Prefix of the day: "pene"

This rock was identified at the whatsthisrock subreddit as a "penecontemporaneous deformation structure."  It apparently is such a commonly-used term that it is shortened by users to "PCD."  There is excellent informed discussion at the link to explain that PCDs are formed when sedimentary material is deformed during deposition ("contemporaneously").  Lots of further details at Geological Digressions.

I thought the rock was cool, but what grabbed my attention was the fact that I am an English major almost 80 years of age and I'm seeing a prefix that is not in my wheelhouse.

Onward to the Wiktionary entry for "pene":

Almost the thing or quality expressed by the root, as peneplain (almost a plain), peninsula (almost an island), penultimate (almost the last), penumbra (almost in shadow).

Wow.  Three words I've used for essentially all my adult life without appreciating their common prefix.

You learn something every day.

The etymology of "soccer"

 This will be my only post relevant to this year's World Cup.

"... in its early days, football was a very "posh" sport.  "The people who founded the Football Association in England in 1863 were Oxford graduates who had attended elite public schools," he said.  The game played under Football Association rules became known as "association football", wrote John M Cunningham in the Encyclopaedia Britannica.  The name also helped distinguish it from another popular sport: rugby...

Among wealthy university students in the 1880s and 1890s, there was a habit of shortening words and adding "-er" to the end, creating a kind of slang.  "So instead of saying 'breakfast,' they would say 'brekker'."  Applied to rugby, they would call it "rugger."..

It appears that these inventive students took "soc" from the middle of the word "association" and added "-er," producing "soccer".  "Obviously, no-one knows for certain, but what people are sure about is that it comes from Oxford. There are many documentary sources confirming that it was a word coined by students there."

More information at the source article at the BBC.

Postal history of the Telemark coast of Norway

The video is a full-length recording of an hour-long presentation at the Boston 2026 World Exposition of Philately.  The Telemark postal district is situated west of Oslo, and the coast extends from Skien on the north to Kragero on the southwest.  This presentation discusses postal history of this region up through the end of the 19th century.  The information will be of most interest to serious philatelists or to others interested in Scandinavian history.

One item will also be of interest to anyone who has a relative or friend whose last name is Odegaard.  When the Black Plague arrived in Norway in 1340, approximately 2/3 of the population died.  Some of those who survived moved to the abandoned farms.  "Odegaard" is Norwegian for "abandoned farm."  You learn something every day.

The dark side of Beatrix Potter

Beatrix Potter, despite the efforts of Graham Greene and many others, is still tarred with a certain National Trust tweeness, even though her tales of murder and separation are among the darkest if funniest books ever written. Those books would be nothing without their illustrations, and in her masterpiece, The Tale of Samuel Whiskers, she should have firmly established herself in a direct line of gothic illustrators stretching from Fuseli and Blake to Mervyn Peake. This picture, of Tom Kitten being turned into a roly-poly pudding, is among the funniest yet also most terrifying illustrations of the 20th century.[Martin Rowson]

Text and image from a gallery of writers' favourite classic book illustrations posted at The Guardian.  I was unaware of this supposed "dark side," but found two relevant commentaries, the first in a Guardian column in 2006:

The Tale of Tom Kitten does not teach adventurous disobedience; rather it tells us that disobedience is punished with violence. Or this, at least, is what I thought when I flung the book across the room in disgust (only, intrigued, to pick it up again soon after).

Tom Kitten and his siblings are smacked and sent to bed for their notional disgrace. Worse yet, when they continue romping in the bedroom, they disturb what Potter calls the "dignity and repose of the tea party". Can the reader who finishes the book rest easy that subversive Tom has triumphed? No: the fact is Tabitha Twitchit thrashes her children for losing their clothes. Imagine what grisly fate will befall them when she stomps upstairs from her ruined tea party! To her credit, Potter leaves the sadism of this neurotic to the imagination.

