Apologies if this one has already been mentioned, but when I saw it I immediately thought of this Newsgroup.
https://xkcd.com/403/
On 9/23/2026 2:18 AM, Sam Plusnet wrote:
Apologies if this one has already been mentioned, but when I saw it I
immediately thought of this Newsgroup.
https://xkcd.com/403/
On 22/09/2026 21:19, Johann 'Myrkraverk' Oskarsson wrote:
On 9/23/2026 2:18 AM, Sam Plusnet wrote:Not just any webcomic. XKCD is a hallowed repository of reference
Apologies if this one has already been mentioned, but when I saw it I
immediately thought of this Newsgroup.
https://xkcd.com/403/
material in AUE. Respect it.
On 22/09/2026 21:19, Johann 'Myrkraverk' Oskarsson wrote:
On 9/23/2026 2:18 AM, Sam Plusnet wrote:Not just any webcomic. XKCD is a hallowed repository of reference
Apologies if this one has already been mentioned, but when I saw it I
immediately thought of this Newsgroup.
https://xkcd.com/403/
material in AUE. Respect it.
Apologies if this one has already been mentioned, but when I saw it I immediately thought of this Newsgroup.
https://xkcd.com/403/
"Sam":
Apologies if this one has already been mentioned, but when I saw it I
immediately thought of this Newsgroup.
https://xkcd.com/403/
I suggest that the alt.usage.englishiest xkcd is number 1010,
(and then read its sequel, 1012).
On 9/23/2026 4:51 PM, occam wrote:
On 22/09/2026 21:19, Johann 'Myrkraverk' Oskarsson wrote:
On 9/23/2026 2:18 AM, Sam Plusnet wrote:Not just any webcomic. XKCD is a hallowed repository of reference
Apologies if this one has already been mentioned, but when I saw it I
immediately thought of this Newsgroup.
https://xkcd.com/403/
material in AUE. Respect it.
No. X.K.C.D. is not that good of a webcomic. There are better ones.
On 9/24/2026 4:18 AM, Mark Brader wrote:
"Sam":
Apologies if this one has already been mentioned, but when I saw it I
immediately thought of this Newsgroup.
https://xkcd.com/403/
I suggest that the alt.usage.englishiest xkcd is number 1010,
(and then read its sequel, 1012).
On that subject, the sequel, is there a good etymological dictionary, preferably in physical form, I can still buy? Or is it all just sub- scription online now which only large mathematical departments can aff-
ord?
An entomological dictionary could be helpful if I were to write a fic- tional account about the life of insects, but that's quite specialized literature, and I'm not sure I'll make the effort. What do you think?
On Wednesday or thereabouts, Johann 'Myrkraverk' Oskarsson asked ...
On 9/23/2026 4:51 PM, occam wrote:
On 22/09/2026 21:19, Johann 'Myrkraverk' Oskarsson wrote:
On 9/23/2026 2:18 AM, Sam Plusnet wrote:Not just any webcomic.-a XKCD is a hallowed repository of reference
Apologies if this one has already been mentioned, but when I saw it I >>>>> immediately thought of this Newsgroup.
https://xkcd.com/403/
material in AUE.-a Respect it.
No.-a X.K.C.D. is not that good of a webcomic.-a There are better ones.
De gustibus, of course, but xkcd (no full stops or spaces!) is quite
attuned to what happens in AUE, so it has a special place here.
Other webcomics (and even conventional comics like Calvin and Hobbes)
make appearances here, but few are as consistently apt as xkcd.
/dps
[1] It came to my surprised that Americans, even educated ones, don't
know this term. I had to use another term, probably "period" or a
"dot" when verbally giving directions. But now I forgot if it was a
website U.R.L. or some code or shell command or other.
On 9/24/2026 4:18 AM, Mark Brader wrote:
"Sam":
Apologies if this one has already been mentioned, but when I saw it I
immediately thought of this Newsgroup.
https://xkcd.com/403/
I suggest that the alt.usage.englishiest xkcd is number 1010,
(and then read its sequel, 1012).
On that subject, the sequel, is there a good etymological dictionary, preferably in physical form, I can still buy?-a Or is it all just sub- scription online now which only large mathematical departments can aff-
ord?
An entomological dictionary could be helpful if I were to write a fic-
tional account about the life of insects, but that's quite specialized literature, and I'm not sure I'll make the effort.-a What do you think?
On 23/09/2026 09:51, occam wrote:
On 22/09/2026 21:19, Johann 'Myrkraverk' Oskarsson wrote:
On 9/23/2026 2:18 AM, Sam Plusnet wrote:Not just any webcomic.-a XKCD is a hallowed repository of reference
Apologies if this one has already been mentioned, but when I saw it I
immediately thought of this Newsgroup.
https://xkcd.com/403/
material in AUE.-a Respect it.
The mouse-over seems especially on topic for aue.
"Sam":
Apologies if this one has already been mentioned, but when I saw it I
immediately thought of this Newsgroup.
https://xkcd.com/403/
I suggest that the alt.usage.englishiest xkcd is number 1010,
(and then read its sequel, 1012).
On that subject, the sequel, is there a good etymological dictionary, preferably in physical form, I can still buy?
On 23/09/2026 22:18, Mark Brader wrote:
"Sam":
Apologies if this one has already been mentioned, but when I saw it I
immediately thought of this Newsgroup.
https://xkcd.com/403/
I suggest that the alt.usage.englishiest xkcd is number 1010,
(and then read its sequel, 1012).
<smile> Yes, 1010 is particularly apt. Overlong in text, plenty hair splitting, and rich in pedantry.
Now, on to something else, have you thought to make your own webcomic?
I suppose CorelDRAW!, potentially version 5 from 1994, is a good choice
to make one.
What do you think?
On 23/09/2026 09:51, occam wrote:
On 22/09/2026 21:19, Johann 'Myrkraverk' Oskarsson wrote:
On 9/23/2026 2:18 AM, Sam Plusnet wrote:Not just any webcomic. XKCD is a hallowed repository of reference
Apologies if this one has already been mentioned, but when I saw it I
immediately thought of this Newsgroup.
https://xkcd.com/403/
material in AUE. Respect it.
The mouse-over seems especially on topic for aue.
Le 24/09/2026 |a 07:26, occam a |-crit :
On 23/09/2026 22:18, Mark Brader wrote:
"Sam":
Apologies if this one has already been mentioned, but when I saw it I
immediately thought of this Newsgroup.
https://xkcd.com/403/
I suggest that the alt.usage.englishiest xkcd is number 1010,
(and then read its sequel, 1012).
<smile> Yes, 1010 is particularly apt.-a Overlong in text, plenty hair
splitting, and rich in pedantry.
And anyway, the OED (which is descriptive, not prescriptive, right
enough) lists "An exceptionally large ocean wave caused by an event that disturbs a large expanse of water such as an earthquake, volcanic
eruption, landslide, or meteorite impact" - Sense 1.b., 1844 on.
"The United States and New Zealand conducted secret tests of a 'tsunami
bomb' designed to destroy coastal cities by using underwater explosions
to trigger tidal waves" - 'Daily Telegraph', 2013-01-02.
On 23/09/2026 09:51, occam wrote:
On 22/09/2026 21:19, Johann 'Myrkraverk' Oskarsson wrote:
On 9/23/2026 2:18 AM, Sam Plusnet wrote:Not just any webcomic. XKCD is a hallowed repository of reference
Apologies if this one has already been mentioned, but when I saw it I
immediately thought of this Newsgroup.
https://xkcd.com/403/
material in AUE. Respect it.
The mouse-over seems especially on topic for aue.
Sam Plusnet <not@home.com> wrote:
On 23/09/2026 09:51, occam wrote:
On 22/09/2026 21:19, Johann 'Myrkraverk' Oskarsson wrote:
On 9/23/2026 2:18 AM, Sam Plusnet wrote:Not just any webcomic. XKCD is a hallowed repository of reference
Apologies if this one has already been mentioned, but when I saw it I >>>>> immediately thought of this Newsgroup.
https://xkcd.com/403/
material in AUE. Respect it.
The mouse-over seems especially on topic for aue.
A Dutch author invented the term 'kutzwager' for it.
(lit. cunt-brother-in-law)
So anyone he shared a sexual contact with,
and propagating in the line.
So somewhat like 'Reigen' (E. La Ronde) by Schnitzler,
but exponentially growing rather than in a loop.
For himself he claimed that he had a friend in his line
who had something with Marilyn Monroe,
so from there to most of the world,
Jan
Den 23.09.2026 kl. 22.36 skrev Johann 'Myrkraverk' Oskarsson:
On that subject, the sequel, is there a good etymological dictionary,
preferably in physical form, I can still buy?
This online dictionary is free:
-a-a-a-a-a https://www.etymonline.com/
Ar an ceathr|| l|i is fiche de m|! M|-an F||mhair, scr|!obh Johann Oskarsson:
> On 9/24/2026 4:18 AM, Mark Brader wrote:
> > "Sam":
> >> Apologies if this one has already been mentioned, but when I saw it I
> >> immediately thought of this Newsgroup.
> >>
> >> https://xkcd.com/403/
> >
> > I suggest that the alt.usage.englishiest xkcd is number 1010,
> > (and then read its sequel, 1012).
>
> On that subject, the sequel, is there a good etymological dictionary,
> preferably in physical form, I can still buy? Or is it all just sub-
> scription online now which only large mathematical departments can aff-
> ord?
https://www.oed.com/information/purchasing/the-oed-in-print/?tl=true
ItrCOs a good etymological dictionary but the second edition is old. And the dictionary is -u 599, which you may not be willing to pay.
My local public library, which is an hour and a half drive away, subscribes to
the OED. On the suggestion of someone in alt.usage.english I am now a member of
Donegal County Libraries and can access the online, reasonably up-to-date, version free at the point of use. (I have no other use for the county library.)
It wouldnrCOt shock me if your local public library in Iceland also subscribed.
> An entomological dictionary could be helpful if I were to write a fic-
> tional account about the life of insects, but that's quite specialized
> literature, and I'm not sure I'll make the effort. What do you think?
Do some XEmacs work instead. IrCOve just pushed a point release. WhatrCOs your
appetite for porting GNU code? (Limited, I imagine.) WhatrCOs your appetite for
porting SXEmacs code?
Paul Erd+as wasn't known for having any interest in sex!
My Erd+as number is 3 (not counted |a la Xkcd).
