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Wikipedia

Soap

Joined 8 January 2006

Yes, I'm still planning to write Climate of Denver. I get distracted easily, sorry. I am mostly active on Wiktionary these days, in part because I have minor eyesight problems and have difficulty handling large chunks of text.

Weather and climate

Mostly putting this here for my own use .... User:Soap/climate

Record low of -9F at Anaktuvuk_Pass,_Alaska#Climate on 9/26/2021 but it may be a different station.

Poem

See /poems.

Placenames

Native American placenames with Latinate appearance

I have no single must-have trait to put a name on this list; it's all subjective. Most are places near where I live. A final vowel plus /-s/ can change the sound of the whole name, but this can be undone by other traits. For example, Aziscohos does not sound particularly Latin or even Greek.

I live in New England, so I am much more familiar with local placenames, including relatively obscure ones such as Agamenticus, than I am with placenames further afield. However it may be that the phenomenon is real and that the original colonists of New England and the Canadian maritimes maintained a preference for Latinate names even where the original Native American names did not always suggest such respellings. For example, Piscataqua and Piscataquis both appear in Maine, but Piscataway appears in New Jersey.

Northeast US and eastern Canada

Lesser-known placenames

Everywhere else

For more, and for their meanings, see here. Cascapedia and Matapedia are not yet on that list. It may be that there are more placenames like this in the southeastern United States and that I simply don't know about them because I haven't lived there. It's perhaps worth noting that I recognize more such names in the southeast than, for example, in the Midwest or the West, suggesting perhaps that Muskogean languages are superficially similar in sound to Algonquian languages even though they are not known to be related. A relation has in fact been proposed (see Gulf languages because the idea doesnt have a page of its own), though I think it's unlikely, as Algonquian languages seem to have arrived from the west, and Muskogean languages seem to have links in Mexico and the Caribbean.

I grew up thinking that Tampa was a Greek plural.

Edge cases

Edge cases
  • Schenectady, Saratoga, Ticonderoga, Conestoga .... none of these have Latinate endings, so I dont really think they belong on the list, but in a sense they continue the same familiar prosody found in New England. Conestoga was once spelled Quanestaqua.
  • Canobie, only here because someone mistook it for "canopy"
  • Machias for spelling only, because the sound of the ch is in fact tʃ.
  • Osseo, an Ojibwe name in Minnesota which means bony in Italian (but not anything in Latin or Greek).
  • Sysladobsis, off the main list only due to use of b where Latin and Greek would both use p. Possibly a localism since this is Penobscot territory.

ough in Native American place names

  • Youghiogheny
  • Ramapough (but cf Ramapo university)
  • Poughkeepsie, New York ... i wonder if there's a reason why they seem to be confined to the northern Appalachians.
  • Quiyoughcohannock was in eastern Virginia, but may be from an older stage of the language ... there is no modern place with this name. I found the tribe name spelled Quiocohànoes in a document of 1801 written (or at least edited) by Thomas Jefferson. Perhaps by 1800 the ough spelling was already in retreat.
  • Toughkenamon

There was also Nandtaughtacund. Interestingly enough, Hyannis above seems to be named after someone called Iyannough, which suggests there may have been an -ough stage in early colonial New England that got covered by a later trend of Latin-like names. Saratoga was once spelled Sarraghtoga.

Other lookalikes

Japanese

  • Toiyabe not from an early Japanese settler.
  • Temagami
  • Pokegama, MN also sounds Japanese, although I know now that Pokemon is not really a Japanese word. There is also a Pokagon. Both names are Algonquian and might be related.
  • See also some placenames in the southeast. Muskogean languages seem to straddle the line between the Latin-like names of New England and the Japanese-like names of other areas (mostly in the West). This gave me an idea for how it would look if Japanese names had been spelled according to how we handle Native American placenames. Imagine Noggasaukee and Sarporough?