So far, my daughter and I have found Beatrix Potter to be a proselytiser for sadistic punishment, a sartorial fascist, a property-upholding reactionary, an obsessive-compulsive nutcase (or rather nut-kin) and, conceivably, a bystander in the face of an intolerable natural dystopia that, with her sick (though gifted) writer's mind, she culpably imagined. As an adult reader, I must say, I'm beginning to like her.

And this at Wig and Pen:

Use discretion when reading Beatrix Potter to your children. In almost every Potter tale, her main characters—everyone from Peter Rabbit to Jemima Puddle Duck—flirt with mortal danger...

The Silence of the Lambs has nothing on Potter’s description of the house and yard [in The Tale of Mr. Tod]:

The house was something between a cave, a prison, and a tumbledown pigsty. There was a strong door, which was shut and locked. [In the yard] there were many unpleasant things lying about that had much better have been buried: rabbit bones and skulls, and chickens’ legs and other horrors. It was a shocking place and very dark.

Peeking through a window, Benjamin and Peter discovered that Tommy Brock had retired for the night after stashing the brood—still alive and kicking--in an oven for safekeeping and for his next meal.

I have no personal insights to offer, not having read any of the canon.  Knowledgeable readers should feel free to offer comments.

Reposted from 2012 because I found it while trying to look up information on Beatrix Potter's use of cloche gardening on her farm.

Cloche hats

Here's the Wiki:

The cloche hat is a fitted, bell-shaped hat that was popular during the 1920s. (Cloche is the French word for bell.) Caroline Reboux is the creator of the cloche hat.

Cloche hats were usually made of felt so that they conformed to the head. The hat was typically designed to be worn low on the forehead, with the wearer's eyes only slightly below the brim. By 1928-1929, it became fashionable to turn the brims on cloche hats upwards. This style remained prevalent throughout the early 1930s until the cloche hat became obsolete around 1933-1934.

Often, different styles of ribbons affixed to the hats indicated different messages about the wearer. Several popular messages included: An arrow-like ribbon which indicated a girl was single but had already given her heart to someone, a firm knot which signaled marriage or a flamboyant bow which indicated the wearer was single and interested in mingling...

Photo via the wonderfully-named My Ear-Trumpet Has Been Struck by Lightning.  Too bad it has now gone inactive (but still browseable).

Reposted from 2010 (!!) after watching Agatha Christie's Seven Dials miniseries last night and seeing Mia McKenna Bruce in the starring role of a 1925 character:

Personally I would be happy to see this hat style come back into fashion.  It looks very comfy and reasonably sensible in a world concerned about solar skin damage.

Secretariat at the Belmont Stakes in 1973 - his "tremendous machine" performance

 

Everyone who watched the Belmont 40 years ago will never forget Secretariat's race that day.  He had already won the Kentucky Derby and the Preakness; this was his bid for the Triple Crown, and he was so good that few owners wanted to enter their horses against him in the Belmont - that's why there were so few racing that day.   The track didn't even take "show" bets, and it's an interesting (?unique) anomaly that Secretariat was so favored by bettors that he would have paid more to show ($2.40) than he did to win ($2.20).  

Over 5,000 winning tickets were never redeemed because the holders valued them more as souvenirs than for their cash value.

And to this day his speed for 1.5 miles has never been equaled.  Even if you have no interest in thoroughbred racing per se, you owe it to yourself to watch this 3-minute clip to see one of the iconic moments in the history of sport.

Reposted from 2013.

Addendum:  A tip of the blogging hat to reader demenace07, who offered this link with more information about the economics of uncashed winning tickets for a more recent race:

Some enterprising horse bettors are selling their tickets on eBay, where such tickets are selling for $20 to $30. Other sellers bought up many of the cheapest Belmont Stakes gambling tickets. One seller is selling a lot of 500 such tickets. Another is selling 150 tickets in a lot.

Tickets for the Triple Crown wins of Secretariat (1973) and Seattle Slew (1977) sold for big money on the collectors market.

Rovell said that the tickets are simply worth more to collectors than the cash-in price. He said, “Whether you want to keep it for your memory or resell it, it’s worth ten times more than if you cash it in. So people are making good bets.”