On 24/09/26 18:02, athel.cb@gmail.com wrote:
Paul Erd+as wasn't known for having any interest in sex!
My Erd+as number is 3 (not counted |a la Xkcd).
So is mine, which surprised me when I looked it up. The research world
is a small world.
The one that really surprised me was my Mathematics Genealogy tree.
http://www.pmoylan.org/pages/family/MathGenealogy.pdf
On 9/24/2026 2:31 PM, Bertel Lund Hansen wrote:
Den 23.09.2026 kl. 22.36 skrev Johann 'Myrkraverk' Oskarsson:
On that subject, the sequel, is there a good etymological dictionary,
preferably in physical form, I can still buy?
This online dictionary is free:
-a-a-a-a-a-a https://www.etymonline.com/
It is rather shallow, and does get things wrong occasionally.-a Not a
point of merit, but for instance, Martin Bernal proposed Egyptian ety-
mology for /desert/ in his epic /Black Athena/, volume I if I recall correctly.
I believe Egyptologists are still denying this etymology, and I'm not
sure why.-a I think it's a valid proposal.-a Bernal uses the term /compe- titive plausibility/, and until thoroughly disabused by perhaps a Roman
or Greek etymological dictionary predating Julius Caesar comes up, I
think people should be free to consider it without being ridiculed by Egyptologists.
Do you think etymonline will ever quote Bernal, and give it as a pro-
posed, if contested, etymology?
Best wishes, and happy etymology!
On 24/09/2026 10:25 p.m., Johann 'Myrkraverk' Oskarsson wrote:
On 9/24/2026 2:31 PM, Bertel Lund Hansen wrote:
Den 23.09.2026 kl. 22.36 skrev Johann 'Myrkraverk' Oskarsson:
On that subject, the sequel, is there a good etymological dictionary,
preferably in physical form, I can still buy?
This online dictionary is free:
-a-a-a-a-a-a https://www.etymonline.com/
It is rather shallow, and does get things wrong occasionally.-a Not a
point of merit, but for instance, Martin Bernal proposed Egyptian ety-
mology for /desert/ in his epic /Black Athena/, volume I if I recall
correctly.
Not "desert", I think, which has an uncontroversial Latin etymology
(passive participle of de:serere 'to abandon').
Perhaps you're thinking of "oasis", about which I think Bernal had
something to say. I can't access OED right now, but COD says it's in
Greek, "apparently from Ancient Egyptian". And AHD more or less agrees,
but cites Coptic (Very-a Late Egyptian) ouahe 'oasis, dwelling area'.
I believe Egyptologists are still denying this etymology, and I'm not
sure why.-a I think it's a valid proposal.-a Bernal uses the term /compe-
titive plausibility/, and until thoroughly disabused by perhaps a Roman
or Greek etymological dictionary predating Julius Caesar comes up, I
think people should be free to consider it without being ridiculed by
Egyptologists.
Being an "Egyptologist" entails, I suppose, some ability to read the language, but not necessarily expertise in etymology.
On 24/09/2026 12:41, Peter Moylan wrote:
On 24/09/26 18:02, athel.cb@gmail.com wrote:
Paul Erd+as wasn't known for having any interest in sex!
My Erd+as number is 3 (not counted |a la Xkcd).
So is mine, which surprised me when I looked it up. The research
world is a small world.
The one that really surprised me was my Mathematics Genealogy
tree.
http://www.pmoylan.org/pages/family/MathGenealogy.pdf
Interesting. So what are the relationships, as defined by the links? "Taught", "collaborated", "occupied same space as" "begat" or
something else?
On 24/09/26 18:02, athel.cb@gmail.com wrote:
Paul Erd+as wasn't known for having any interest in sex!
My Erd+as number is 3 (not counted |a la Xkcd).
So is mine, which surprised me when I looked it up. The research world
is a small world.
The one that really surprised me was my Mathematics Genealogy tree.
http://www.pmoylan.org/pages/family/MathGenealogy.pdf
On 24/09/26 18:02, athel.cb@gmail.com wrote:
Paul Erd+as wasn't known for having any interest in sex!
My Erd+as number is 3 (not counted |a la Xkcd).
So is mine, which surprised me when I looked it up. The research world
is a small world.
The one that really surprised me was my Mathematics Genealogy tree.
http://www.pmoylan.org/pages/family/MathGenealogy.pdf
On 24/09/26 18:02, athel.cb@gmail.com wrote:
Paul Erd+as wasn't known for having any interest in sex!
My Erd+as number is 3 (not counted |a la Xkcd).
So is mine, which surprised me when I looked it up. The research world
is a small world.
The one that really surprised me was my Mathematics Genealogy tree.
http://www.pmoylan.org/pages/family/MathGenealogy.pdf
Peter Moylan <peter@pmoylan.org> posted:
On 24/09/26 18:02, athel.cb@gmail.com wrote:Chrome refuses to open this, calling it insecure! I'll try another browser.
Paul Erd?s wasn't known for having any interest in sex!
My Erd?s number is 3 (not counted a la Xkcd).
So is mine, which surprised me when I looked it up. The research world
is a small world.
The one that really surprised me was my Mathematics Genealogy tree.
http://www.pmoylan.org/pages/family/MathGenealogy.pdf
OK. Firefox was more cooperative. Alas, I don't find anything to say about it.
On 23/09/2026 21:06, Sam Plusnet wrote:
On 23/09/2026 09:51, occam wrote:
On 22/09/2026 21:19, Johann 'Myrkraverk' Oskarsson wrote:
On 9/23/2026 2:18 AM, Sam Plusnet wrote:Not just any webcomic.-a XKCD is a hallowed repository of reference
Apologies if this one has already been mentioned, but when I saw it I >>>>> immediately thought of this Newsgroup.
https://xkcd.com/403/
material in AUE.-a Respect it.
The mouse-over seems especially on topic for aue.
That adds a whole new dimension to 'six degrees of separation'.
Co-authored papers aside, I wonder how many degrees of separation there
are between me and Marilyn Monroe?
Le 24/09/2026 |a 07:26, occam a |-crit :
On 23/09/2026 22:18, Mark Brader wrote:
"Sam":
Apologies if this one has already been mentioned, but when I saw it I
immediately thought of this Newsgroup.
https://xkcd.com/403/
I suggest that the alt.usage.englishiest xkcd is number 1010,
(and then read its sequel, 1012).
<smile> Yes, 1010 is particularly apt.-a Overlong in text, plenty hair
splitting, and rich in pedantry.
And anyway, the OED (which is descriptive, not prescriptive, right
enough) lists "An exceptionally large ocean wave caused by an event that disturbs a large expanse of water such as an earthquake, volcanic
eruption, landslide, or meteorite impact" - Sense 1.b., 1844 on.
"The United States and New Zealand conducted secret tests of a 'tsunami bomb' designed to destroy coastal cities by using underwater explosions
to trigger tidal waves" - 'Daily Telegraph', 2013-01-02.
On 24/09/2026 08:19, Hibou wrote:
Le 24/09/2026 a 07:26, occam a ocrit :
On 23/09/2026 22:18, Mark Brader wrote:
"Sam":
Apologies if this one has already been mentioned, but when I saw it I >>>>> immediately thought of this Newsgroup.
https://xkcd.com/403/
I suggest that the alt.usage.englishiest xkcd is number 1010,
(and then read its sequel, 1012).
<smile> Yes, 1010 is particularly apt.a Overlong in text, plenty hair
splitting, and rich in pedantry.
And anyway, the OED (which is descriptive, not prescriptive, right enough) >> lists "An exceptionally large ocean wave caused by an event that disturbs a >> large expanse of water such as an earthquake, volcanic eruption, landslide, >> or meteorite impact" - Sense 1.b., 1844 on.
"The United States and New Zealand conducted secret tests of a 'tsunami
bomb' designed to destroy coastal cities by using underwater explosions to >> trigger tidal waves" - 'Daily Telegraph', 2013-01-02.
I would guess that collaboration involved the US supplying the bomb and monitoring equipment etc. etc., whilst NZ supplied the location.
Peter Moylan wrote on 24.09.26 12:41:
On 24/09/26 18:02, athel.cb@gmail.com wrote:
Paul Erd+as wasn't known for having any interest in sex!
My Erd+as number is 3 (not counted |a la Xkcd).
So is mine, which surprised me when I looked it up. The research world
is a small world.
The one that really surprised me was my Mathematics Genealogy tree.
http://www.pmoylan.org/pages/family/MathGenealogy.pdf
How did you manage to create that file from the genealogy database?
On Thu, 24 Sep 2026 18:29:26 GMT, athel.cb@gmail.com <user12588@newsgrouper.org.invalid> wrote:
Peter Moylan <peter@pmoylan.org> posted:
On 24/09/26 18:02, athel.cb@gmail.com wrote:Chrome refuses to open this, calling it insecure! I'll try another browser.
Paul Erd?s wasn't known for having any interest in sex!
My Erd?s number is 3 (not counted a la Xkcd).
So is mine, which surprised me when I looked it up. The research world
is a small world.
The one that really surprised me was my Mathematics Genealogy tree.
http://www.pmoylan.org/pages/family/MathGenealogy.pdf
Chrome does tell me that it's an insecure site, but allows me to allow
it.
OK. Firefox was more cooperative. Alas, I don't find anything to say about it.
It's....ummm...quite involved.
"The United States and New Zealand conducted secret tests of a 'tsunami
bomb' designed to destroy coastal cities by using underwater explosions
to trigger tidal waves" - 'Daily Telegraph', 2013-01-02.
And anyway, the OED (which is descriptive, not prescriptive, right
enough) lists "An exceptionally large ocean wave caused by an event that disturbs a large expanse of water such as an earthquake, volcanic
eruption, landslide, or meteorite impact" - Sense 1.b., 1844 on.
"The United States and New Zealand conducted secret tests of a 'tsunami bomb' designed to destroy coastal cities by using underwater explosions
to trigger tidal waves" - 'Daily Telegraph', 2013-01-02.
Remember-a Thursday, when-a Sam Plusnet asked plaintively:
On 24/09/2026 08:19, Hibou wrote:
Le 24/09/2026 |a 07:26, occam a |-crit :
On 23/09/2026 22:18, Mark Brader wrote:
"Sam":
Apologies if this one has already been mentioned, but when I saw it I >>>>>> immediately thought of this Newsgroup.
https://xkcd.com/403/
I suggest that the alt.usage.englishiest xkcd is number 1010,
(and then read its sequel, 1012).
