Things you always wanted to know the answer to [Vol. 5]
Discussion
vonuber said:
Ayahuasca said:
Prior to their conquest by Julius Caesar did the Gauls speak with what we now call a French accent?
Highly unlikely given they wouldn't have been speaking French.Clockwork Cupcake said:
glazbagun said:
Showing my massive ignorance here, but do Welsh or Gaelic have any distinct sounds that our English palate can't handle?
The Welsh "Ll-" sound doesn't have any equivalent sound in English. That's the one that springs most readily to mind, look you boyo V41LEY said:
Trivia question for stamp collectors (I can’t find the answer) - who was the first black face on a British (ie UK - not territory, dependency, commonwealth etc) postage stamp. Thought it would make a good pub quiz question.
(I'm no longer a stamp collector but...IIRC.....)In the late 60s the UK had stamps with Ghandi on ... presumably for an anniversary - but India had his image on independence stamps somewhere about 1947-50......
Lily the Pink said:
K12beano said:
In the late 60s the UK had stamps with Ghandi on ... presumably for an anniversary
1969, the centenary of his birth. See above. But the poster asked for black, not brown.I wracked my brains some more and came up with the Salvation Army centenary, and looked it up:
https://www.postalmuseum.org/wp-content/uploads/20...
So - by my reckoning 1965!
Rostfritt said:
Robertj21a said:
Why can't people use There/Their/They're and Your/You're correctly ?
Because we speak more than we write and hear more than we read and they sound the same.Roofless Toothless said:
Rostfritt said:
Robertj21a said:
Why can't people use There/Their/They're and Your/You're correctly ?
Because we speak more than we write and hear more than we read and they sound the same.V8mate said:
Roofless Toothless said:
Rostfritt said:
Robertj21a said:
Why can't people use There/Their/They're and Your/You're correctly ?
Because we speak more than we write and hear more than we read and they sound the same.Climbing Everest.
I have watched a couple of documentaries about it, including an excellent one last night about Hilary/Tenzing. Now I'm not saying it isn't a bloody difficult thing to do, but they managed it in 1953 with what must surely have been very basic kit (though I reaslise they had oxygen).
Is it just the altitude and potential weather problems that make it so difficult? Because from what I've seen it's pretty much a tough walk until you get to 26,000 feet and even then there is almost no actual climbing involved.
I have watched a couple of documentaries about it, including an excellent one last night about Hilary/Tenzing. Now I'm not saying it isn't a bloody difficult thing to do, but they managed it in 1953 with what must surely have been very basic kit (though I reaslise they had oxygen).
Is it just the altitude and potential weather problems that make it so difficult? Because from what I've seen it's pretty much a tough walk until you get to 26,000 feet and even then there is almost no actual climbing involved.
SCEtoAUX said:
Climbing Everest.
I have watched a couple of documentaries about it, including an excellent one last night about Hilary/Tenzing. Now I'm not saying it isn't a bloody difficult thing to do, but they managed it in 1953 with what must surely have been very basic kit (though I reaslise they had oxygen).
Is it just the altitude and potential weather problems that make it so difficult? Because from what I've seen it's pretty much a tough walk until you get to 26,000 feet and even then there is almost no actual climbing involved.
I understand it is not a particularly technical climb, except for the (short) Hillary Step, but the altitude, the remoteness (tough walk in just to get to base camp), the length of the acclimatisation climbs, is a massive grinding down process. K2 on the other hand is just a little lower, but much more technical. 4,000 people have climbed Everest, only 367 have climbed K2. Pay enough money, and you can climb Everest. Not K2. I have watched a couple of documentaries about it, including an excellent one last night about Hilary/Tenzing. Now I'm not saying it isn't a bloody difficult thing to do, but they managed it in 1953 with what must surely have been very basic kit (though I reaslise they had oxygen).
Is it just the altitude and potential weather problems that make it so difficult? Because from what I've seen it's pretty much a tough walk until you get to 26,000 feet and even then there is almost no actual climbing involved.
Watching a documentary about the Red Arrows and it’s shown the ‘circus’ members flying in the back seat on a transit.
I wondered, do the engineers ever take the stick and get to have a turn on those flights? I know if I was sitting in the back seat I’d be bloody itching to have a play.
I wondered, do the engineers ever take the stick and get to have a turn on those flights? I know if I was sitting in the back seat I’d be bloody itching to have a play.
Roofless Toothless said:
I don't know if this is a question that can be answered at all, but it has long been in my mind.
Do all creatures, do all individuals, experience the passage of time at the same rate?