(Regarding the /r/ in the above word: there was an early layer of nonrhotic pronunciations in colonial America; see words such as sagamore. Many nonrhotic speakers lived in the southern states too though I dont have examples at hand; see older Southern American English. Possibly still hints of nonrhotic speech in Mississippi in the 1940s here.)

Polish

Vulgar-sounding names

There is a cluster of vulgar-sounding names like Big Assawoman Bay (and yes, it's pronounced like that), Cuttawoman (possibly the same as Cuttatawoman), and the now-lost Pissasec around the Chesapeake Bay, particularly in what is now Virginia. Pissasee might be a misreading of Pissasec rather than a separate form of the tribal name.

Meanwhile in Canada, the placename Nipissing has no particular reason to have a double -ss-, and I'd have chosen a spelling like Nippasing instead to make it clearer that the word is accented on the first syllable. Actually, it occurred to me it might be a French spelling convention, as Lake Nipissing is fairly close to Quebec and French speakers have for a long time lived outside Quebec as well. Offhand I don't know of any other placenames with the substring -piss-. I tried searching once, and it turned up nothing, but I suspect the search tool wasn't coded to look for substrings and was therefore useless to me (I tried some other strings for comparison and they also mostly came up empty). Even so, the placenames where one might expect to see a double s in this position always seem to use single S, like the above Capisic.

By contrast, the tribal name once spelled Cowass was soon respelled to Coös (listed above).

Named after other Native American placenames?

Some placenames seem to recur. Often a name is found in New England and reappears further west. Some of these, such as Osceola, are likely what they appear to be .... an newer interior settlement named after an older one near the east coast. But coincidences also happen, and some adopted placenames may be smoothed out into a more familiar shape.

Shakopee ~ Sacopee ~ Chicopee (several locations) ... at least two independent roots, possibly three or more.

The Miami of Indiana are linguistically unrelated to Miami, FL.

At least two unrelated Jamaicas (the island and Jamaica, Queens); see Jamaica (disambiguation) for more possibilities.

Kennebec could go either way ... according to this book, the name was chosen by Milwaukee Railroad officials, but this doesnt rule out its having come from the placename in Maine.

Other common elements

Annieopsquotch, the world's largest playground. The /psk(Vt)/ sequence also occurs in Swampscott, Presumpscot, and possibly Passumpsic. But it is not necessarily from the same Native American root word in all these names. The last three all have an /m/ before the consonant sequence, as well.

Magog

An honorable mention for Magog, Quebec, because I grew up thinking it was the actual placename referred to in the Bible as Magog, and didn't even consider that the Bible may have influenced the name of the Quebec town until early adulthood. This is, nonetheless, a legitimate Native American placename, and the full version of the name is still seen: Memphrémagog. Indeed, I suspect I didn't realize the truth about the name until I saw the full version of it on a road sign or perhaps a map.

Popinac

For a change in the other direction, the popinac plant gets its name from Greek opopanax, but sounds to me more like a loan from Nahuatl or perhaps an eastern North American language.

Facts about biology

I read more about biology on Wikipedia than any other science, but I've never worked in the field or even undertaken formal study. I actually know much more about meteorology than biology, but for a reason that's hard to explain, I find weather stressful. Other sciences, like astronomy and biology, are "always new" and can relieve stress for me just by me reading about them.

Entognatha is the wingless, callow arthropod clade.

Sea shells made of limestone evolved several times ... for example, once as seashells proper and once as foraminifera.

Although tadpoles carry many parasites, lake trout and other tadpolophagous fish seem largely unaffected.

Enteroxenos is the parasitic snail that is "little more than a string of gonads".

Humans as parasites

Humans are the world's only lactoparasite, but other animals eat the eggs of different species. Humans are in many ways like traditional parasites (loss of unneeded body parts and abilities), ...

fill this in later

...and in many ways like nothing else in nature:

Only animal where female SSC is larger than male?

Retrograde adulthood

Tantulocarida is the crustacean that reproduces by budding, perhaps the only crustacean or even the only arthropod to do so. It is also the only animal in the world in which the larva form is larger than the adult. (The reason why the smaller stage is called the adult is because it is the sexually reproducing stage. It appears that the male "adults" are little more than packets of sperm cells, and they do not even eat.)