<smile> Yes, 1010 is particularly apt.-a Overlong in text, plenty hair >>>> splitting, and rich in pedantry.
And anyway, the OED (which is descriptive, not prescriptive, right
enough) lists "An exceptionally large ocean wave caused by an event
that disturbs a large expanse of water such as an earthquake,
volcanic eruption, landslide, or meteorite impact" - Sense 1.b., 1844
on.
"The United States and New Zealand conducted secret tests of a
'tsunami bomb' designed to destroy coastal cities by using underwater
explosions to trigger tidal waves" - 'Daily Telegraph', 2013-01-02.
I would guess that collaboration involved the US supplying the bomb
and monitoring equipment etc. etc., whilst NZ supplied the location.
Wouldn't be secret after the bomb was detonated, if it's much bigger
than a depth charge, no?
On 25/09/26 04:44, Tony Cooper wrote:
On Thu, 24 Sep 2026 18:29:26 GMT, athel.cb@gmail.com
<user12588@newsgrouper.org.invalid> wrote:
Peter Moylan <peter@pmoylan.org> posted:
On 24/09/26 18:02, athel.cb@gmail.com wrote:Chrome refuses to open this, calling it insecure! I'll try another
Paul Erd?s wasn't known for having any interest in sex!
My Erd?s number is 3 (not counted |a la Xkcd).
So is mine, which surprised me when I looked it up. The research world >>>> is a small world.
The one that really surprised me was my Mathematics Genealogy tree.
http://www.pmoylan.org/pages/family/MathGenealogy.pdf
browser.
Chrome does tell me that it's an insecure site, but allows me to allow
it.
OK. Firefox was more cooperative. Alas, I don't find anything to say
about it.
There's not much overlap between mathematics and chemistry, which in
some ways is surprising.
It's....ummm...quite involved.
It supports my belief that pretty much all human scientific advance is
due to a small handful of people. Once you go back a few generations, everyone is related to everyone else.
On 25/09/26 04:22, Carlo XYZ wrote:
Peter Moylan wrote on 24.09.26 12:41:
On 24/09/26 18:02, athel.cb@gmail.com wrote:
Paul Erd+as wasn't known for having any interest in sex!
My Erd+as number is 3 (not counted |a la Xkcd).
So is mine, which surprised me when I looked it up. The research world
is a small world.
The one that really surprised me was my Mathematics Genealogy tree.
http://www.pmoylan.org/pages/family/MathGenealogy.pdf
How did you manage to create that file from the genealogy database?
Slowly.
Doing the graphics wasn't hard, of course. I think I used OpenOffice
Draw. But for the source data, I just had to step through the links on
the Mathematics Genealogy web site.
Breaking it up into sheets took a bit of trial and error.--- Synchronet 3.22a-Linux NewsLink 1.2
On 25/09/26 04:44, Tony Cooper wrote:
On Thu, 24 Sep 2026 18:29:26 GMT, athel.cb@gmail.com
<user12588@newsgrouper.org.invalid> wrote:
Peter Moylan <peter@pmoylan.org> posted:
On 24/09/26 18:02, athel.cb@gmail.com wrote:Chrome refuses to open this, calling it insecure! I'll try another
Paul Erd?s wasn't known for having any interest in sex!
My Erd?s number is 3 (not counted a la Xkcd).
So is mine, which surprised me when I looked it up. The research world >>>> is a small world.
The one that really surprised me was my Mathematics Genealogy tree.
http://www.pmoylan.org/pages/family/MathGenealogy.pdf
browser.
Chrome does tell me that it's an insecure site, but allows me to allow
it.
OK. Firefox was more cooperative. Alas, I don't find anything to say
about it.
There's not much overlap between mathematics and chemistry, which in
some ways is surprising.
It's....ummm...quite involved.
It supports my belief that pretty much all human scientific advance is
due to a small handful of people. Once you go back a few generations, everyone is related to everyone else.
Peter Moylan wrote on 25.09.26 00:54:
On 25/09/26 04:22, Carlo XYZ wrote:
Peter Moylan wrote on 24.09.26 12:41:
The one that really surprised me was my Mathematics Genealogy
tree.
http://www.pmoylan.org/pages/family/MathGenealogy.pdf
How did you manage to create that file from the genealogy
database?
Slowly.
Doing the graphics wasn't hard, of course. I think I used
OpenOffice Draw. But for the source data, I just had to step
through the links on the Mathematics Genealogy web site.
So, "by hand". I had hoped for a ready-made package to be avaliable somewhere.
On 9/23/2026 4:51 PM, occam wrote:
On 22/09/2026 21:19, Johann 'Myrkraverk' Oskarsson wrote:
On 9/23/2026 2:18 AM, Sam Plusnet wrote:Not just any webcomic. XKCD is a hallowed repository of reference
Apologies if this one has already been mentioned, but when I saw it I
immediately thought of this Newsgroup.
https://xkcd.com/403/
material in AUE. Respect it.
No. X.K.C.D. is not that good of a webcomic. There are better ones.
On 25/09/26 04:44, Tony Cooper wrote:al got A level Chemistry ,,,,". I had never done any Chemistry in my
On Thu, 24 Sep 2026 18:29:26 GMT, athel.cb@gmail.com
<user12588@newsgrouper.org.invalid> wrote:
Peter Moylan <peter@pmoylan.org> posted:
On 24/09/26 18:02, athel.cb@gmail.com wrote:Chrome refuses to open this, calling it insecure! I'll try another
Paul Erd?s wasn't known for having any interest in sex!
My Erd?s number is 3 (not counted |a la Xkcd).
So is mine, which surprised me when I looked it up. The research world >>>> is a small world.
The one that really surprised me was my Mathematics Genealogy tree.
http://www.pmoylan.org/pages/family/MathGenealogy.pdf
browser.
Chrome does tell me that it's an insecure site, but allows me to allow
it.
OK. Firefox was more cooperative. Alas, I don't find anything to say
about it.
There's not much overlap between mathematics and chemistry, which in
some ways is surprising.
At the start of my second year at university we were told " Since you've
On 9/24/2026 7:11 PM, Ross Clark wrote:
On 24/09/2026 10:25 p.m., Johann 'Myrkraverk' Oskarsson wrote:
On 9/24/2026 2:31 PM, Bertel Lund Hansen wrote:
Den 23.09.2026 kl. 22.36 skrev Johann 'Myrkraverk' Oskarsson:
On that subject, the sequel, is there a good etymological dictionary, >>>>> preferably in physical form, I can still buy?
This online dictionary is free:
-a-a-a-a-a-a https://www.etymonline.com/
It is rather shallow, and does get things wrong occasionally.-a Not a
point of merit, but for instance, Martin Bernal proposed Egyptian ety-
mology for /desert/ in his epic /Black Athena/, volume I if I recall
correctly.
Not "desert", I think, which has an uncontroversial Latin etymology
(passive participle of de:serere 'to abandon').
Perhaps you're thinking of "oasis", about which I think Bernal had
something to say. I can't access OED right now, but COD says it's in
Greek, "apparently from Ancient Egyptian". And AHD more or less
agrees, but cites Coptic (Very-a Late Egyptian) ouahe 'oasis, dwelling
area'.
Nope, /desert/, the noun.
Bernal dared to contest it, and the subsequent flame war can still be
read if you buy the correct academic publication(s).
My point is not that the O.E.D. is wrong, nor that Martin Bernal is
right, but that this stuff does get contested from time to time, and
people tend to believe the O.E.D. is always correct.
flame war, I side with Bernal, and claim this etymology really should be mentioned in etymological dictionaries, but maybe not entomological
unless we start to discuss desert insects.
I believe Egyptologists are still denying this etymology, and I'm not
sure why.-a I think it's a valid proposal.-a Bernal uses the term /compe- >>> titive plausibility/, and until thoroughly disabused by perhaps a Roman
or Greek etymological dictionary predating Julius Caesar comes up, I
think people should be free to consider it without being ridiculed by
Egyptologists.
Being an "Egyptologist" entails, I suppose, some ability to read the
language, but not necessarily expertise in etymology.
And hubris.-a At least for the classicists who didn't realize they were racists for something like two hundred years until Bernal pointed it
out.-a It's now generally accepted among world famous Egyptologists that
the study of classics was full of racism, but this particular etymology
is still dismissed.
Do you have any objections to the English word /desert/ having an origin
in Egyptian?
Best wishes, and happy flame wars for hundreds of years!
On 25/09/2026 00:02, Peter Moylan wrote:
There's not much overlap between mathematics and chemistry, which
in some ways is surprising.
At the start of my second year at university we were told " Since
you've al got A level Chemistry ,,,,". I had never done any
Chemistry in my life. Maths & Physics were my subjects. But, I found
a significant correlation between maths and chemistry to allow me to
get by.
On 25/09/26 10:30, Charles Hope wrote:
On 25/09/2026 00:02, Peter Moylan wrote:
There's not much overlap between mathematics and chemistry, which
in some ways is surprising.
At the start of my second year at university we were told " Since
you've al got A level Chemistry ,,,,". I had never done any
Chemistry in my life. Maths & Physics were my subjects. But, I found
a significant correlation between maths and chemistry to allow me to
get by.
The subjects are related in that they attract people with a "hard
science" form of thinking. And of course some aspects of chemistry are mathematically demanding. But I don't think I've encountered a paper in
a mathematical journal authored by a chemist, or vice versa. Athel might
know of examples.
On 24/09/2026 11:27 p.m., Johann 'Myrkraverk' Oskarsson wrote:
On 9/24/2026 7:11 PM, Ross Clark wrote:
On 24/09/2026 10:25 p.m., Johann 'Myrkraverk' Oskarsson wrote:
On 9/24/2026 2:31 PM, Bertel Lund Hansen wrote:
Den 23.09.2026 kl. 22.36 skrev Johann 'Myrkraverk' Oskarsson:
On that subject, the sequel, is there a good etymological dictionary, >>>>>> preferably in physical form, I can still buy?
This online dictionary is free:
-a-a-a-a-a-a https://www.etymonline.com/
It is rather shallow, and does get things wrong occasionally.-a Not a
point of merit, but for instance, Martin Bernal proposed Egyptian ety- >>>> mology for /desert/ in his epic /Black Athena/, volume I if I recall
correctly.
