Neolithic artefacts called "Shetland knives" are unique to those islands, apart from one example reported from mainland Scotland. Someone has now checked the label on the anomaly, and it reads "Lerwick" (the capital of Shetland), not (as originally reported) "Lanark". Always check primary sources!

So I started @hutchinsondave.bsky.social's The Essence feeling slightly aggrieved that it wasn't a Fractured Europe sequel, and now that I've finished it I want a sequel to The Essence—immediately. If you loved Fractured Europe, you'll also love The Essence. oikofuge.com/hutchinson-f...

Today's festive word: STABLE oikofuge.com/stable/

Today's crossword word: INHALE It means "to breathe in", from Latin halare, "breathe". Using it to mean "gulp down food" is not only anatomically ignorant, it's profoundly annoying, especially to anyone who has either a) breathed in food accidentally, or b) seen the consequences of such an event.

How often do you check your email junk folder(s)? I do it once a day. But I just read a story about a person who managed to miss email alerts for SEVEN YEARS, because they were wrongly being routed straight to Junk. How much misplaced trust in algorithms do you have to have for that to happen?

Today's festive word: WASSAIL oikofuge.com/wassail/

Excellent note of much-needed sanity here from the BBC--- it's not "superflu", and it's a fundamentally stupid and dangerous idea to call it "superflu". BBC News - What's really going on with flu this winter? www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

I also want to say thank you to the person who introduced me to the French word 'beaucoup' this year. It means a lot.

Today's crossword word: INFER From Latin in-, "into", and ferre, "to bring". It means to deduce. You INFER something from available evidence. Not, please, to be confused with IMPLY, from Latin in- and plicare, "to fold". Which means to suggest, to have a hidden meaning to your words.

And now I find out that The Salt Path wasn't even published by a real penguin.

Guy ahead of me in the queue in my local cake/sandwich outlet just walked up to the counter with eight cream doughnuts. "Sitting in or taking away?" they asked.

Actors! Attention! A walking stick is used in the hand OPPOSITE the painful leg, so that it can effectively off-load that leg. A stick in the LEFT hand is moved forward in time with the RIGHT leg. A stick in the RIGHT hand moves with the LEFT leg. Why do only 1 in 20 of you do this properly?

When I was a young fella, back when dinosaurs ruled the Earth, I used to be irritated and bemused in equal measure when some oldie at the next table started *reading the menu aloud*. Now that I am an oldie myself, I know that their dining companion(s) had forgotten their reading glasses.

No matter how tired I get, I never get "dark circles under my eyes". That would look very odd indeed, and I don't know why people keep saying it. At worst, fatigue produces a dark arc that's not much more than a third of a full circle. A dark circle would require a tattooist.

Happy 76th Birthday, Tom Waits!

In half a century, I've never encountered a person who described their own musical tastes as "eclectic" who actually had remotely eclectic tastes. Hint: Laying claim to "everything from Meat Loaf to Mozart" just makes it worse.

Either of these. Both excellent.

Today's crossword word: RIA From Spanish ría, "estuary", this has taken on a specific geological meaning, first in German and then in English. It denotes a long, narrow inlet of the sea formed by the partial submergence of an unglaciated valley; in contrast to a fjord, which has been glaciated.

Aaaaargh. My coffee cup just turned into an interdimensional portal through which a demonic snowman is emerging. Or it's possible I'm just overlaying my own feelings about Christmas ...

Watched Bladerunner again last night. Would have been so much better if they had gone with the original idea, that instead of origami unicorns, Edward James Olmos’ character had made balloon animals. “It’s too bad she won’t live; but then again SQUEEEK-SQUEEEK-SQUEEEEEEK-SQUEEEEK Who does?”

Curse you, internet of things. My car is currently at the menders, for reasons that need not detain us. The app on my phone is having hysterics while the car is partially dismantled. Nice to know the work's underway, but I don't need twelve notifications that "Your car has multiple issues".

An autumnal walk along the southern rim of Glen Doll, featuring a potential solution to the Mystery of the Glittering Skellies, and other reflections on Scottish hill names. Glen Doll: The Lunkard To Corrie Fee oikofuge.com/glen-doll-lu...

On 23 March, the Earth passed through the plane of Saturn's rings. Today, 23 November, we very nearly caught up with the ring plane again. Here's a graph of the Saturnian latitude of the Sun (red) and Earth (green), showing the ring-plane crossings (corresponding to zero Saturnian latitude):

"I would never have salmon DNA injected into my face again," Charlotte says, "ever." www.bbc.co.uk/news/article... Amazing that this needed said, really.

From the Department of Disappointingly False Folk Etymology: Peter Heck, in the Mark Twain Mysteries, derives the word "stateroom" from a Mississippi riverboat that had cabins named after every state of the Union. I'd love that to be true.