Reposted again in 2026 because I found it while looking for other stuff.  I don't follow or even enjoy watching horse racing, although I did see some dressage events during my years in Kentucky, but this race is so iconic that it's worth preserving here in the blog.

Some observations re SpaceX

"By Friday, however, the macro narratives were entirely overshadowed by the excitement of the SpaceX IPO. It’s an IPO that will go down in history for a remarkable combination of reasons—from its sheer scale ($75 billion, almost three times the previous largest IPO) and the $1.8 trillion valuation (which places it immediately, on day one, as the seventh-most-valuable US company), to challenging the traditional playbook on investor allocation, price discovery, and fast-tracked index inclusion. It has also triggered an unprecedented wave of wealth creation, from Elon Musk’s new trillionaire status to some 4,400 millionaires minted among the firm’s current and former employees. All this for a company that generates no profits, is highly valued, and carries enormous key-person risk."

Excerpted from the weekly substack email from Mohamed A. El-Erian (boldface added).

Why mosquito eggs float

This hand-coloured scanning electron micrograph was the favourite of the jury in the section "Best Scientific Image". The image shows the surface of a mosquito egg (from Culex pipiens), which generates a water repellent network by connecting microscopically small structures to trap a thin layer of air. The vitally important structures avoid immersion and enable the egg to float and aggregate with neighbouring eggs.

The website of photographer Martin Oeggerli.  Reposted from 2013 because I had my first encounter with mosquitoes this week in the woods behind our house.

What's wrong with people nowadays?

"A space in Mankato that promotes reflection and healing for families who have lost a child has been vandalized, according to the nonprofit in charge of the memorial.

The nonprofit behind the One Bright Star memorial at Victory Drive and E. Main Street said on June 5 that someone in recent days broke off a large landscape rock, damaged a plaque and threw both of them into the memorial’s pond...

One Bright Star was founded in 1998 by four mothers who each experienced the death of a child, and the memorial was completed in 2003. It includes a shallow pond centered by a large star sculpture and a wall with paver bricks in remembrance of children who have died."

"The police in Boston are searching for two boys who they said flashed a handgun at a pair of children running a lemonade stand on Wednesday and stole... cash from a bright pink lockbox...Tiffany Byrne, the aunt of the two children working the lemonade stand, said that about $80 was taken...

Ms. Byrne said her nephew, David, 12, and niece, Juliette, 11, “were pretty shaken up” but otherwise unharmed. She said she believed the robbers were wearing masks and were around middle-school age."

Studying whiskers on an elephant's trunk

This is the sentence that piqued my curiosity:

"Haptic researchers discovered a difference of two orders of magnitude in the elasticity of the thousand whiskers of an Asian elephant's trunk as they progress from the base to the tip."

The sentence was one of the "Findings" listed in the May 2026 issue of Harper's Magazine (this recurring feature is a wonderfully eclectic potpourri of scientific observations).  The source was not provided, but a brief search led me to the arXiv of Cornell University and to the source text: "Functionally graded keratin facilitates tactile sensing in elephant whiskers."  The research was conducted at the Max Planck Institute in Stuttgart.  Here is the abstract:

Keratin composites enable animals to hike with hooves, fly with feathers, and sense with skin. These distinct functions arise from variations in the underlying properties and microscale arrangement of this natural polymer. One well-studied example is mammalian whiskers, elongated keratin rods attached to tactile skin structures that extend the animal’s sensory volume. Here, we investigate the non-actuated whiskers that cover Asian elephant (Elephas maximus) trunks and find they are geometrically and mechanically tailored to facilitate tactile perception by encoding contact location in vibrotactile signal amplitude and frequency. Elephant whiskers emerge from armored trunk skin and shift from a thick, circular, porous, stiff root to a thin, ovular, dense, soft point. This smooth transition enables interaction with widely varying substrates, reduces wear, and increases the vibrotactile signal information generated during contact. The functionally graded geometry, porosity, and stiffness of elephant whiskers tune the neuromechanics of trunk touch, facilitating highly dexterous manipulation.

