Smuggling Salt Is Slovenian Culture!

Did You Know Large Wine Bottles Have Special Names?

Wine bottle names are… odd. Once you get large enough, the wine holders become named after biblical kings:

1.5 L Magnum: Equivalent to two standard 750 ml bottles.

3.0 L Double Magnum: Equivalent to two Magnums or four standard 750 ml bottles.

4.5 L Jeroboam : Equivalent to six standard 750 ml bottles.

6.0 L Imperial: Equivalent to eight standard 750 ml bottles or two Double Magnums. Why they stopped using kings here I don’t know.

9.0 L Salmanazar: Equivalent to twelve standard 750 ml bottles or a full case of wine!

12.0 L Balthazar: Equivalent to sixteen standard 750 ml bottles or two Imperials.

15.0 L Nebuchadnezzar: Equivalent to twenty standard 750 ml bottles.

Interestingly, I looked around and could not find why the names are what they are. The names just appeared, I guess, and everyone agreed to use them.

Ornithorhynchus anatinus - Detail of Bill

The monotremes (egg-laying mammals) are the only mammalia with any sort of electroreception ability, and the platypus’ ability is far stronger than that of the echidna. They use neither sight nor smell while hunting for their food, which consists of small crustaceans and molluscs buried in lakes and slow-moving river bottoms. The platypus finds its food by sweeping its broad bill back and forth along the sediment, and the receptors that line the front and part of the sides of the bill pick up the electric field given off by its prey. It then uses its paws (with the flipper-ish part folded back) to dig out its snack.

Illustrations from the Proceedings of the Zoological Society of London, Vol. I: Mammalia. 1848-1860.

#Feathursday: Innate and Learned Behaviors

Once again we bring you a portion of the educational series Man: A Course of Study. This booklet uses the Herring Gull to teach innate and learned behaviors. We wish we knew who the illustrator of this booklet was because they’ve done a great job helping us understand how baby bird brains work.

Man: A Course of Study was developed by Jerome S. Bruner, an American psychologist who wanted to build a curriculum to teach fifth graders about what it is to be human. He often used animals as contrast to help explain the biological nature of humans.

From the teaching series, Man: A Course of Study published by Curriculum Development Associates. Our copy is the first commercial edition published in 1970.

More Feathursday posts

Some of our other posts from Man: A Course of Study

In general I am a casual observer and usually do not make comments, especially since I am here to learn and have no background in linguistics. But in this case I feel strongly compelled to put my 2 cents' worth of thoughts in.

Although I cannot say that I am anything like fluent, I do have a reasonable amount of Mandarin Chinese and Japanese, and I have to say the first thing I thought when I saw this article was "ah". Because although I can see how katakana is derived from Chinese, using the rather restricted stroke combinations that is the basis of all Chinese characters, the same cannot be said for hiragana, because at the very least, squiggles do not exist in Chinese, at least by the time it was exported to Japan. What you might think are squiggles in Chinese are in fact just our possibly lazy, or perhaps more elegant way of writing, the way cursive would look compared to printed letters. Hirangana bears only a superficial resemblance to Chinese and always feels like it must have another source of inspiration.

Also keep in mind that Chinese was basically an imported language into Japan, and an attempt to shoehorn Japanese sounds into Chinese characters (which I think I can safely say did not sound the same) must have been unwieldy at best. In fact, today, Japanese pronouciations of kanji differ so much from the Chinese, and often their usage too, that I would use my knowledge of the characters only as a rough starting point as to what they might mean in Japanese.

Also, I looked up Kūkai, and, to cut a long story short, he was a Japanese Buddhist monk who went to China to study the sutras, and, to quote from the Wikipedia page directly:

Kūkai arrived back in Japan in 806 as the eighth Patriarch of Esoteric Buddhism, having learnt Sanskrit and its Siddhaṃ script, studied Indian Buddhism, as well as having studied the arts of Chinese calligraphy and poetry, all with recognized masters. He also arrived with a large number of texts, many of which were new to Japan and were esoteric in character, as well as several texts on the Sanskrit language and the Siddhaṃ script.

And a quick look at the Siddham script shows that it has its roots in the Aramaic alphabet.

This is the man to whom the invention of the kana system is attributed to, and if that is the case, I see a possible connection that is as not as far-fetched as it seems.

The History of Hiragana

In Japanese language, we have three types of letters, Kanji, Hiragana, Katakana.

Hiragana’s root is from old Ivrit and Palmyra letters.

The first column:  Phoenician alphabet The second column: Ostracon The third column: Old Aramaic The forth column: Imperial Aramaic The fifth column: Dead Sea scrolls The sixth column: Palmyrene script The seventh column: Palmyra

The first column: Hiragana The second column: Consonants The third column: Vowels The forth column: combined with the consonant and the vowel The fifth column: Sousho-tai (a hand writing style) The sixth column: Kanji

The Pirate Queen of the South China Sea

The Red Flag Fleet under Ching Shih’s rule went undefeated, despite attempts by Qing dynasty officials, the Portuguese navy, and the East India Company to vanquish it. After three years of notoriety on the high seas, Ching Shih finally retired in 1810 by accepting an offer of amnesty from the Chinese government. Ching Shih died in 1844, at the ripe old age of 69.At the dawn of the 1800s, a former prostitute from a floating brothel in the city of Canton was wed to Cheng I, a fearsome pirate who operated in the South China Sea in the Qing dynasty. Though the name under which we now know her, Ching Shih, simply means “Cheng’s widow,” the legacy she left behind far exceeded that of her husband’s. Following his death, she succeeded him and commanded over 1,800 pirate ships, and an estimated 80,000 men.