Local bus company has to provide a pronunciation guide for the Scottish town they operate from. (Yes, Friockheim is FREE-come.)

Eye-catching punctuation in a New York Times crossword clue today (in the app): "Get me?," to beatniks That comma would be considered ugly and superfluous in the UK, but I'd be interested in @bcdreyer.social 's view on US usage, if he cares to comment.

Today's crossword word: LOGO From Greek logos, "word". A catch-all term including logograms, logotypes, and combinations of those. Logograms are symbols, like Apple's apple. Logotypes are names rendered in specific typefaces, colours & styles. These may be combined into a "combination mark".

"I had a really strange dream last night!" • Yeah. Dreams'll do that. • If you found it notable or interesting in some way, I'm happy for you. • Don't imagine for a moment that I want to hear any more about it.

This wins the internet today, though it might be slightly lost on audiences beyond the UK.

Loud Guy in Restaurant just explained that the reason "AI" hallucinates is because *people aren't marking their text as unreliable*. So it's actually the fault of crazy folk, ill-informed folk, and folk who have no idea that the parody they posted 10 years ago has been scraped. Now we know.

A tale of two tails. Concorde, and a Hawker-Siddeley Hawk, at the National Musem of Flight, North Berwick.

Today's crossword word: UGLI The Jamaican tangelo was originally propagated from a single tree, a natural hybrid of tangerine and grapefruit. Although the fruit is often called "ugli fruit", UGLI® is actually a trademark, registered by Cabel Hall Citrus Ltd in 1934, designating their own tangelos.

Working my way through Clifford Simak's short stories, including some Westerns. In one such story, he describes a staggering man as a "reeling robot", which seemed joltingly anachronistic. But the story is set during the Range Wars, which I see lasted well beyond 1920, when Čapek coined "robot".

Today's crossword word: SPA The original "spa" was at the allegedly health-giving mineral springs in Spa, Belgium. All others take their name from that. The derivation of the placename from a Latin acronym, Salus Per Aquam ("health from water"), is a backronym—a recent, retrospective, confection.

Today's crossword word: WEE In American English, the adjective is generally just a synonym for "tiny" or intensifier for "small". In Scots, it can also signify "young" (independent of size), or have connotations of affection, contempt, apology or short duration. (It's all in the context and tone.)

When a chatbot gets something wrong, it’s not because it made an error. It’s because on that roll of the dice, it happened to string together a group of words that, when read by a human, represents something false. But it was working entirely as designed. It was supposed to make a sentence & it did.

The "Lane Tracing Assist" on my new Toyota:

So, the BBC thinks that "bicep" is a word. Aaargh. www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cev18p1gwp2o The singular muscle has two heads, so it's bi+ceps. See also tri- and quadri-. #copyediting #proofreading

Today's crossword word: DECO A design style popular in the 1920s and '30s. The word is the worn-down nubbin of the original French, art décoratif, meaning "decorative art", a phrase popularized by the Exposition des Arts Décoratifs, held in Paris in 1925.

Just took a Swish corded curtain rail apart to replace a broken part. Gad, these are clever little bits of kit. Note to self: photograph the disassembly process for later reference, you idiot.

Finally got around to writing about @philipcball.bsky.social 's splendid "Alchemy". Gorgeous book, fascinating text: oikofuge.com/ball-alchemy/

Today's crossword word(s): ET TU Popular for its cluster of common letters, these last words of Julius Caesar seem to have been invented by Shakespeare. If he said anything, the more ancient sources have him speaking Greek, surprisingly: "Kai su, teknon?" ("You too, child?")

Mind has been officially blown by seeing Saturn and its moon Titan through the Mills Observatory Victorian 10" Cooke telescope. WOW! Every time I've visited before, the clouds have come too, but not today! This old technology still works perfectly with a clockwork tracking mechanism. Stunning 🥳👌 🔭

Always nice when an author turns up to comment on one of the reviews on my blog—so far, that's always been a pleasant interaction! The latest such comes from Robert Matthews, on my discussion of his analysis of tumbling toast and Murphy's Law. oikofuge.com/matthews-tum...

Today's crossword word: ERNE A large eagle, from Old English "earn". In the UK, the white-tailed eagle. In the USA, "bald erne" is a poetic name for the bald eagle. The Germanic languages are full of close cognates, from Dutch "arend" to Swedish "örn". And then there's Ancient Greek "ornis", bird.

Now, that's what I call a CASTLE!

I think the barista hates me.

The wisdom of Ted Chiang, from "The Lifecycle of Software Objects": "experience is algorithmically incompressible" www.goodreads.com/book/show/41...

A nice evocation of the "expanding ignorance" at the edges of science, from astronomer Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin: "There is more research to be done than there ever was; we know so much less than we did when I came [to Harvard] as a student more than 50 years ago." www.goodreads.com/book/show/10...