The non-scientist reader will want to skip down to the Conclusions to get a sense of the "why":

Biological functionally graded material composites like elephant whiskers can inspire engineered devices that use functional gradients to achieve specific capabilities ranging from fatigue reduction to signal power increases. One of the first animal stiffness gradients discovered was the beak of the Humboldt squid, but mimicry of this stiffness gradient in soft materials posed a considerable manufacturing challenge at the time of this discovery. Recent advances in multi-material 3D printing enable unprecedented control over the deposition of materials with widely varying mechanical properties; cutting-edge inkjet systems create monolithic parts from materials with elastic moduli that span three orders of magnitude. Recent characterization of composites built from these materials enables inverse design, whereby one achieves desired system properties such as stiffness, toughness, and frequency response by prescribing both geometry and constituent materials at the microscale. Fields ranging from material science and neuroscience to haptics and bio-inspired robotics rely on signal processing through material interfaces, and functional gradients have significant potential to enable programmable signal shifts tuned to specific use cases.

Back in the 1970s when I began my postgraduate science research, United States Senator William Proxmire (a Democrat!) was ridiculing bench researchers for publishing what he considered to be trivial scientific findings.  He created a "Golden Fleece Award" to demean such research.  Some of the research mocked at that time was probably truly trivial and wasteful of public resources, but the luddite attitude was unfortunate, and the humor involved may have carried over to influence public opinion of science.  In those years I was studying the effect of serum complement and Protein A on the clearance of staphylococci and gram-negative bacteria from BALB/c mouse lungs; fortunately I was well below his radar.

I'm posting this now to make note of the "why" of studying elephant trunk whiskers.  Mother Nature has been doing hard science for millennia, and finding out how she achieved results can guide humans in an endless variety of quests.

An interesting Sudoku variant

I have been away from Sudoku for a year or two, but got lured back when this variant was posted by Kottke this morning.

In this variant the numbers in the dotted "cages" have to add up to the designated total (without duplication within the cage), and the numbers in the "thermometers" have to rise, with the lowest in the "bulb" of the thermometer.  Otherwise normal Sudoku rules apply.

You can play this grid online here, where there are the standard tools for entering "possibles" and for checking the validity of your entries as you go along.  I used the latter feature regularly, and managed to fill in the grid in 64 minutes without blind guessing.

College students who cannot read

Excerpt from an article in The Chronicle of Higher Education:

"Six weeks into the term, I assigned my rhetoric and writing students a 20-page article. It was the same length I had assigned for five years and the same length I had read without complaint as an undergraduate a decade ago. Not one student finished it.

When I asked why, a student answered honestly: It was too long, and she kept losing track of what the paper was about. This was not a remedial class: These were students who had cleared the admissions process and written essays good enough to get them here. Yet a routine academic reading assignment had defeated them.

Every generation of professors has complained that their students cannot read. The lament is usually overblown, but data have caught up to anecdote, and what I am seeing in my classroom is no longer a hunch. There is a measurable, generational collapse in sustained reading and writing, and the academy is responding to it with improvisation and exhaustion rather than the structural overhaul it requires.

In February 2024, Adam Kotsko, who teaches in the Shimer Great Books School at North Central College, wrote in Slate that students who once handled 30 pages of reading per class meeting now seem “intimidated by anything over 10 pages and seem to walk away from readings of as little as 20 pages with no real understanding.” Crucially, he added that this is “not a matter of laziness on the part of the students” but of underlying skills they were never given a chance to build.

The Chronicle of Higher Education’s 2024 investigation found the same pattern across institutions as different as the Stevens Institute of Technology and Wellesley College, where the average SAT exceeds 1400. Nicholaus Gutierrez, an assistant professor at Wellesley, told The Chronicle that the baseline for what students consider a reasonable amount of work has dropped so noticeably that he has cut his readings accordingly; a 750-word essay now strikes many students as long. At Stevens, the science and technology studies associate professor Theresa MacPhail described following the mantra of “meet your students where they are” for so long that she has begun to feel “like a cruise director organizing games of shuffleboard.”