Not "desert", I think, which has an uncontroversial Latin etymology
(passive participle of de:serere 'to abandon').
Perhaps you're thinking of "oasis", about which I think Bernal had
something to say. I can't access OED right now, but COD says it's in
Greek, "apparently from Ancient Egyptian". And AHD more or less
agrees, but cites Coptic (Very-a Late Egyptian) ouahe 'oasis, dwelling
area'.
Nope, /desert/, the noun.
It was the noun I was talking about. A desert is land that is abandoned, left uninhabited and uncultivated. (I've now been able to check OED, and they have no quarrel with it.)
You claim it's /uncontroversial/, but Martin
Bernal dared to contest it, and the subsequent flame war can still be
read if you buy the correct academic publication(s).
I sure wish you could remember where these are.
My point is not that the O.E.D. is wrong, nor that Martin Bernal is
right, but that this stuff does get contested from time to time, and
people tend to believe the O.E.D. is always correct.
Yes, etymologies are contested all the time. (I have contested a couple
of OED's myself.) If people accord OED's etymologies a higher degree of credibility, it is because they are conclusions from long histories of contestations like this -- not just dogma handed down from some
benighted past era.
Incidentally, they have a much fuller account of "oasis" than the other dictionaries I mentioned. In the earliest English appearances (16th-17th century), as in Greek, it's treated as a proper name ("a countrye in Egypt"), but the generic sense starts to emerge in the early 19th
century, and is derived from Ancient Egyptian wb+2'-b|!. (They also mention the Coptic form, and a probable Arabic cognate.
In this particular
flame war, I side with Bernal, and claim this etymology really should be
mentioned in etymological dictionaries, but maybe not entomological
unless we start to discuss desert insects.
I believe Egyptologists are still denying this etymology, and I'm not
sure why.-a I think it's a valid proposal.-a Bernal uses the term /compe- >>>> titive plausibility/, and until thoroughly disabused by perhaps a Roman >>>> or Greek etymological dictionary predating Julius Caesar comes up, I
think people should be free to consider it without being ridiculed by
Egyptologists.
Being an "Egyptologist" entails, I suppose, some ability to read the
language, but not necessarily expertise in etymology.
And hubris.-a At least for the classicists who didn't realize they were
racists for something like two hundred years until Bernal pointed it
out.-a It's now generally accepted among world famous Egyptologists that
the study of classics was full of racism, but this particular etymology
is still dismissed.
Because etymological judgements are not based on who's a racist and
who's not.
Do you have any objections to the English word /desert/ having an origin
in Egyptian?
Why would I? assuming there's evidence for it.
-a I mean, do we /really know/ how the Romans got theirs?
Got their what?
On 24/09/26 18:02, athel.cb@gmail.com wrote:
Paul Erd+as wasn't known for having any interest in sex!
My Erd+as number is 3 (not counted |a la Xkcd).
So is mine, which surprised me when I looked it up. The research world
is a small world.
The one that really surprised me was my Mathematics Genealogy tree.
http://www.pmoylan.org/pages/family/MathGenealogy.pdf
Sam Plusnet <not@home.com> wrote:
On 23/09/2026 09:51, occam wrote:
On 22/09/2026 21:19, Johann 'Myrkraverk' Oskarsson wrote:
On 9/23/2026 2:18 AM, Sam Plusnet wrote:Not just any webcomic. XKCD is a hallowed repository of reference
Apologies if this one has already been mentioned, but when I saw it I >>>>> immediately thought of this Newsgroup.
https://xkcd.com/403/
material in AUE. Respect it.
The mouse-over seems especially on topic for aue.
A Dutch author invented the term 'kutzwager' for it.
(lit. cunt-brother-in-law)
On 9/25/2026 7:02 PM, Ross Clark wrote:
On 24/09/2026 11:27 p.m., Johann 'Myrkraverk' Oskarsson wrote:
On 9/24/2026 7:11 PM, Ross Clark wrote:
On 24/09/2026 10:25 p.m., Johann 'Myrkraverk' Oskarsson wrote:
On 9/24/2026 2:31 PM, Bertel Lund Hansen wrote:
Den 23.09.2026 kl. 22.36 skrev Johann 'Myrkraverk' Oskarsson:
On that subject, the sequel, is there a good etymological
dictionary,
preferably in physical form, I can still buy?
This online dictionary is free:
-a-a-a-a-a-a https://www.etymonline.com/
It is rather shallow, and does get things wrong occasionally.-a Not a >>>>> point of merit, but for instance, Martin Bernal proposed Egyptian ety- >>>>> mology for /desert/ in his epic /Black Athena/, volume I if I recall >>>>> correctly.
Not "desert", I think, which has an uncontroversial Latin etymology
(passive participle of de:serere 'to abandon').
Perhaps you're thinking of "oasis", about which I think Bernal had
something to say. I can't access OED right now, but COD says it's in
Greek, "apparently from Ancient Egyptian". And AHD more or less
agrees, but cites Coptic (Very-a Late Egyptian) ouahe 'oasis,
dwelling area'.
Nope, /desert/, the noun.
It was the noun I was talking about. A desert is land that is
abandoned, left uninhabited and uncultivated. (I've now been able to
check OED, and they have no quarrel with it.)
You claim it's /uncontroversial/, but Martin
Bernal dared to contest it, and the subsequent flame war can still be
read if you buy the correct academic publication(s).
I sure wish you could remember where these are.
Of course, from Bernal's side it's /Black Athena/ volumes I-III, and
/Black Athena Writes Back/.-a I forgot the title of the major publication which /Black Athena Writes Back/ was primarily responding to.
I'm sure there were others I am unaware of.
My point is not that the O.E.D. is wrong, nor that Martin Bernal is
right, but that this stuff does get contested from time to time, and
people tend to believe the O.E.D. is always correct.
Yes, etymologies are contested all the time. (I have contested a
couple of OED's myself.) If people accord OED's etymologies a higher
degree of credibility, it is because they are conclusions from long
histories of contestations like this -- not just dogma handed down
from some benighted past era.
Incidentally, they have a much fuller account of "oasis" than the
other dictionaries I mentioned. In the earliest English appearances
(16th-17th century), as in Greek, it's treated as a proper name ("a
countrye in Egypt"), but the generic sense starts to emerge in the
early 19th century, and is derived from Ancient Egyptian wb+2'-b|!. (They >> also mention the Coptic form, and a probable Arabic cognate.
In this particular
flame war, I side with Bernal, and claim this etymology really should be >>> mentioned in etymological dictionaries, but maybe not entomological
unless we start to discuss desert insects.
I believe Egyptologists are still denying this etymology, and I'm not >>>>> sure why.-a I think it's a valid proposal.-a Bernal uses the term
/compe-
titive plausibility/, and until thoroughly disabused by perhaps a
Roman
or Greek etymological dictionary predating Julius Caesar comes up, I >>>>> think people should be free to consider it without being ridiculed by >>>>> Egyptologists.
Being an "Egyptologist" entails, I suppose, some ability to read the
language, but not necessarily expertise in etymology.
And hubris.-a At least for the classicists who didn't realize they were
racists for something like two hundred years until Bernal pointed it
out.-a It's now generally accepted among world famous Egyptologists that >>> the study of classics was full of racism, but this particular etymology
is still dismissed.
Because etymological judgements are not based on who's a racist and
who's not.
Except it was.-a For Greek.-a That was the underlying theme in Bernal's
great epic.-a It's now accepted among real world famous Egyptologists,
that the study of Classics was in fact racist for approximately two
hun-dred years, and nobody noticed [1] until Bernal started to write about it.
Of course, most of Bernal's etymological suggestions have been dismissed
and the current crop of Egyptologists [2] simply say that he "overstated
his case."-a In this discussion, if you haven't read /Black Athena/, it's easy to dismiss the underlying current in Bernal's epic, and that is the
meta science [3] of the science of the Classics.-a Simply put, most, ety- mologies of Semitic origins were denied on racist grounds in the langua-
ge of the Greeks, which in turn affects the etymology of the language of
the Anglo Saxons, and other peoples whose native tongue is now the spok-
en word of the King of England.-a [4]
Do you have any objections to the English word /desert/ having an origin >>> in Egyptian?
Why would I? assuming there's evidence for it.
-a-a I mean, do we /really know/ how the Romans got theirs?
Got their what?
Their word for /deserts/.
Wouldn't it be much more natural that they encountered the phenomenon
in what we now call Northern Africa, of which one of the major civili- zations was Egypt?
More to the point, do we have etymological dictionaries of Roman Latin?
For that matter, where did the Egyptians get their word?-a Can we simply
task the Egyptologists to dig up the etymological dictionary of the old kingdom of Egypt?
Best wishes, and happy Egyptology in alt.usage.english!
[1] At least, nobody important enough start a real flame war.
[2] I have the story from Bob Brier, and you can listen to him
if you bother to buy his courses.-a I forgot which episodes to
give you chapter and verse.-a I do not know how Classicists as they
call themselves to this day tell this story.
[3] The study of scientific literature, independent of the underlying science.-a I don't have a better word for it, and this is indeed unrelat-
ed to both the Edinburgh /ML/ programming language, and Meta the com-
pany.
[4] This paragraph is also right justified.-a But not the others.
On 9/24/2026 12:41 PM, Peter Moylan wrote:
On 24/09/26 18:02, athel.cb@gmail.com wrote:
Paul Erd+as wasn't known for having any interest in sex!
My Erd+as number is 3 (not counted |a la Xkcd).
So is mine, which surprised me when I looked it up. The research
world is a small world.
The one that really surprised me was my Mathematics Genealogy
tree.
http://www.pmoylan.org/pages/family/MathGenealogy.pdf
What are the rules for highligthing some people and not others? I
would likely have highlighted e.g. Lindemann and Klein, but not
Eisenstein by my assessment of impact or fame.
On 9/25/2026 7:02 PM, Ross Clark wrote:
On 24/09/2026 11:27 p.m., Johann 'Myrkraverk' Oskarsson wrote:
Their word for /deserts/. Are there any natural deserts in Italy?
Wouldn't it be much more natural that they encountered the phenomenon
in what we now call Northern Africa, of which one of the major civili- zations was Egypt?
More to the point, do we have etymological dictionaries of Roman Latin?
For that matter, where did the Egyptians get their word? Can we simply
task the Egyptologists to dig up the etymological dictionary of the old kingdom of Egypt?