Her husband, Ching I, was the formidable commander of the Red Flag Fleet of pirate ships. He married a 26-year-old Ching Shih in 1801. She quickly took to the pirate life and when Ching I died six years later, Ching Shih wasn’t going to let Ching I’s adopted son, Cheung Po Tsai take over.  Cheung Po Tsai, however, was more than just Ching Shih’s adopted son –-  the young man had also been Ching I’s lover.

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Ottoman Empire and Edo-era Japan. You probably never thought about them together before, right? Turns out the Ottomans knew about Japan since at least the late 1600s, because the Ottoman scholar Katip Çelebi included Japan in his atlas “Displaying the World.”

He didn’t quite get the shape of the islands, or their number, or their names…but hey, he tried!

I am not a native Japanese speaker but the first word that comes to mind is 懐かしい (natsukashii), which is that warm fuzzy feeling you have when you think upon a fond memory or experience. Or that feeling you are having when you say, "sure brings back memories." Depending on context it gets translated to nostalgic, or longing, or dear, but by themselves they all feel somewhat inadequate.

For Chinese mandarin, I can think of 骗我的感情 (pian wo de gan qing) (there should be tone markers, but I don't know how to put them in, sorry!), which is literally "trick/bluff my feelings", which I am now finding quite to explain! Hmm... it's that disappointment you feel when someone sets your expectations up for something and then fails to deliver. I suppose like feeling cheated.

Hope that helps and good luck!

bobbies

YOU SPEAK A LANGUAGE AND I NEED YOUR HELP PLEASE I BEG YOU

hi. sorry about that catchy title, but you have something i need. you speak a language, maybe even multiple languages. you use emotions words everyday. i’m sure you know that languages have their own emotion words that are very hard to translate to other languages, for example, the word ‘anxiety’ doesn’t really exist in Polish, it is always a challenge to translate it in such way to convey its true meaning. Polish people don’t really feel anxiety, because they don’t have the word for it. i need your help with something: tell me an emotion word that is unique to your language or hard to translate. i’ll ask you a few questions and maybe i’ll write an essay about it using the natural semantic metalanguage (NSM). it’s a linguistic theory, whatever. please help a linguist out. i need an A. i promise i won’t get an F on your precious word. 

i am interested in emotion words from every language except for Polish and English.

you can reply under this post, you can message me privately, i can give you my e-mail, whatever works for you. it would really help me if you reblogged this post, but no pressure

help education.. pretty please?

The Black Book of Carmarthen is the oldest surviving manuscript written entirely in the Welsh language. It was penned by a single scribe working at different periods around the year 1250.

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Could you explain this tfw no ZF joke? I really dont get it... :D

Get ready for a long explanation! For everyone’s reference, the joke (supplied by @awesomepus​) was:

Q: What did the mathematician say when he encountered the paradoxes of naive set theory?A: tfw no ZF

You probably already know the ‘tfw no gf’ (that feel when no girlfriend) meme, which dates to 2010. I’m assuming you’re asking about the ZF part.

Mathematically, ZF is a reference to Zermelo-Fraenkel set theory, which is a set of axioms commonly accepted by mathematicians as the foundation of modern mathematics. As you probably know if you’ve taken geometry, axioms are super important: they are basic assumptions we make about the world we’re working in, and they have serious implications for what we can and can’t do in that world. 

For example, if you don’t assume the Parallel Postulate (that consecutive interior angle measures between two parallel lines and a transversal sum to 180°, or twice the size of a right angle), you can’t prove the Triangle Angle Sum Theorem (that the sum of the angle measures in any triangle is also 180°). It’s not that the Triangle Angle Sum Theorem theorem is not true without the Parallel Postulate — simply that it is unprovable, or put differently, neither true nor false, without that Postulate. Asking whether the Triangle Angle Sum Theorem is true without the Parallel Postulate is really a meaningless question, mathematically. But we understand that, in Euclidean geometry (not in curved geometries), both the postulate and the theorem are “true” in the sense that we have good reason to believe them (e.g., measuring lots of angles in physical parallel lines and triangles). Clearly, the axioms we choose are important.

Now, in the late 19th and early 20th century, mathematicians and logicians were interested in understanding the underpinnings of the basic structures we use in math — sets, or “collections,” being one of them, and arithmetic being another. In short, they were trying to come up with an axiomatic set theory. Cantor and Frege were doing a lot of this work, and made good progress using everyday language. They said that a set is any definable collection of elements, where “definable” means to provide a comprehension (a term you’re familiar with if you program in Python), or rule by which the set is constructed.