 
Four chordates. Upper right is an "animal" that cannot move and has no brain or body symmetry, but is closely related to vertebrates. See also commons:User:Soap/animal gallery for what happens when the tiger gets tired of posing for photos.

Yet, the less celebrated tunicates also reproduce by budding, and because they are part of the clade that gave rise to vertebrates, this could be seen as even more remarkable than Tantulocarida. In fact, both species have oddly out-of-place "adults" .... with the tunicates, the adults are much larger than the children, but are sessile and grossly non-animallike, to the point of not even being symmetrical despite being long-established members of Bilateria.

Humans are natural

See pom-pom crab.

Humans have relatively unarmoured appendages and are neither able to defend themselves well nor feed themselves efficiently with their hands and mouth. Tools such as cultellus cucini are grasped delicately with the hands and then held in place by several soft fingers. The tools are used in ritual combat, but primarily are used to cut through tough food items which the human scrapes off for further processing in a fire. Human skin is highly vulnerable, so humans wear clothes for protection from the elements. Humans often dream at night, and by the morning, although their eyes are not yet fully opened, they have already grasped hold of their devices.

Mullerian mimicry

Many different prey of the same predator could all employ their own warning signals, but this would make no sense for any party. If they could all agree on a common warning signal, the predator would have fewer detrimental experiences, and the prey would lose fewer individuals educating it. No such conference needs to take place, as a prey species that just so happens to look a little like an unprofitable species will be safer than its conspecifics, enabling natural selection to drive the prey species toward a single warning language.

Other biology ideas

I believe humans are megafauna. Not by weight but by body plan .... we are essentially gorillas, of above average height, who have lost most of our muscle mass through evolution towards holding weapons. This is similar to the evolution of parasites towards a very thin body form, as they lose the muscles and other organs they no longer need as they evolve towards reliance on the other. I've also compared humans to fairies, as we are much more delicate and easily injured than other apes, and also lacking in natural bodily weapons, yet as if by magic we have become much more powerful than all of those other animals.

I wonder why that name didnt catch on?

In the 19th century the Carboniferous Period was often referred to as the "Age of Ferns" but these discoveries during the first decade of the 20th century made it clear that the "Age of Pteridosperms" was perhaps a better description.

— this article

chlamydia

Chlamydia_pneumoniae is the koalas' disease. it is not clear if humans are to blame ... either directly (humans handling koalas) or indirectly (humans handling animals who later transmittted it to koalas). It's even possible koalas infected us, though here again it could have been indirect or from some other animal. This is not the same STD-based chlamydia that we usually pass amongst each other.

domestication in the wild

I think species such as Canada geese and raccoons could be considered domesticated, and that in fact they've become domesticated much more quickly than our pets have.

In the case of geese, it seems that humans' elimination of the geese's natural predators combined with our overwhelming population ratio against all wild animals has led geese to identify us as "the animal" they need to be aware of. And yet, as the vast majority of humans suppress our hunting instincts, they see us as soft and harmless. They may think of us as fellow prey animals, or indeed, as the only prey animals, if they have by now become so accustomed to seeing us and not seeing wild animals that they've lost their own prey instincts entirely. How could this happen so fast? Perhaps the geese that lost the prey instinct were the ones most likely to venture into the wild where it is easier to find food. They may also have quickly settled new habitats opened up by human population growth isolating wildlife corridors so that the few remaining natural predators of geese could not find them. All of this might also apply to ducks and perhaps other birds with large wild populations.

Other science

Electron jugs repel

Fundamental_interaction#Electromagnetism once said "This is larger than what the planet Earth would weigh if weighed on another Earth." but it has since been reworded to something more straightlaced. Also, note that this is both the electron jugs repel article and the high school magnet experiment article. high school no longer mentioned in page today. i may want to restore it, as it was only removed recently.