On 24/09/2026 22:58, Snidely wrote:
Remembera Thursday, whena Sam Plusnet asked plaintively:
On 24/09/2026 08:19, Hibou wrote:
Le 24/09/2026 a 07:26, occam a ocrit :
On 23/09/2026 22:18, Mark Brader wrote:
"Sam":
Apologies if this one has already been mentioned, but when I saw it I >>>>>>> immediately thought of this Newsgroup.
https://xkcd.com/403/
I suggest that the alt.usage.englishiest xkcd is number 1010,
(and then read its sequel, 1012).
<smile> Yes, 1010 is particularly apt.a Overlong in text, plenty hair >>>>> splitting, and rich in pedantry.
And anyway, the OED (which is descriptive, not prescriptive, right
enough) lists "An exceptionally large ocean wave caused by an event that >>>> disturbs a large expanse of water such as an earthquake, volcanic
eruption, landslide, or meteorite impact" - Sense 1.b., 1844 on.
"The United States and New Zealand conducted secret tests of a 'tsunami >>>> bomb' designed to destroy coastal cities by using underwater explosions >>>> to trigger tidal waves" - 'Daily Telegraph', 2013-01-02.
I would guess that collaboration involved the US supplying the bomb and >>> monitoring equipment etc. etc., whilst NZ supplied the location.
Wouldn't be secret after the bomb was detonated, if it's much bigger than a >> depth charge, no?
What's that phrase? "Pics - or it didn't happen."
On Friday, Johann 'Myrkraverk' Oskarsson pointed out that ...
On 9/25/2026 7:02 PM, Ross Clark wrote:
On 24/09/2026 11:27 p.m., Johann 'Myrkraverk' Oskarsson wrote:
Their word for /deserts/.-a Are there any natural deserts in Italy?
Wouldn't it be much more natural that they encountered the phenomenon
in what we now call Northern Africa, of which one of the major civili-
zations was Egypt?
"Abandoned, wasteland" need not apply only to large stretches of
extremly hot dry sand.-a ISTR beeing told of Roman papers describing some
of the Alps as "desert".-a And did the Romans do Spain before Egypt?-a I would think so, and they certainly did Carthage before Julius, which was mostly coastal Africa.-a They made a serious attempt at making Carthage "abandoned".
More to the point, do we have etymological dictionaries of Roman Latin?
Pliny and company, no?-a-a Although that would mostly be considered "folk etymology" today, without the effort to find earliest citations that is expected today.
If I remember correctly, /dsr/ or the variation thereof used by theFor that matter, where did the Egyptians get their word?-a Can we simply
task the Egyptologists to dig up the etymological dictionary of the old
kingdom of Egypt?
It's turtles all the way down.
On Friday, Johann 'Myrkraverk' Oskarsson pointed out that ...
On 9/25/2026 7:02 PM, Ross Clark wrote:
On 24/09/2026 11:27 p.m., Johann 'Myrkraverk' Oskarsson wrote:
Their word for /deserts/.a Are there any natural deserts in Italy?
Wouldn't it be much more natural that they encountered the phenomenon
in what we now call Northern Africa, of which one of the major civili-
zations was Egypt?
"Abandoned, wasteland" need not apply only to large stretches of
extremly hot dry sand.a ISTR beeing told of Roman papers describing some
of the Alps as "desert".a And did the Romans do Spain before Egypt?a I
would think so, and they certainly did Carthage before Julius, which was mostly coastal Africa.a They made a serious attempt at making Carthage "abandoned".
More to the point, do we have etymological dictionaries of Roman Latin?
Pliny and company, no?aa Although that would mostly be considered "folk etymology" today, without the effort to find earliest citations that is expected today.
For that matter, where did the Egyptians get their word?a Can we simply
task the Egyptologists to dig up the etymological dictionary of the old
kingdom of Egypt?
It's turtles all the way down.
/dps
So that's for usage in modern western European languages. Exactly which areas the Romans described as "desertus/um", no doubt someone could tell
us.
On 9/26/2026 1:40 PM, Ross Clark wrote:
So that's for usage in modern western European languages. Exactly
which areas the Romans described as "desertus/um", no doubt someone
could tell us.
Of course, the etymology couldn't be backwards, because the noun wasn't borrowed.-a Such as in modern Japanese, /pinchi/ means pliers, because
they "pinch."
So, under absolutely no circumstances, did the Romans in Egypt mistake
the description /red/ for the uninhabited sands as being /deserted/.
I believe you know this for a fact, because you're over three thousand
years old.-a Good job, and I'll be certain to celebrate your next birth-
day.
Best wishes, and happy long lives in alt.usage.english!
On 26/09/2026 9:22 p.m., Johann 'Myrkraverk' Oskarsson wrote:
On 9/26/2026 1:40 PM, Ross Clark wrote:
So that's for usage in modern western European languages. Exactly
which areas the Romans described as "desertus/um", no doubt someone
could tell us.
Of course, the etymology couldn't be backwards, because the noun wasn't
borrowed.-a Such as in modern Japanese, /pinchi/ means pliers, because
they "pinch."
So, under absolutely no circumstances, did the Romans in Egypt mistake
the description /red/ for the uninhabited sands as being /deserted/.
I believe you know this for a fact, because you're over three thousand
years old.-a Good job, and I'll be certain to celebrate your next birth-
day.
Best wishes, and happy long lives in alt.usage.english!
I can smell the whimsy on your breath, but I have no idea whether it conceals any serious response to what I said above.
Peter Moylan <peter@pmoylan.org> posted:
On 25/09/26 10:30, Charles Hope wrote:
On 25/09/2026 00:02, Peter Moylan wrote:
There's not much overlap between mathematics and chemistry, which
in some ways is surprising.
At the start of my second year at university we were told " Since
you've al got A level Chemistry ,,,,". I had never done any
Chemistry in my life. Maths & Physics were my subjects. But, I found
a significant correlation between maths and chemistry to allow me to
get by.
The subjects are related in that they attract people with a "hard
science" form of thinking. And of course some aspects of chemistry are
mathematically demanding. But I don't think I've encountered a paper in
a mathematical journal authored by a chemist, or vice versa. Athel might
know of examples.
Charles Coulson springs to mind, but he seems to have published mainly in the Proceedings of the Royal Society, which has lots of mathematics, but isn't really a mathematics journal. Doubtless there are other quantum chemists, but I can't think of any. I don't think you'll find any organic chemists.
.
Going in the opposite direction, the best I can think of is Santiago Schnell, who has published in the FEBS Journal (Federation of European Biochemical Societies Journal).
The drawing program was a useful ready-made tool. With its concept of a "connector", you can move the rectangular blocks around untill they fit neatly, and the connecting lines just follow.
The data collection could be automated, I think. Just use curl to follow
the web links, and then you could write a program to parse the pages
that are fetched, to extract the useful information. I suppose, though,
that a bit of human judgement is needed to know when to stop following
the unpromising leads.
And don't suggest using an AI for that. I've been using an AI, at the
urging of someone else, to debug software, and it's a mixed blessing.
They can be incredibly stubborn about sticking with their incorrect but dogmatic assertions.
On 9/26/2026 6:45 PM, Ross Clark wrote:
On 26/09/2026 9:22 p.m., Johann 'Myrkraverk' Oskarsson wrote:
On 9/26/2026 1:40 PM, Ross Clark wrote:
So that's for usage in modern western European languages. Exactly
which areas the Romans described as "desertus/um", no doubt someone
could tell us.
Of course, the etymology couldn't be backwards, because the noun wasn't
borrowed.-a Such as in modern Japanese, /pinchi/ means pliers, because
they "pinch."
So, under absolutely no circumstances, did the Romans in Egypt mistake
the description /red/ for the uninhabited sands as being /deserted/.
I believe you know this for a fact, because you're over three thousand
years old.-a Good job, and I'll be certain to celebrate your next birth- >>> day.
Best wishes, and happy long lives in alt.usage.english!
I can smell the whimsy on your breath, but I have no idea whether it
conceals any serious response to what I said above.
If you want a serious reply, it's simply this: /I do not know/.-a I don't
try to insist that Bernal is right, nor that the O.E.D. is wrong.
I just think it's an etymology that deserves mention because the /seman-
tic fit/ is too great to ignore.
than the Egyptians borrowed the term from the Romans, during their stint
as a legion in the armies of Troy VII, and before they settled Latinium.
Do we know where they were, before ca. 1000 B.C., or before Julius Cae
sar?-a As far as I understand the archaeology, most of the surrounding
Italy was settled by the Etruscans, and probably the Greeks, before
then.
Do you think they independently created their military traditions, or is
it possible they borrowed theirs from the Phoenicians?-a I mean, are we taking the stand that they /didn't/ learn military traditions from Egypt
when we have archaeological evidence of -- I forgot what, please forgive
me -- some type of fortifications we -- the plebs -- have come to know
as /Roman/, from the Egyptian middle kingdom or older?
I mean, when do we start to assume linguistic or racial superiority, and
deny possibly older traditions from Afroasiatic [1] origins?
Best wishes, and happy Afroasiatic in alt.usage.english!
[1] This is duly anointed linguistic term, I did not make it up myself.
Ross Clark <benlizro@ihug.co.nz> wrote:
On 26/09/2026 12:05 p.m., Snidely wrote:
On Friday, Johann 'Myrkraverk' Oskarsson pointed out that ...
On 9/25/2026 7:02 PM, Ross Clark wrote:
On 24/09/2026 11:27 p.m., Johann 'Myrkraverk' Oskarsson wrote:
Their word for /deserts/. Are there any natural deserts in Italy?
Wouldn't it be much more natural that they encountered the phenomenon
in what we now call Northern Africa, of which one of the major civili- >> zations was Egypt?
"Abandoned, wasteland" need not apply only to large stretches of extremly hot dry sand. ISTR beeing told of Roman papers describing some of the Alps as "desert". And did the Romans do Spain before Egypt? I would think so, and they certainly did Carthage before Julius, which was mostly coastal Africa. They made a serious attempt at making Carthage "abandoned".
"In English before the 20th century, desert was often used in the sense
of "unpopulated area", without specific reference to aridity...Phrases
such as "desert island" and "Great American Desert", or Shakespeare's "deserts of Bohemia" (The Winter's Tale) in previous centuries did not necessarily imply sand or aridity; their focus was the sparse population."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desert#Etymology
So that's for usage in modern western European languages. Exactly which areas the Romans described as "desertus/um", no doubt someone could tell us.
