Weekend Open Thread

Looks like once again, Hack Stone has been burdened by what hasn’t been, that being rightfully assuming the throne of the highly coveted and rarely awarded First Commenter of the This Ain’t Hell Weekend Open Thread.

… cats were once used as weapons? In ancient times, Persian soldiers used cats in battle against the Egyptians. The Egyptians would see the cats with the Persian army and refuse to attack, for fear of hurting the felines. Cats were considered divine in Egypt. (What, you mean they aren’t?)

… a hurricane’s landfall may not happen when you think it does? Landfall for a hurricane is official when the eye of the storm – not the leading edge – crosses the coastline. (Try telling that to the folks who have to endure the leading edge of the storm.)

… flying saucers and UFOs are not the same thing? Sure, to most people, the terms are interchangeable. But they aren’t – a UFO, an unidentified flying object, is simply something you see in the sky that you can’t identify, but someone else probably could. A “flying saucer,” on the other hand, is an apparently alien vehicle from another planet (though in reality it’s usually either a misidentified aircraft or a hoax). Additional trivia note: The term “flying saucer” comes from a 1947 sighting of some kind of aerial craft by pilot Kenneth Arnold (1915-1984). Arnold himself never used the term, though he did say the disc-shaped objects he spotted were “like saucers.” (Little green men, indeed!)

… the first computer to use a graphical user interface was a failure? Don’t let the fancy nomenclature throw you – a graphical user interface, or GUI, is simply a way of interacting with a computer using windows, icons, or menus, instead of typing commands on a keyboard. But the first computer to utilize one was a flop. The Apple Lisa™, released in early 1983, was aimed at business users and carried a rather steep price tag – $9,995. It was plagued by insufficient software, unreliable floppy disks, a tiny five-megabyte hard drive, and that insanely huge price tag. The Lisa did, however, usher in the era of GUI, which manifested itself most solidly the following year with the Apple Macintosh™, which had an original cut-rate price of $2,495. (Now your cell phone can do all that it did and a whole lot more, for a lot less money.)

… a term exists for a word that contains a synonym for itself inside it? It’s called a “kangaroo word” and it works like this: take a look at the word “masculine.” It contains the word “male” in it. Or “chicken,” which contains “hen.” The letters may or may not be spread out, but the related word is inside. Wild, eh? (Thanks to Sheila for this one! Rest in peace, my friend.)

… how easy it is to make friends with a goat? Pretty easy, at least according to a paper published in Royal Society Open Science in 2018. According to the paper, all you have to do to make a friend out of a goat is smile at it. Goats recognize happy human facial expressions, and are in fact drawn to them. (It gets their goat.)

Now … you know!

Credit scores… The local talk radio station in DC, WMAL, which by the way had some guy named Hack from Bethesda on this morning, frequently runs commercials for a credit restoration company. Hack thought that would make a great Christmas present for someone with two bankruptcies and multiple liens against them, but when they asked for the name, Hack said “Psul of the Ballsack…”, then they hung up and blocked Hack’s phone number.

Back to teaching…