Worse, the national data tell the same story in colder language. On the 2011 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) writing assessment, which is the most recent comprehensive writing benchmark, only 24 percent of 12th graders reached the Proficient level, and just 3 percent reached Advanced; another 21 percent scored below Basic. The reading side of the ledger is worse, and getting worse fast: The 2024 NAEP results released in September 2025 show 12th-grade reading scores at the lowest level recorded since the assessment began in 1992. Thirty-two percent of 12th graders now score below NAEP Basic in reading, meaning that, in the assessment’s own language, they likely “cannot draw general conclusions based on concepts presented explicitly in a text.” And yet more than half of these same seniors reported being accepted to a four-year college. That last sentence is the whole problem in one line: We are admitting a cohort that cannot read at a college level and are pretending otherwise.

Longread at the link.

Ending a movie with a preposition

Last evening while trying to avoid doomscrolling I browsed some movies recorded on my DVR.  I noticed that the dialogue in The Maltese Falcon ends with a preposition.

I found some commentary on the phrase at Blog of the Darned:

To be fair, the quote is based on a quote from Shakespeare:

Prospero:

   ...

   Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff

   As dreams are made on; and our little life

   Is rounded with a sleep.

The Tempest Act 4, scene 1, 156–158

Also "The stuff that dreams are made of" did not appear in Dashiell Hammett novel. Humphrey Bogart reportedly suggested the line to John Huston, and they went with it. Bogart was a stage actor on Broadway before turning to film, so I presumably he was familiar with The Tempest.

I'm not a rigid prescriptivist regarding usage of the English language, but last night I wondered whether any other major motion pictures end the dialogue on a preposition.  A quick search of "last lines" mentions "And then I woke up" from No Country for Old Men, but in that case it would be an adverb (it's also not a preposition in "I'm ready for my close up."

There are probably many such examples.  If there are movies with Minnesota characters, they might end a scene asking "are you coming with?"

I offer the challenge to the readers here.  Not just any movie sentences ending with prepositions, but final words spoken in a movie.

Scribbles on a bookmark - solved with AI

When I read books I use white paper bookmarks so that I can jot down new words to look up. or pithy statements or clever insights worth quoting in TYWKWDBI.  The best bookmarks are cut-up greeting cards, which have white expanses and the proper stiffness.

Embedded above is a scan of the top portion of a bookmark I recently found in a pocket while doing laundry.   And to my dismay I had no idea what book I had been reading at the time, or how long ago.  I can still look up words, but how to retrieve the "advice" from some page 61? (I had already decided to skip the "cure for lesbianism" on page 32).

Does anyone want to try to guess the book, based on the words harvested?  Answer tomorrow.

Addendum:  I could not for the life of me figure out which book I had been reading.  So I asked AI:

I immediately remembered the book, which I had read because it was longlisted for the Booker Prize.  I had returned it to the library many weeks ago.  So I looked at my list of "Books read" and there it was - graded with a "2+" on my personal scale of 0-4.  

That rating meant it wasn't worth a potential future reread and not worth reviewing for TYWKIWDBI, so I won't be recommending the book here.  I may add attercop, inchwell, swingle scutch, becks, and casemate to my huge list of interesting words (sigil is already there).  And I've requested the book from the library again to see whether the "cure for lesbianism" or the "advice" are worth blogging.

I'm posting this now not for the book per se, but to make note of the amazing power of artificial intelligence.  I used the commonly-available and free "AI mode" on Google.  What amazes me is that it appears that 127 pages of this book have been loaded into a database.  So I wondered whether the book could be reproduced by asking the AI to "regurgitate" it passage by passage ("give me a sentence, give me the next sentence etc...).  This morning I asked...

That was followed by links (to New Direcrtions Publishing and to Penguin Books Australia) where I could purchase the book.  Interestingly there was no link to a third-party seller like Amazon, and (to my disappointment and that of John Farrier) no suggestion that "you can get this book from your local public library."

All of this would seem to be within the boundaries of copyright law, but it still amazes me that a book just published this past year has already been scanned into storage into a massive data warehouse that is guzzling cooling water somewhere in a rural agricultural area.