Perhaps the paragraph could be improved by saying it is not the magnet which is so impressive, but the electromagnetic force that keeps objects together in the first place. Unless (though I dont think so) this is actually the residual strong force.

Oort cloud edit. here, i actually amplified a claim i disagreed with to call attention to it, as i felt that had i removed it i would be unable to explain myself in scientific words.

Spacetime#Privileged_character_of_3+1_spacetime has the "tachyons only" chart

This planet is hundreds of times larger (not more massive) than its star. The lack of remark in our article suggests maybe this is not so rare.

Yes, really

You've been eating soap all your life and never knew it.

Stimming

Most stims seem to involve the hands and mouth, but headbanging does not. Is it biologically different? As of 28 June 2023, headbanging is only briefly mentioned on the stimming article, yet it is probably the most famous stereotypy of all.

I just remembered that I used to spin in circles when I was young and seriously injured myself when my head hit the edge of a wooden desk while lying down in a spinny chair. (I can't do this anymore because of medical issues; I would simply throw up immediately.) Yet, NT's also like spinning chairs, so it may be that there is no definite line between stimming and what the general public enjoys. Many other examples can likely be found; think about how many stim-like pleasures are delivered at amusement parks, especially water parks, and yet autistics are not particularly associated with attending amusement parks.

I used to think that dancing was stimming and thought of it primarily as a solitary activity.

See User:Soap/stim.

Where does coffee come from?

Caffeine is a bitter, white crystalline purine. The word purine (pure urine) was coined by the German chemist Emil Fischer in 1884.

Humans, the yellow tadpoles

Children's tadpole drawings look a lot like certain cartoon characters: the M&M's mascots, Pac-Man (in some games), Bob-ombs, and certainly many others.[1] Additionally, a less common style of emoji shows round head-bodies with arms and legs erupting directly from the body. Is it possible that we still as adults have this mental image in our heads? The traditional explanation for children's tadpoles is that they cannot see their own necks, and simply draw what they see when they look down at the rest of their bodies. But this would not explain why children also draw other people the same way.

Note that the so-called tadpole stage is not the stage with the familiar (to me) triangle bodies, but occurs at even earlier age.

And why do we prefer yellow emojis?

Assorted articles that I will read many times over

I am particularly fond of articles that teach a subject in chronological order, whether it is the history of the event or the history of the discovery. In either case it reads just like a story would.

Astronomy and physics

Linguistics

Earth science

Other science and math

Music

Music is not a subject I understand well, so almost any article will do. I honestly cherish my inability to understand even basic concepts like tablature, as it reminds me of my early childhood when everything I encountered was like this. Italian is the language of strict parents and furniture too big to move.

History and politics

Likewise, almost any article will do, though I have a preference for events far from home.

Weather and climate

My lack of interest in weather, the science I know by far the most about, is difficult to explain. It brings me stress, unlike the other topics, but right now I can't fully understand why.

Other notes

m:User:Soap/global.css

ru:Робрека may be the Robozero over which the 1663 UFO sighting took place. Information about it is surprisingly hard to find and I am questioning whether it even happened. One source says it was in 1666 instead, but this may be a conflation with this.


Riddles from the Deep

Sunàqwa the Sea Lamprey asks:
What do you call a bottom dwelling microscopic sea animal with eight retractable tentacles, teeth on both ends, blinking bioluminescence, colonial reproduction through simultaneous release, light-seeking behavior, and a tiny, poisonous calcite seashell?  

Archie

Indiscretions of Archie's plot sounds a lot like Archie Comics and even has a character named Reggie. Were those names just more popular back then, or did the creators of Archie Comics choose the names as a tribute?

Junction

Was CJ Affiliate (formerly Commission Junction) named after a children's song? If so, was the fetish site named after the company or the song? (Note that the link here is to Reddit, not to the fetish site.)