'Desert' in this sense is still in modern use.
For example, 'junk DNA' is disapproved of,
for various reasons.
The prefered name for it is 'gene desert' nowadays.
Parts of it are known to be functional, even while not coding,
Jan
On 24/09/26 18:02, athel.cb@gmail.com wrote:
Paul Erd+as wasn't known for having any interest in sex!
My Erd+as number is 3 (not counted |a la Xkcd).
So is mine, which surprised me when I looked it up. The research world
is a small world.
The one that really surprised me was my Mathematics Genealogy tree.
http://www.pmoylan.org/pages/family/MathGenealogy.pdf
On 2026-09-24, Peter Moylan wrote:
On 24/09/26 18:02, athel.cb@gmail.com wrote:
Paul Erd+as wasn't known for having any interest in sex!
My Erd+as number is 3 (not counted |a la Xkcd).
So is mine, which surprised me when I looked it up. The research world
is a small world.
Mine is 4, but only by a fine thread.
On 9/24/2026 10:28 AM, J. J. Lodder wrote:
Sam Plusnet <not@home.com> wrote:
On 23/09/2026 09:51, occam wrote:
On 22/09/2026 21:19, Johann 'Myrkraverk' Oskarsson wrote:
On 9/23/2026 2:18 AM, Sam Plusnet wrote:Not just any webcomic. XKCD is a hallowed repository of reference
Apologies if this one has already been mentioned, but when I saw it I >>>>> immediately thought of this Newsgroup.
https://xkcd.com/403/
material in AUE. Respect it.
The mouse-over seems especially on topic for aue.
A Dutch author invented the term 'kutzwager' for it.
(lit. cunt-brother-in-law)
The Danish (very vulgar) term I know for the concept
is "hulsvoger" (lit. hole-brother-in-law).
Adam Funk wrote on 27.09.26 19:14:
On 2026-09-24, Peter Moylan wrote:
On 24/09/26 18:02, athel.cb@gmail.com wrote:
Paul Erd+as wasn't known for having any interest in sex!
My Erd+as number is 3 (not counted |a la Xkcd).
So is mine, which surprised me when I looked it up. The research world
is a small world.
Mine is 4, but only by a fine thread.
Whatever "by a fine thread" means.
Anyway, inferring from
<https://www.underleaf.ai/tools/erdos-number>
no path seems to exist from Adam Funk to Erd||s. (Which is surprising
in itself, because there is very likely to be one, however long.)
<https://www.underleaf.ai/tools/erdos-number>
nospam@de-ster.demon.nl (J. J. Lodder) posted:
Ross Clark <benlizro@ihug.co.nz> wrote:
On 26/09/2026 12:05 p.m., Snidely wrote:
On Friday, Johann 'Myrkraverk' Oskarsson pointed out that ...
On 9/25/2026 7:02 PM, Ross Clark wrote:
On 24/09/2026 11:27 p.m., Johann 'Myrkraverk' Oskarsson wrote:
Their word for /deserts/. Are there any natural deserts in Italy?
Wouldn't it be much more natural that they encountered the phenomenon >> in what we now call Northern Africa, of which one of the major civili- >> zations was Egypt?
"Abandoned, wasteland" need not apply only to large stretches of extremly hot dry sand. ISTR beeing told of Roman papers describing some
of the Alps as "desert". And did the Romans do Spain before Egypt? I would think so, and they certainly did Carthage before Julius, which was
mostly coastal Africa. They made a serious attempt at making Carthage "abandoned".
"In English before the 20th century, desert was often used in the sense of "unpopulated area", without specific reference to aridity...Phrases such as "desert island" and "Great American Desert", or Shakespeare's "deserts of Bohemia" (The Winter's Tale) in previous centuries did not necessarily imply sand or aridity; their focus was the sparse population."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desert#Etymology
So that's for usage in modern western European languages. Exactly which areas the Romans described as "desertus/um", no doubt someone could tell us.
'Desert' in this sense is still in modern use.
For example, 'junk DNA' is disapproved of,
By some, maybe, but junk DNA is a perfectly reasonable name for a perfectly reasonable concept. There is no doubt that the human genome contains lots of junk DNA. Refer to Larry Moran's web site (https://sandwalk.blogspot.com/) for more information, or his book: What's in Your Genome?: 90% of Your Genome
Is Junk.
for various reasons.
Mostly feeble reasons
The prefered name for it is 'gene desert' nowadays.
Preferred by whom? I've never come across this term.
Parts of it are known to be functional, even while not coding,
Adam Funk wrote on 27.09.26 19:14:
On 2026-09-24, Peter Moylan wrote:
On 24/09/26 18:02, athel.cb@gmail.com wrote:
Paul Erd+as wasn't known for having any interest in sex!
My Erd+as number is 3 (not counted |a la Xkcd).
So is mine, which surprised me when I looked it up. The research world
is a small world.
Mine is 4, but only by a fine thread.
Whatever "by a fine thread" means.
Anyway, inferring from
<https://www.underleaf.ai/tools/erdos-number>
no path seems to exist from Adam Funk to Erd||s. (Which is surprising
in itself, because there is very likely to be one, however long.)
On 25/09/26 04:44, Tony Cooper wrote:
On Thu, 24 Sep 2026 18:29:26 GMT, athel.cb@gmail.com
<user12588@newsgrouper.org.invalid> wrote:
Peter Moylan <peter@pmoylan.org> posted:
On 24/09/26 18:02, athel.cb@gmail.com wrote:Chrome refuses to open this, calling it insecure! I'll try another
Paul Erd?s wasn't known for having any interest in sex!
My Erd?s number is 3 (not counted |a la Xkcd).
So is mine, which surprised me when I looked it up. The research world >>>> is a small world.
The one that really surprised me was my Mathematics Genealogy tree.
http://www.pmoylan.org/pages/family/MathGenealogy.pdf
browser.
Chrome does tell me that it's an insecure site, but allows me to allow
it.
OK. Firefox was more cooperative. Alas, I don't find anything to say
about it.
There's not much overlap between mathematics and chemistry, which in
some ways is surprising.
It's....ummm...quite involved.
It supports my belief that pretty much all human scientific advance is
due to a small handful of people. Once you go back a few generations, everyone is related to everyone else.
In article <119dpjk$2b55b$1@dont-email.me>,
Phil <phil@anonymous.invalid> wrote:
<https://www.underleaf.ai/tools/erdos-number>
That seems a little unreliable. It finds me (though with the wrong
middle name) and confuses one of my co-authors with someone completely unrelated with a similar name. I doubt my real Erdos number is less
than 5.
On 28/09/2026 13:53, Carlo XYZ wrote:
Anyway, inferring from
<https://www.underleaf.ai/tools/erdos-number>
The tool at the end of this link is dubious. I have authored very few papers, but I get an Erd+as number of 3.
Why I think the tool/database is dubious is because the first link ('co-author') gives a name I have never heard of, let along collaborated with.
On 24/09/2026 22:58, Snidely wrote:
Remember Thursday, when Sam Plusnet asked plaintively:
On 24/09/2026 08:19, Hibou wrote:
Le 24/09/2026 a 07:26, occam a ocrit :
On 23/09/2026 22:18, Mark Brader wrote:
"Sam":
Apologies if this one has already been mentioned, but when I saw it I >>>>>> immediately thought of this Newsgroup.
https://xkcd.com/403/
I suggest that the alt.usage.englishiest xkcd is number 1010,
(and then read its sequel, 1012).
<smile> Yes, 1010 is particularly apt. Overlong in text, plenty hair >>>> splitting, and rich in pedantry.
And anyway, the OED (which is descriptive, not prescriptive, right
enough) lists "An exceptionally large ocean wave caused by an event
that disturbs a large expanse of water such as an earthquake,
volcanic eruption, landslide, or meteorite impact" - Sense 1.b., 1844
on.
"The United States and New Zealand conducted secret tests of a
'tsunami bomb' designed to destroy coastal cities by using underwater
explosions to trigger tidal waves" - 'Daily Telegraph', 2013-01-02.
I would guess that collaboration involved the US supplying the bomb
and monitoring equipment etc. etc., whilst NZ supplied the location.
Wouldn't be secret after the bomb was detonated, if it's much bigger
than a depth charge, no?
What's that phrase? "Pics - or it didn't happen."
nospam@de-ster.demon.nl (J. J. Lodder) posted:
Ross Clark <benlizro@ihug.co.nz> wrote:
On 26/09/2026 12:05 p.m., Snidely wrote:
On Friday, Johann 'Myrkraverk' Oskarsson pointed out that ...
On 9/25/2026 7:02 PM, Ross Clark wrote:
On 24/09/2026 11:27 p.m., Johann 'Myrkraverk' Oskarsson wrote:
Their word for /deserts/. Are there any natural deserts in Italy?
Wouldn't it be much more natural that they encountered the phenomenon >> in what we now call Northern Africa, of which one of the major civili- >> zations was Egypt?
"Abandoned, wasteland" need not apply only to large stretches of extremly hot dry sand. ISTR beeing told of Roman papers describing some
of the Alps as "desert". And did the Romans do Spain before Egypt? I would think so, and they certainly did Carthage before Julius, which was
mostly coastal Africa. They made a serious attempt at making Carthage "abandoned".
"In English before the 20th century, desert was often used in the sense of "unpopulated area", without specific reference to aridity...Phrases such as "desert island" and "Great American Desert", or Shakespeare's "deserts of Bohemia" (The Winter's Tale) in previous centuries did not necessarily imply sand or aridity; their focus was the sparse population."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desert#Etymology
So that's for usage in modern western European languages. Exactly
which areas the Romans described as "desertus/um", no doubt someone
could tell us.
'Desert' in this sense is still in modern use.
For example, 'junk DNA' is disapproved of,
By some, maybe, but junk DNA is a perfectly reasonable name for a perfectly reasonable concept.
There is no doubt that the human genome contains lots of
junk DNA. Refer to Larry Moran's web site (https://sandwalk.blogspot.com/) for more information, or his book: What's in Your Genome?: 90% of Your Genome Is Junk.
for various reasons.
Mostly feeble reasons
The prefered name for it is 'gene desert' nowadays.
Preferred by whom? I've never come across this term.
