, to make room for pasture land or farmland (e.g., plantation of palm trees for the palm oil that is showing up in so much of our food)--not to mention that this process is depriving indigenous people of their land and homes. Yet Brazil's President Bolsonaro does nothing to stop this pillaging and destruction of the rainforests of his country.

In many nations there are conferences, there are speeches. But is enough being done, aside from talk? At least a few scientists warned of the problem decades ago. True, we have some renewal energy--wind farms, etc.--but they still are providing only a small percentage of energy consumed. We need "transformative" change, and it doesn't seem to be happening.

Copyright © 2022.