Miscellanea, mostly etymologies and meanings of words.

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.

4/26 Carcinogen: "An agent that causes cancer or induces malignant
transformation of cells." Carcinization: "The convergent
evolution of crustaceans into forms similar to true crabs."

The Greeks identified cancerous tumors with the legs of a crab,
or, in Greek, καρκίνος, which gives the root carcino- for both
crabs (the animal) and cancer (the medical condition). The
Latin word "cancer" similarly means crab and was calqued to
describe the medical condition, hence why the constellation
Cancer is the Crab.

4/27 I'm not a math major so the following may be incorrect, but here
is my understanding of the Euler formulas for Fourier series:

The set of trigonometric functions of the form cos(mx) or
sin(mx), where m is a positive integer, unioned with the
constant function 1, forms an orthonormal basis with the inner
product being <f, g> := 1/pi * int_{-pi}^{+pi} f(x)g(x) dx. So
to express any "reasonably well behaved" periodic function (with
period = 2pi) in terms of sines and cosines we can take its
inner product with each basis vector and use the result in a
series. This view makes it exactly analogous to dotting a
Euclidean vector with the orthonormal basic vectors to retrieve
its components.

5/10 Consider that the gravitational constant is known to six
significant figures:

G = 6.67430(15) * 10^-11 m^3 kg^-1 s^-2

and the mass of the Earth is known to seven:

M_E = 5.972168 * 10^24 kg

but their product, called the geocentric gravitational constant
or the Earth's standard gravitational parameter, is known far
more accurately to ten significant figures!

G*M_E = 3.986004418 * 10^14 m^3 s^-2

5/23 Boustrophedon: written from left to right, then right to left,
on alternating lines.