Nash's world

I was reading up on the etymology of turkey on reddit and found out that

• Americans and other English speakers call turkey “turkey” because they thought it came from Turkey. There’s a chance they actually didn’t know where Turkey was, it just had this “far east” exotic appeal…
• Turks don’t have any Turkey, obviously, but they have the guinea fowl (“angolan chicken in portuguese”) which I godamn hope it comes from Guine because I don’t want to start this all over again.
• The turks call turkey “hindi” because they thought it came from India (so did the french – “Dinde”, hebrews and russians “indük” or “индейка”). And because everyone had no idea where India actually was, since they still believed it to be the same place as america.
• The Swedes, Dutch and Norwegian call it, respectively, “kalkun”/”kalkon”/”kalkoen” because they were smartasses that thought they were better than their other european friends and it did not come from just India, it came specifically from Calcutta.
• The greek called them Galopoula meaning French Bird, partly because they mistook it for the domesticated Guineafowl in southern france, but mostly I guess because they were really trolling the language at this point to see what other bullshit they could get in there. (continue reading…)

I was reading minivan news today and came across this article regarding the parliamentarians ”Privileges” Bill. In the article MP Mahloof argues that the 20,000 MVR additional allowance was needed because  of “number of people petitioning MPs for money and assistance”.  He says that he is   he is giving away about 2000 US dollars a month (roughly 41 %) to constituents. So this got me thinking why not establish a charity with the amount that MP are giving out and pool the money together so to reach more people. Lets do the math and find out how much exactly will this hypothetical charity will have.

(continue reading…)

Right now, its raining methane on Titan. The planet Uranus, apparently trying to live up to its name, is orbiting the sun sideways, while venus spins backwards. There ares stars exploding, black holes gorging, galaxies colliding.

And here we sit, on a planet pock-marked by collisions, rocked by earthquakes, shaken by storms. a planet doomed to be fried with radiation as its magnetic fields collapse, until finally the sun grows into a red giant and leaves nothing of the Earth but dust.

Here we sit, glasses on over noses, inhalers in our pockets, braces on our teeth, waiting to die as our heart muscles expires, our cells decide to grow forever, or blood vessels just pops and some times in unnatural ways too.

here we sit, and some of us say, behold, look at the order of it all