When I look out of the window and watch small birds flitting about the bushes, the speed that they negotiate all the twists and turns seems superhuman to me. It's like every second to us is five to them, and they are whizzing in and out of the branches as easily as we can walk down the garden path. My son's tortoise seems to operate at the other end of the spectrum.
Could the skill of a racing driver or top test match batsman be partly based on them experiencing time at a different rate than the rest of us? They seem like they have longer to accurately judge the speed of a car or the flight of a ball?
I suppose it would be just as odd to assume that time passes at the same rate for all of us, as it is to accept that it can differ between individuals. After all, we all know that sometimes time seems to drag, and sometime flies by. I myself have had an experience during an accident when I know for sure my mind was working at a different rate than normal - one of those time stood still moments.
Is this what is behind the extraordinary skill of some sportsmen?
Sir Terry Pratchett had this observation..Do all creatures, do all individuals, experience the passage of time at the same rate?
When I look out of the window and watch small birds flitting about the bushes, the speed that they negotiate all the twists and turns seems superhuman to me. It's like every second to us is five to them, and they are whizzing in and out of the branches as easily as we can walk down the garden path. My son's tortoise seems to operate at the other end of the spectrum.
Could the skill of a racing driver or top test match batsman be partly based on them experiencing time at a different rate than the rest of us? They seem like they have longer to accurately judge the speed of a car or the flight of a ball?
I suppose it would be just as odd to assume that time passes at the same rate for all of us, as it is to accept that it can differ between individuals. After all, we all know that sometimes time seems to drag, and sometime flies by. I myself have had an experience during an accident when I know for sure my mind was working at a different rate than normal - one of those time stood still moments.
Is this what is behind the extraordinary skill of some sportsmen?
(spoilered coz its really long!)
The sun was near the horizon.
The shortest-lived creatures on the Disc were mayflies, which barely make it through twenty-four hours. Two of the oldest zigzagged aimlessly over the waters of a trout stream, discussing history with some younger members of the evening hatching.
“You don’t get the kind of sun now that you used to get,” said one of them.
“You’re right there. We had proper sun in the good old hours. It were all yellow. None of this red stuff.”
“It were higher, too.”
“It was. You’re right.”
“And nymphs and larvae showed you a bit of respect.”
“They did. They did,” said the other mayfly vehemently.
“I reckon, if mayflies these hours behaved a bit better, we’d still be having proper sun.”
The younger mayflies listened politely.
“I remember,” said one of the oldest mayflies, “when all this was fields, as far as you could see.”
The younger mayflies looked around.
“It’s still fields,” one of them ventured, after a polite interval.
“I remember when it was better fields,” said the old mayfly sharply.
“Yeah,” said his colleague.” And there was a cow.”
“That’s right! You’re right! I remember that cow! Stood right over there for, oh, forty, fifty minutes. It was brown, as I recall.”
“You don’t get cows like that these hours.”
“You don’t get cows at all.”
“What’s a cow?” said one of the hatchlings.
“See?” said the oldest mayfly triumphantly. “That’s modern Ephemeroptera for you.” It paused.” What were we doing before we were talking about the sun?”
“Zigzagging aimlessly over the water,” said one of the young flies; This was a fair bet in any case.
“No, before that.”
“Er... you were telling us about the Great Trout.”
“Ah. Yes. Right. The Trout. Well, you see, if you’ve been a good mayfly, zigzagging up and down properly –”
“– taking heed of your elders and betters –”
“– yes, and taking heed of your elders and betters, then eventually the Great Trout –”
Clop
Clop
“Yes?” said one of the younger mayflies.
There was no reply.
“The Great Trout what?” said another mayfly, nervously.
They looked down at a series of expanding concentric rings on the water.
“The holy sign!” said a mayfly. “I remember being told about that! A Great Circle in the water! Thus shall be the sign of the Great Trout!”
The oldest of the young mayflies watched the water thoughtfully. It was beginning to realise that, as the most senior fly present, it now had the privilege of hovering closest to the surface.
“They say,” said the mayfly at the top of the zigzagging crowd, “that when the Great Trout comes for you, you go to a land flowing with... flowing with...”
Mayflies don’t eat. It was at a loss. “Flowing with water,” it finished lamely.
“I wonder,” said the oldest mayfly.
“It must be really good there,” said the youngest.
“Oh? Why?”
“ ’Cos no-one ever wants to come back.”
Whereas the oldest things on the Discworld were the famous Counting Pines, which grow right on the permanent snowline of the high Ramtop Mountains.
The Counting Pine is one of the few known examples of borrowed evolution.
