Trivia

This is an unsorted collection of miscellaneous trivia that I come across. Originally, these trivia items were written down in my notebook. It’s harder for me to quickly draw pictures for a webpage, so trivia with pictures might get left out.

Autonomous System Numbers (ASNs)

Assigned to ranges of IP addresses controlled by an organization that are ISP agnostic. You can tell different ISPs to use your IP addresses using your ASN and the BGP protocol.

Cistercian numerals

Early 13th C. numbers written in a single glyph, where lines’ positions on a central staff determines its place value. Encodes numbers from 1-9999.

Kmonad

A software keyboard remapping tool.

Dashes

• En-dashes are for ranges, relations, and scores.
• Em-dashes are for pauses or where a period is too strong.

Formula E

Electric car version of Formula 1. Fans vote before a race who gets an extra jolt of electricity for a ¿few seconds at the start of the race?

NASCAR

Originates from moonshiners with modified cars for faster smuggling. After prohibition, races were frequently held at Daytona Beach. Originally raced with actual stock (bought from manufacturer) cars with modifications.

Electromagnetic resonance (EMR)

Graphics tablets with a grid of wires behind the display transmit EM waves via induction to the coil in the pen for electrical energy. The coil is used again to transmit data back.

Brazilian Jiu Jitsu

Evolved from Judo practitioners in Brazil.

UFC was originally organized after video demonstrations of BJJ practitioners defeating practitioners of other martial arts. The Gracie family of Gracie Jiu Jitsu wished to promote BJJ to a wider audience by accepting challenges in the UFC.

Kendo

To score points, you must shout the area of the body you wish to attack first, such as “men” (head).

Immersed tube/tunnel

Tunnel building technique for tunneling across water.

Tunnel segments are prefabricated, floated to their destination, sunk, and linked together.

Refrigeration loop

• Condenser (hot side): coolant condenses into liquid, heat energy released.
• Evaporator (cold side): coolant expands into gas, heat energy absorbed.
• Under low pressure, the boiling point of the coolant is lowered.

Tsugaru election 津軽選挙

In Aomori Prefecture, electoral fraud was so openly prevalent that candidates would bribe voters by going door-to-door handing out money, asking voters to verbally ask election officials to write the name of the candidate for them on the ballot, and handing them onigiri filled with cash.

Merge algorithm

Have two sorted arrays and two pointers. Advance whatever pointer has the smaller of the two and put the value in the merged array.

Areal features

Features of a language that exist in languages within a geographic area that have spread due to language contact.

Feature transmission

Most language features that are structural like syntax and morphology are spread from parent to child. Language contact tends to only spread lexical and phonological features.

Wasps

Wasps cannot fly well under 10 C but can keep active below freezing.

Monad

• A monad is a container type that implements a flatMap method and contains one or more values
  • [1,2,3].flatMap(x => return [x*2])
    • Returns [2,3,6]
  • [1,2,3].flatMap(x => return [x, x])
    • Returns [1,1,2,2,3,3]
  • [1,2,3].flatMap(x => return [])
    • Returns []
• Monadic functions accept monads and return monads
• Monadic functions can be chained together

CBOR

A non-human-readable serialization format

Protobuf

A serialization format where the client and server need to know the schema beforehand. Non-human-readable.

Unification Church “Moonies”

Korean new religious movement that encourages followers to donate large sums. Sun Myung Moon believes he is the second coming of Christ. The UC has a lot of influence with the Japanese LDP, which led to the assassination of Shinzo Abe in 2022, who was killed with an improvised gun.

SRAM

Static RAM.

• Uses flip-flops to store bits
• Data persists as long as power is on
• More expensive than DRAM which needs to be refreshed every second or so

Incompatibilism

The idea that free will is incompatible with determinism. Compatibilism is the inverse.

Kombucha

Black tea fermented by a culture of certain bacterias and yeasts.

Splatbooks

Name derives from the asterisk (*), or splat. World of Darkness supplement books were called things like clanbooks, traditionbooks, thingbooks, which were collectively known as *books on Usenet.