On 28/09/2026 13:53, Carlo XYZ wrote:
Adam Funk wrote on 27.09.26 19:14:
On 2026-09-24, Peter Moylan wrote:
On 24/09/26 18:02, athel.cb@gmail.com wrote:
Paul Erd+as wasn't known for having any interest in sex!
My Erd+as number is 3 (not counted |a la Xkcd).
So is mine, which surprised me when I looked it up. The research world >>>> is a small world.
Mine is 4, but only by a fine thread.
Whatever "by a fine thread" means.
Anyway, inferring from
<https://www.underleaf.ai/tools/erdos-number>
The tool at the end of this link is dubious. I have authored very few papers, but I get an Erd+as number of 3.
Why I think the tool/database is dubious is because the first link ('co-author') gives a name I have never heard of, let along collaborated with.
athel.cb@gmail.com <user12588@newsgrouper.org.invalid> posted:
nospam@de-ster.demon.nl (J. J. Lodder) posted:
Ross Clark <benlizro@ihug.co.nz> wrote:
On 26/09/2026 12:05 p.m., Snidely wrote:
On Friday, Johann 'Myrkraverk' Oskarsson pointed out that ...
On 9/25/2026 7:02 PM, Ross Clark wrote:
On 24/09/2026 11:27 p.m., Johann 'Myrkraverk' Oskarsson wrote:
Their word for /deserts/. Are there any natural deserts in Italy? >>>>>> Wouldn't it be much more natural that they encountered the phenomenon >>>>>> in what we now call Northern Africa, of which one of the major civili- >>>>>> zations was Egypt?
"Abandoned, wasteland" need not apply only to large stretches of
extremly hot dry sand. ISTR beeing told of Roman papers describing some >>>>> of the Alps as "desert". And did the Romans do Spain before Egypt? I >>>>> would think so, and they certainly did Carthage before Julius, which was >>>>> mostly coastal Africa. They made a serious attempt at making Carthage >>>>> "abandoned".
"In English before the 20th century, desert was often used in the sense >>>> of "unpopulated area", without specific reference to aridity...Phrases >>>> such as "desert island" and "Great American Desert", or Shakespeare's
"deserts of Bohemia" (The Winter's Tale) in previous centuries did not >>>> necessarily imply sand or aridity; their focus was the sparse population." >>>>
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desert#Etymology
So that's for usage in modern western European languages. Exactly which >>>> areas the Romans described as "desertus/um", no doubt someone could tell us.
'Desert' in this sense is still in modern use.
For example, 'junk DNA' is disapproved of,
By some, maybe, but junk DNA is a perfectly reasonable name for a perfectly >> reasonable concept. There is no doubt that the human genome contains lots of >> junk DNA. Refer to Larry Moran's web site (https://sandwalk.blogspot.com/) >> for more information, or his book: What's in Your Genome?: 90% of Your Genome
Is Junk.
Following up on this a little, in an interview in 2009 Sydney Brenner, a more authoritative figure than I am, was asked if he would make a "public confession"
that he was wrong about junk, and answered that "I am prepared to reduce it from 96% to 95.8%".
Then there is the "onion test": the domestic onion, Allium cepa, has five times
as much DNA in its genome as we do. Is that because it leads a much more complex
life than humans do, and needs a tremendous number of functional genes,
or because it has (at least) five times as much junk? It is far from being the
most extreme example. Lungfish have about 40 times as much DNA as humans. At the other extreme, pufferfish have about one tenth of as much DNA as humans, but still manage to live lives as exciting as those of lungfish. Then there is
the dinoflagellate Gonyaulax polyedra, with about 60 times as much DNA as a human.
for various reasons.
Mostly feeble reasons
The prefered name for it is 'gene desert' nowadays.
Preferred by whom? I've never come across this term.
Parts of it are known to be functional, even while not coding,
Very small parts. Every time a new function is discovered the believers in the
Encode Project leap on it to suggest that it is just one of 10000 previously unknown functions, despite the absence of even the slightest evidence that more
than a handful of the 9999 unknown functions exist.
athel.cb@gmail.com <user12588@newsgrouper.org.invalid> posted:
nospam@de-ster.demon.nl (J. J. Lodder) posted:
Ross Clark <benlizro@ihug.co.nz> wrote:
On 26/09/2026 12:05 p.m., Snidely wrote:
On Friday, Johann 'Myrkraverk' Oskarsson pointed out that ...
On 9/25/2026 7:02 PM, Ross Clark wrote:
On 24/09/2026 11:27 p.m., Johann 'Myrkraverk' Oskarsson wrote:
Their word for /deserts/. Are there any natural deserts in
Italy? Wouldn't it be much more natural that they encountered the
phenomenon in what we now call Northern Africa, of which one of
the major civili- zations was Egypt?
"Abandoned, wasteland" need not apply only to large stretches of extremly hot dry sand. ISTR beeing told of Roman papers
describing some of the Alps as "desert". And did the Romans do
Spain before Egypt? I would think so, and they certainly did Carthage before Julius, which was mostly coastal Africa. They
made a serious attempt at making Carthage "abandoned".
"In English before the 20th century, desert was often used in the
sense of "unpopulated area", without specific reference to aridity...Phrases such as "desert island" and "Great American
Desert", or Shakespeare's "deserts of Bohemia" (The Winter's Tale)
in previous centuries did not necessarily imply sand or aridity;
their focus was the sparse population."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desert#Etymology
So that's for usage in modern western European languages. Exactly
which areas the Romans described as "desertus/um", no doubt someone could tell us.
'Desert' in this sense is still in modern use. For example, 'junk DNA'
is disapproved of,
By some, maybe, but junk DNA is a perfectly reasonable name for a
perfectly reasonable concept. There is no doubt that the human genome contains lots of junk DNA. Refer to Larry Moran's web site (https://sandwalk.blogspot.com/) for more information, or his book:
What's in Your Genome?: 90% of Your Genome Is Junk.
Following up on this a little, in an interview in 2009 Sydney Brenner, a
more authoritative figure than I am, was asked if he would make a "public confession" that he was wrong about junk, and answered that "I am prepared
to reduce it from 96% to 95.8%".
On 9/28/2026 10:46 PM, athel.cb@gmail.com wrote:
athel.cb@gmail.com <user12588@newsgrouper.org.invalid> posted:
nospam@de-ster.demon.nl (J. J. Lodder) posted:
Ross Clark <benlizro@ihug.co.nz> wrote:
On 26/09/2026 12:05 p.m., Snidely wrote:
On Friday, Johann 'Myrkraverk' Oskarsson pointed out that ...
On 9/25/2026 7:02 PM, Ross Clark wrote:
On 24/09/2026 11:27 p.m., Johann 'Myrkraverk' Oskarsson wrote:
Their word for /deserts/. Are there any natural deserts in Italy? >>>>>> Wouldn't it be much more natural that they encountered the phenomenon >>>>>> in what we now call Northern Africa, of which one of the major civili- >>>>>> zations was Egypt?
"Abandoned, wasteland" need not apply only to large stretches of
extremly hot dry sand. ISTR beeing told of Roman papers describing some
of the Alps as "desert". And did the Romans do Spain before Egypt? I >>>>> would think so, and they certainly did Carthage before Julius, which was
mostly coastal Africa. They made a serious attempt at making Carthage >>>>> "abandoned".
"In English before the 20th century, desert was often used in the
sense of "unpopulated area", without specific reference to
aridity...Phrases such as "desert island" and "Great American
Desert", or Shakespeare's "deserts of Bohemia" (The Winter's Tale) in >>>> previous centuries did not necessarily imply sand or aridity; their
focus was the sparse population."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desert#Etymology
So that's for usage in modern western European languages. Exactly
which areas the Romans described as "desertus/um", no doubt someone
could tell us.
'Desert' in this sense is still in modern use.
For example, 'junk DNA' is disapproved of,
By some, maybe, but junk DNA is a perfectly reasonable name for a
perfectly reasonable concept. There is no doubt that the human genome
contains lots of junk DNA. Refer to Larry Moran's web site
(https://sandwalk.blogspot.com/) for more information, or his book:
What's in Your Genome?: 90% of Your Genome Is Junk.
Following up on this a little, in an interview in 2009 Sydney Brenner, a more authoritative figure than I am, was asked if he would make a
"public confession" that he was wrong about junk, and answered that "I
am prepared to reduce it from 96% to 95.8%".
Then there is the "onion test": the domestic onion, Allium cepa, has
five times as much DNA in its genome as we do. Is that because it leads
a much more complex life than humans do, and needs a tremendous number
of functional genes, or because it has (at least) five times as much
junk? It is far from being the most extreme example. Lungfish have about
40 times as much DNA as humans. At the other extreme, pufferfish have
about one tenth of as much DNA as humans, but still manage to live lives
as exciting as those of lungfish. Then there is the dinoflagellate Gonyaulax polyedra, with about 60 times as much DNA as a human.
for various reasons.
Mostly feeble reasons
The prefered name for it is 'gene desert' nowadays.
Preferred by whom? I've never come across this term.
Parts of it are known to be functional, even while not coding,
Very small parts. Every time a new function is discovered the believers
in the Encode Project leap on it to suggest that it is just one of 10000 previously unknown functions, despite the absence of even the slightest evidence that more than a handful of the 9999 unknown functions exist.
Dear athel,
Please forgive me for not keeping up with the latest scientific jargon.
There are also /the guys/ who "pollinate" D.N.A. between individuals,
and cross species. I forgot the term for them, and I'm not sure if they
are considered alive, or virus-adjacent, or what.
Some sort of /life form/ or /environmental hazard/ that grabs a bit of
D.N.A. and exits the cell, only to enter another one in a different in- dividual and leave the piece of D.N.A.
There was a scientific news article about this in the last five years, I believe, but didn't keep the link handy for Usenet flamewars.
This phenomenon probably explains a lot of evolution, but hasn't hit the textbooks yet.
Johann 'Myrkraverk' Oskarsson <johann@myrkraverk.invalid> wrote:
On 9/28/2026 10:46 PM, athel.cb@gmail.com wrote:
athel.cb@gmail.com <user12588@newsgrouper.org.invalid> posted:
nospam@de-ster.demon.nl (J. J. Lodder) posted:
Ross Clark <benlizro@ihug.co.nz> wrote:
On 26/09/2026 12:05 p.m., Snidely wrote:
On Friday, Johann 'Myrkraverk' Oskarsson pointed out that ...
