Category: Interesting stuff

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And now you know

Ever wonder where the strange names for groups of animals came from? Wonder no more, through the commentariat at Althouse:

From a book I enjoyed as a kid and still browse sometimes called Why Things Are by Joel Achenbach:

Why Are There So Many Bizarre Names For A Collection Of Animals…?

Our favorite is a parliament of owls, because you can imagine them in powdered wigs. According to James Lipton, author of An Exaltation of Larks, the English nobility had nothing better to do in the fifteenth century than sit around and think up funny names for groups of animals. This was called the venereal game, after the word venery, an archaic term for hunting. Terms became widely circulated by word of mouth, then established though the publication of books of courtesy, which instructed a gentleman how to behave in proper society and among other things use the right name for a bunch of foxes (“skulk”).

Many of the terms are conspicuously cute like a cowardice of curs or a murder of crows. Others sound cuter than they are meant to be; a school of fish is a corruption of shoal of fish, which is an appropriate image. Some others: A hover of trout, a husk of hares, a labor of moles, an unkindness of ravens, a murmuration of starlings, a knot of toads, a gang of elk, a fall of woodcocks, a rafter of turkeys, a kindle of kittens, a pitying of woodcocks, a crash of rhinos, a congregation of plovers, and a bevy of roebucks.

Thar’ ye go….

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America the Beautiful

From Kuriositas:

The Grand Circle is a stunning, immense expanse of land located in the South-western United States. It encompasses parts of five states – Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, Utah and Nevada. Not surprisingly it also holds the largest concentration of national parks and monuments in the country. It takes in Arches National Park, Monument Valley, Bryce Canyon, Zion, Antelope Canyon, the Grand Canyon, Horseshoe Bend, Mesa Verde, Natural Bridges, Canyonlands, and Grand Staircase-Escalante.

Breathtaking.

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I wonder how this will play out?

Just in from the real frozen tundra:

MAKHACHKALA, Russia — Beware of 56-year-old Russian women with axes.

A lone wolf attacked Aishat Maksudova outside her sister’s home in Russia’s province of Dagestan in the North Caucasus Mountains.

The animal bit the farmer on her arm and her leg and she fell to the ground, crying out for help from other villagers. No one was in earshot. So she reached for an ax she had brought along to repair a fence, and with remarkable aplomb, she hit the wolf over the head several times until his teeth unclenched.

The wolf later died.

Maksudova has become a hero in the Caspian Sea province that lies east of Chechnya. She was still being treated for her wounds Tuesday at a local hospital after last week’s incident. Doctors said she is recuperating well.

We’ll just check back at the next full moon, mmm?

via The Jawa Report

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Make Google dance… the nerd way.

With the search modifiers described in this article, you can search on Google with a surprising amount of narrowing available. Though the article is mainly about graphing the results of searches, it contains on one handy page all the obscure modifiers that let you pull useful data out of that torrent of information- such as how to differentiate between ‘tackle’ a problem, and fishing ‘tackle’. Definitely a page worth bookmarking!

Why is this interesting at all, you ask? Well, go do your normal Google search using just one or two keywords. Normally you’ll get 60 bazillion (yes, that’s a word, it’s scientifically proven) hits and if you’re lucky somewhere on the first two pages what you were looking for will appear- or at least something close to it. Use some of these ngrams to tell Google what you actually are looking for, et voilà!, a much more focused and narrow result . Too cool.

Ngrams FTW!

via Eugene Volokh