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.

Stockfish

Originally a classical chess-playing algorithm, it was augmented with a neural network in 2020, and in 2023 is now entirely a neural network.

The classical algorithm works by looking at the tree of possible game states starting from the current state. Each state gets a score (in centipawns):

• If during some state it is the computer’s turn, then the score is the max of the child states’ scores (it wants to make a move that benefits itself).
• If it is the opponent’s turn, then the score is the min of the child states’ scores (the opponent wants to make a move that hurts the computer).

Then the algorithm will make the move that maximizes the score. This algorithm is called Minimax.

Alpha-beta pruning

Because the tree can get really big, to make it faster, Alpha-beta pruning stops evaluation (prunes parts of the tree) when it encounters a move that’s proven to be worse than another move that’s already been evaluated.

Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM)

ATM is a data-link layer protocol (like Ethernet or I²C) mainly used for creating WANs. First, to connect to another client, a virtual circuit is created specifying the route that the data should take along the network. Then all the data packets, which are all 53 bytes, are routed through this circuit.

Unlike Ethernet, you can guarantee an ATM connection’s Quality of Service, such as its data rate and maximum delay. ATM is used in DSL networks.

Tea

Black, white, green, oolong, and pu-erh tea all come from the same plant species, the tea tree (Camellia sinensis). The difference between them is the level of oxidization achieved when processing them, with white tea being the least oxidized and black tea the most oxidized.

Pinky

Pinky is a really small scripting language designed to be easy to implement by people learning to write compilers and interpreters. (source)

Calibri used to detect forgery

In the wake of the Panama Papers, the former Prime Minister of Pakistan Nawaz Sharif was under investigation for tax evasion. He produced documents purportedly dated 2006. The documents were typeset in Calibri, a font created in 2004 and available in beta versions of Windows Vista and Microsoft Office 2007, before both became widely available in 2007. (source)

Menko

Menko are Japanese cards used to play the game of the same name. Players put down Menko, and use a third Menko to try to flip the other two over. Whoever flips a Menko gets to keep the flipped Menko.

The earliest Menko-like tokens date back to the Edo period and were made from fired clay, but over time other materials were used. Lead Menko were banned in 1900 because kids would lick them to gain an advantage and poision themselves, ushering in an era of cardboard-backed cards.

After the Japanese defeat during WW2, the MacArthur administration banned the glorification of the Japanese military and soldiery, and Menko started to depict baseball stars rather than planes and samurai. (source)

Eliica

The Ellica (Electric Lithium-Ion Car) is an 2004 electric vehicle prototype designed at Keio University. It reached a speed of 370 km/h on the Nardò High Speed Track in Italy and accelerates from 0-100 km/h in four seconds. It has eight wheels for traction, and they are smaller than normal passenger wheels so the car sits lower to the ground. It seats the driver and three passengers. (source)

Rembrandt lighting

A lighting technique named after the Dutch painter Rembrandt that causes a triangular patch on the face’s darker side to have a triangular illuminated patch below the eye. It is seen in film noir to evoke emotions and create a sense of mystery. (source)

Modulex

A company that spun out of LEGO in 1963 to make serious LEGOs for architecture. Modulex blocks were smaller and designed to be used in 1/20 scale models. They originally bore a LEGO wordmark on the studs, but this was changed to a simple M, in order to distance themselves from LEGOs, which were commonly seen as mere kids’ toys. As architectural trends turned away from blocky shapes, Modulex switched to marketing towards factory and city planners.

Modulex would go on to produce sets for building corporate project planning boards and other signage. As computers improved, providing convenient project management tools and CAD capabilities, Modulex bricks became obsolete. Though the bricks were discontinued in 2004, the company continues to this day as a manufacturer of commercial signage and displays.

In 2015, a company called Modulex Bricks A/S was founded to make Modulex bricks from the original moulds, but it was bought out by the LEGO company and it has no intention of manufacturing them. (source)