On 9/25/2026 7:02 PM, Ross Clark wrote:
On 24/09/2026 11:27 p.m., Johann 'Myrkraverk' Oskarsson wrote: >>>>>Their word for /deserts/. Are there any natural deserts in Italy? >>>>>> Wouldn't it be much more natural that they encountered the phenomenon
in what we now call Northern Africa, of which one of the major civili-
zations was Egypt?
"Abandoned, wasteland" need not apply only to large stretches of >>>>> extremly hot dry sand. ISTR beeing told of Roman papers describing some
of the Alps as "desert". And did the Romans do Spain before Egypt? I
would think so, and they certainly did Carthage before Julius, which was
mostly coastal Africa. They made a serious attempt at making Carthage
"abandoned".
"In English before the 20th century, desert was often used in the
sense of "unpopulated area", without specific reference to
aridity...Phrases such as "desert island" and "Great American
Desert", or Shakespeare's "deserts of Bohemia" (The Winter's Tale) in >>>> previous centuries did not necessarily imply sand or aridity; their >>>> focus was the sparse population."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desert#Etymology
So that's for usage in modern western European languages. Exactly
which areas the Romans described as "desertus/um", no doubt someone >>>> could tell us.
'Desert' in this sense is still in modern use.
For example, 'junk DNA' is disapproved of,
By some, maybe, but junk DNA is a perfectly reasonable name for a
perfectly reasonable concept. There is no doubt that the human genome
contains lots of junk DNA. Refer to Larry Moran's web site
(https://sandwalk.blogspot.com/) for more information, or his book:
What's in Your Genome?: 90% of Your Genome Is Junk.
Following up on this a little, in an interview in 2009 Sydney Brenner, a more authoritative figure than I am, was asked if he would make a
"public confession" that he was wrong about junk, and answered that "I
am prepared to reduce it from 96% to 95.8%".
Then there is the "onion test": the domestic onion, Allium cepa, has
five times as much DNA in its genome as we do. Is that because it leads
a much more complex life than humans do, and needs a tremendous number
of functional genes, or because it has (at least) five times as much junk? It is far from being the most extreme example. Lungfish have about 40 times as much DNA as humans. At the other extreme, pufferfish have about one tenth of as much DNA as humans, but still manage to live lives as exciting as those of lungfish. Then there is the dinoflagellate Gonyaulax polyedra, with about 60 times as much DNA as a human.
for various reasons.
Mostly feeble reasons
The prefered name for it is 'gene desert' nowadays.
Preferred by whom? I've never come across this term.
Parts of it are known to be functional, even while not coding,
Very small parts. Every time a new function is discovered the believers in the Encode Project leap on it to suggest that it is just one of 10000 previously unknown functions, despite the absence of even the slightest evidence that more than a handful of the 9999 unknown functions exist.
Dear athel,
Please forgive me for not keeping up with the latest scientific jargon.
There are also /the guys/ who "pollinate" D.N.A. between individuals,
and cross species. I forgot the term for them, and I'm not sure if they are considered alive, or virus-adjacent, or what.
Some sort of /life form/ or /environmental hazard/ that grabs a bit of D.N.A. and exits the cell, only to enter another one in a different in- dividual and leave the piece of D.N.A.
There was a scientific news article about this in the last five years, I believe, but didn't keep the link handy for Usenet flamewars.
This phenomenon probably explains a lot of evolution, but hasn't hit the textbooks yet.
The key word you may be searching for is 'horizontal gene transfer'.
(so between branches of the phylogenetic tree)
This may make 'common descent' from a single original cell problematic.
Hot news, some time ago, but no longer controversial,
and certainly textbook material, by now,
Looking more closely, I see that you're replying not to me, as I initially thought, but to Johann 'Myrkraverk' Oskarsson. I didn't see his post, because for some reason he is in my kill file. I don't remember putting him there, and I don't know why he is there.
On 25/09/2026 01:02, Peter Moylan wrote:
There's not much overlap between mathematics and chemistry, which in
some ways is surprising.
It depends how you classify genetics and the chemistry thereof.
I remember a discussion not too long ago in AUE where the conclusion (at least my take-away) was that there was no such thing as 'chemistry'. It
was all physics, particles and their interactions.
On 28/09/2026 16:22, occam wrote:
On 28/09/2026 13:53, Carlo XYZ wrote:
Adam Funk wrote on 27.09.26 19:14:
On 2026-09-24, Peter Moylan wrote:
On 24/09/26 18:02, athel.cb@gmail.com wrote:
Paul Erd+as wasn't known for having any interest in sex!
My Erd+as number is 3 (not counted |a la Xkcd).
So is mine, which surprised me when I looked it up. The research world >>>>> is a small world.
Mine is 4, but only by a fine thread.
Whatever "by a fine thread" means.
Anyway, inferring from
<https://www.underleaf.ai/tools/erdos-number>
The tool at the end of this link is dubious.-a I have authored very few
papers, but I get an Erd+as number of 3.
Why I think the tool/database-a is dubious is because the first link
('co-author') gives a name I have never heard of, let along collaborated
with.
Yes. For one of my co-authors to whom it assigned an Erd+as number of 3,
I'm quite unable to find any common publications between 1 and 2. For
the other, it's clearly wrongly identified one of his co-authors.
On 2026-09-28, occam wrote:
On 25/09/2026 01:02, Peter Moylan wrote:
...
There's not much overlap between mathematics and chemistry, which in
some ways is surprising.
It depends how you classify genetics and the chemistry thereof.
I remember a discussion not too long ago in AUE where the conclusion (at least my take-away) was that there was no such thing as 'chemistry'. It
was all physics, particles and their interactions.
<https://xkcd.com/435/>
On 2026-09-28, occam wrote:
On 25/09/2026 01:02, Peter Moylan wrote:
...
There's not much overlap between mathematics and chemistry, which in
some ways is surprising.
It depends how you classify genetics and the chemistry thereof.
I remember a discussion not too long ago in AUE where the conclusion (at
least my take-away) was that there was no such thing as 'chemistry'. It
was all physics, particles and their interactions.
<https://xkcd.com/435/>
On 28/09/2026 20:46, Phil wrote:
On 28/09/2026 16:22, occam wrote:
On 28/09/2026 13:53, Carlo XYZ wrote:
Adam Funk wrote on 27.09.26 19:14:
On 2026-09-24, Peter Moylan wrote:
On 24/09/26 18:02, athel.cb@gmail.com wrote:
Paul Erd+as wasn't known for having any interest in sex!
My Erd+as number is 3 (not counted |a la Xkcd).
So is mine, which surprised me when I looked it up. The research
world
is a small world.
Mine is 4, but only by a fine thread.
Whatever "by a fine thread" means.
Anyway, inferring from
<https://www.underleaf.ai/tools/erdos-number>
The tool at the end of this link is dubious.-a I have authored very few
papers, but I get an Erd+as number of 3.
Why I think the tool/database-a is dubious is because the first link
('co-author') gives a name I have never heard of, let along collaborated >>> with.
Yes. For one of my co-authors to whom it assigned an Erd+as number of
3, I'm quite unable to find any common publications between 1 and 2.
For the other, it's clearly wrongly identified one of his co-authors.
This was probably the same AI tool that wrote legal brief which cite imaginary rulings.
On 29/09/2026 17:47, Adam Funk wrote:
On 2026-09-28, occam wrote:
On 25/09/2026 01:02, Peter Moylan wrote:
...
There's not much overlap between mathematics and chemistry, which in
some ways is surprising.
It depends how you classify genetics and the chemistry thereof.
I remember a discussion not too long ago in AUE where the conclusion (at >>> least my take-away) was that there was no such thing as 'chemistry'. It
was all physics, particles and their interactions.
<https://xkcd.com/435/>
Did you see the hidden 'hover' comment of that cartoon? It is just as
funny, even if incorrect.
Adam Funk <a24061@ducksburg.com> wrote:
I did, and now it reminds me of the Feynman quote:
Physics is like sex. Sure, it may give some practical results, but
that's not why we do it.
Mathematicians will gladly embrace the Venus of Milo,
instead of Brigitte or Marilyn like Feynman would have preferred,
just to prove their superior purity over all others.
This never gives any practical results though,
Brigitte and Marilyn were tempting. Venus is 'armless.
On 02/10/26 07:21, J. J. Lodder wrote:
Adam Funk <a24061@ducksburg.com> wrote:
I did, and now it reminds me of the Feynman quote:
-a-a Physics is like sex. Sure, it may give some practical results, but
-a-a that's not why we do it.
Mathematicians will gladly embrace the Venus of Milo,
instead of Brigitte or Marilyn like Feynman would have preferred,
just to prove their superior purity over all others.
This never gives any practical results though,
Brigitte and Marilyn were tempting. Venus is 'armless.
On 02/10/26 07:21, J. J. Lodder wrote:
Adam Funk <a24061@ducksburg.com> wrote:
I did, and now it reminds me of the Feynman quote:
Physics is like sex. Sure, it may give some practical results, but
that's not why we do it.
Mathematicians will gladly embrace the Venus of Milo,
instead of Brigitte or Marilyn like Feynman would have preferred,
just to prove their superior purity over all others.
This never gives any practical results though,
Brigitte and Marilyn were tempting. Venus is 'armless.
On 02/10/2026 01:14, Peter Moylan wrote:
On 02/10/26 07:21, J. J. Lodder wrote:
Adam Funk <a24061@ducksburg.com> wrote:
I did, and now it reminds me of the Feynman quote:
-a-a Physics is like sex. Sure, it may give some practical results, but >>>> -a-a that's not why we do it.
Mathematicians will gladly embrace the Venus of Milo,
instead of Brigitte or Marilyn like Feynman would have preferred,
just to prove their superior purity over all others.
This never gives any practical results though,
Brigitte and Marilyn were tempting. Venus is 'armless.
Venus (n|-e Aphrodite, 'born of the froth') is as old as Greek mythology. Yes, she is currently 'armless but she is also timeless. The other two
are made-in-Hollywood Jenny-come-latelys. Give them another 1000 years
and see if anyone remembers them.
Brigitte and Marilyn were tempting. Venus is 'armless.
Venus (n|-e Aphrodite, 'born of the froth') is as old as Greek mythology.
Yes, she is currently 'armless but she is also timeless. The other two
are made-in-Hollywood Jenny-come-latelys. Give them another 1000 years
and see if anyone remembers them.
Bardot appeared in one or two Hollywood films (mostly flops), but she
wasn't "Hollywood".
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