Most species do their own evolving, making it up as they go along, which is the way Nature intended. And this is all very natural and organic and in tune with mysterious cycles of the cosmos, which believes that there’s nothing like millions of years of really frustrating trial and error to give a species moral fibre and, in some cases, backbone.
This is probably fine from the species’ point of view, but from the perspective of the actual individuals involved it can be a real pig, or at least a small pink root-eating reptile that might one day evolve into a real pig.
So the Counting Pines avoided all this by letting other vegetables do their evolving for them. A pine seed, coming to rest anywhere on the Disc, immediately picks up the most effective local genetic code via morphic resonance and grows into whatever best suits the soil and climate, usually doing much better at it than the native trees themselves, which it usually usurps.
What makes the Counting Pines particularly noteworthy, however, is the way they count.
Being dimly aware that human beings had learned to tell the age of a tree by counting the rings, the original Counting Pines decided that this was why humans cut trees down.
Overnight every Counting Pine readjusted its genetic code to produce, at about eye-level on its trunk, in pale letters, its precise age. Within a year they were felled almost into extinction by the ornamental house number plate industry, and only a very few survive in hard-to-reach areas.
The six Counting Pines in this clump were listening to the oldest, whose gnarled trunk declared it to be thirty-one thousand, seven hundred and thirty-four years old. The conversation took seventeen years, but has been speeded up.
“I remember when all this wasn’t fields.”
The pines stared out over a thousand miles of landscape. The sky flickered like a bad special effect from a time travel movie. Snow appeared, stayed for an instant, and melted.
“What was it, then?” said the nearest pine.
“Ice. If you can call it ice. We had proper glaciers in those days. Not like the ice you get now, here one season and gone the next. It hung around for ages.”
“What happened to it, then?”
“It went.”
“Went where?”
“Where things go. Everything’s always rushing off.”
“Wow. That was a sharp one.”
“What was?”
“That winter just then.”
“Call that a winter? When I was a sapling we had winters –”
Then the tree vanished.
After a shocked pause for a couple of years, one of the clump said: “He just went! Just like that! One day he was here, next he was gone!”
If the other trees had been humans, they would have shuffled their feet.
“It happens, lad,” said one of them, carefully. “He’s been taken to a Better Place1, you can be sure of that. He was a good tree.”
The young tree, which was a mere five thousand, one hundred and eleven years old, said: “What sort of Better Place?”
“We’re not sure,” said one of the clump. It trembled uneasily in a week-long gale. “But we think it involves... sawdust.”
Since the trees were unable even to sense any event that took place in less than a day, they never heard the sound of axes.
V41LEY said:
Trivia question for stamp collectors (I can’t find the answer) - who was the first black face on a British (ie UK - not territory, dependency, commonwealth etc) postage stamp. Thought it would make a good pub quiz question.
OK - seeing as there was no clear answer from the PH massive I got in touch with the curator at the National Postal Museum in London to get their view. There was a black face on the Salvation Army Commemorative issue in 1965 but it was an image rather than a named individual. The first black named face was Mary Seacole in 2006 for a group of stamps celebrating the National Portrait Galley. The first male figure was Olaudah Equiano - a player in the abolition of slavery - in a set of stamps issued in 2007. I’m quite amazed that it took that long for a black face to feature !I raised this as a potential pub quiz question. Now I know the answer I don’t think I’ll bother as no one will get it !!
glazbagun said:
Randy Winkman said:
The BBC Scotland TV series "Fish Town" is about trawler fishing from Peterhead. When the boxes of fish are sold in the market to retail/commercial buyers someone rips off from a pad and throws a number of small "tickets" into the relevant box. I assume they related to who has bought the fish but it all seems a bit random with regard the number of seemingly identical tickets going into one box. How does it work?
I haven't been to a fishmarket in 20 years and it was New Haven, but back then the individual traders would have their own tickets and they would be put in the box to say it was sold. This prevented other buyers showing up later and offering more for the same boxes or trying to swap one box with another. The best thing was to throw it in your van as soon as you'd bought it, but that's not really possible when it's busy. So if you throw tons of tickets in a box or stack of boxes it's more to emphasise just how sold that box is and that it is totally not anyone elses business to be looking at it.
Cyder said:
Watching a documentary about the Red Arrows and it’s shown the ‘circus’ members flying in the back seat on a transit.
I wondered, do the engineers ever take the stick and get to have a turn on those flights? I know if I was sitting in the back seat I’d be bloody itching to have a play.
A relative of mine is a Hawk QFI and flew in the back seat during some Red Arrows training, and, no. That said, it wasn’t a transit. Still no. I wondered, do the engineers ever take the stick and get to have a turn on those flights? I know if I was sitting in the back seat I’d be bloody itching to have a play.
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