But along came Bertrand Russell. He pointed out a big problem in Cantor and Frege’s work, which is now called Russell’s paradox. Essentially, he made the following argument:

Y’all are saying any definable collection is a set. Well, how about this set: R, the set of all sets not contained within themselves. This is, according to you, a valid set, because I gave that comprehension. Now, R is not contained within itself, naturally: if it is contained within itself, then it being an element is a violation of my construction of R in the first place. But R must be contained within itself: if it’s not an element of itself, then it is a set that does not contain itself, and therefore it is an element of itself. So we have that R ∈ R and also R ∉ R. This is a contradiction! Obviously, your theory is seriously messed up.

This paradox is inherently a part of Cantor and Frege’s set theory — it shows that their system was inconsistent (with itself). As Qiaochu Yuan explains over at Quora, the problem is exactly what Russell pointed out: unrestricted comprehension — the idea that you can get away with defining any set you like simply by giving a comprehension. Zermelo and Fraenkel then came along and offered up a system of axioms that formalizes Cantor and Frege’s work logically, and restricts comprehension. This is called Zermelo-Fraenkel set theory (or ZF), and it is consistent (with itself). Cantor and Frege’s work was then retroactively called naive set theory, because it was, of course, pretty childish:

There are two more things worth knowing about axiomatic systems in mathematics. First, some people combine Zermelo-Fraenkel set theory with the Axiom of Choice¹, resulting in a set theory called ZFC. This is widely used as a standard by mathematicians today. Second, Gödel proved in 1931 that no system of axioms for arithmetic can be both consistent and complete — in every consistent axiomatization, there are “true” statements that are unprovable. Or put another way: in every consistent axiomatic system, there are statements which you can neither prove nor disprove.For example, in ZF, the Axiom of Choice is unprovable — you can’t prove it from the axioms in ZF. And in both ZF and ZFC, the continuum hypothesis² is unprovable.³ Gödel’s result is called the incompleteness theorem, and it’s a little depressing, because it means you can’t have any good logical basis for all of mathematics (but don’t tell anyone that, or we might all be out of a job). Luckily, ZF or ZFC has been good enough for virtually all of the mathematics we as a species have done so far!

The joke is that, when confronted with Russell’s paradox in naive set theory, the mathematician despairs, and wishes he could use Zermelo-Fraenkel set theory instead — ‘that feel when no ZF.’

I thought the joke was incredibly funny, specifically because of the reference to ‘tfw no gf’ and the implication that mathematicians romanticize ZF (which we totally do). I’ve definitely borrowed the joke to impress friends and faculty in the math department…a sort of fringe benefit of having a math blog.

– CJH

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Types of mooncakes

Right now(is festival for chinese singaporeans) is the mid-autumn festival. According to the ancient Chinese legend, the story of Chang Er, the wife of a merciless king who downed the elixir of immortality he had intended to drink, to save her people from his tyrannical rule.The tale goes that she ascended to the moon after that, and has been worshipped by the Chinese as a Moon Goddess ever since. 

Making and sharing mooncakes is one of the hallmark traditions of this festival. In singapore, we have main five different chinese dialect group(hokkien,teochew,hakka,cantonese,hainanese) so of course, there are five different types of mooncakes.

CANTONESE MOOKCAKE

This is the most common style of mooncakes sold by bakeries and hotels. The round pastry, which is about 10cm in diameter and about 4cm thick, comes from south China’s Guangdong province and is also eaten in Hong Kong and Macau. The traditional mooncake is filled with lotus seed or red bean paste with egg yolks inside. 

However, there are the modern snowskin mooncakes which contains anything from durian to champagne. (below are champagne mooncakes)

HOKKIEN MOONCAKE

They were known as Scholar Cakes in the past and given to those taking the Imperial Examination to fill junior and senior administrative positions in the Imperial Court. The filling usually comprises winter melon, tangerine peel and melon seeds. Sesame seeds are sprinkled on the white pastry to make it fragrant.

HAINANESE MOONCAKE

Hainanese ones are filled with dried fruit such as tangerine peel as well as sesame seeds and melon seeds. It has two verision with a salty and pepper version. The.The slightly flaky skin is made with pork lard and salt. According to a blog, they are actually only found in singapore as the story goes that the hainanese community in singapore was very poor and could not afford the normal mooncakes sold so they made their own type of mooncake.

TEOCHEW MOONCAKE

Yam-filled mooncakes with a flaky crust are the most common Teochew mooncakes sold in Singapore. Another type is la gao, which is a steamed black sesame cake. It comes plain or with green bean paste or yam filling. There is also another type of Teochew mooncake, a white disc that looks like a big biscuit and is filled with tangerine peel and sugar, flavoured with five-spice powder and topped with sesame seeds.

HAKKA MOONCAKE

This is actually uncommon and almost unheard of in singapore but moon cakes in Hakka regions of china, apart from common moon cakes, have “five-kernel moon cakes” and a kind of round cake made with glutinous rice flour and sugar, compressed into different size. (I can’t find an exact picture of the hakka mooncake so)