Alternatively, is the children's song referencing something older than all of these other things? Compare wikt:Malfunction Junction and (less likely) wikt:commotion lotion for other examples of popular culture phrases using the same pattern. This shows that Malfunction Junction is older than the children's song, but yet it could still be that the other things were named by people who had heard the song but were unaware of the older military term. Likewise, while the military term is about 25 years older than the kids' song, and children's shows are known for parodying things familiar to adults, it is still possible the two rhyming phrases were coined independently.

Bear and Sun

if i have time i might make pages for Bear and Sun, both computer companies associated with the automotive industry. Bear is still around but uses WIndows now, whereas I believe Sun didnt syurvive into the modern era.

Smerconish

Smerconish may be an eastern European surname respelled in an unusual way; this would be most likely if it were originally written in Cyrillic, so perhaps Serbian is the source. Still, I can't find an exact match. Smrkovský is a surname of Czech origin.

Jafra

Jafra (a cosmetics company) did not get its name from Persian, according to their website, but rather from the names of its founders, Jan and Frank. But why did I think it was Persian in the first place? There may be such a word, that I have been unable to find because of my inability to read and write the Persian script.

It may be this word from Avestan.

Funny edits

Many of these diffs are from quite early, when I was more active here. I am going to tentatively break this up into sections ordered by theme, but might decide it was better when it was mostly chronological.

Nature

Language

  • hyvempi :-) Note the very early diff, with just seven digits, where today we have ten.
  • The speakers of the Seward Peninsula dialects are known for their skill in nonverbal communication.
  • These aren't the sort of rumors we discussed in study hall; must have been an interesting school.
  • Excerpts from the Pingelapese language article as of Apr 16 2018:
    • The other cultural influences that are evident throughout Pingelapese history is the Spanish era portrayed in the Pingelapese dance called "Din Dihn" which is loosely translated in English to "Tin Tin". The dance reflects the introduction of a durable and foreign material called Tin by the Spaniards.
    • There is a set of words designated for deceiving long nouns, such as trees or roads.
    • The only other two languages in Micronesia that use triplification are Tibetan, Chintang, Batwana, and Thao.
    • It has been reported that around fifty years ago there was an early orthography taught at the Pingelap elementary atoll. It is not known to many people, but elderly Pingelapese people have confirmed it.
    • The Pingelapse language consists of a total of thirty five phonemes. There are 11 consonants and 14 vowels.
    • Pingelapese has ten syllables and eight vowel phonemes. This is the first recorded Pohnpeic language that has an eight-vowel system. Multiple young and elderly Pingelapese speakers in the Mwalok and Pingelap atoll can confirm this recent discovery of the eighth vowel.
    • Stand alone auxiliary verbs are also a constant in Pingelapese. These verbs are created by taking the ae, aen, e, and e from the pronoun auxiliary complex and will leave the person/number morphemes out.
  • Nyah nyah nyah nyah nyah nyah! I know something you dont know! And 🎶Im not telling yo-o-o-o-u🎵
  • We have high hopes. (notice what year this is for)
  • Proof of a lost colony?
  • Yes, those are much better words. (This edit stood unchallenged for over six years while the rest of us blushed and pretended not to see it.)
  • Because I never could get the hang of typing out those annoying IPA templates, I provided a clearer answer.
  • I've heard it's poor form to laugh at our own jokes, but I had help with this one.
  • Who knew this meme was a thousand years old? Now if we only knew the word for toilet.
  • This got changed, but I liked my version better.
  • [1]
  • [2]
  • That's why we call it Mandarin Chinese.
  • I'll do even better. I'll add a ♥picture♥ too

Internal

Unsorted

Notes

since deleted:
  • Many superheroes wear bulletproof vests, but I've found an even stronger barrier. (was a link to WIktionary's incontinence diaper definition describing it as an impenetrable barrier)

Round things resemble breasts; they are generally more attractive to pacific temperaments than straight lines and hard corners. -- Xiong

My love of traffic lights may be unrelated to the fact that they are round. I will leave the picture here for now but may remove it later. When I was very young, I used to play with the traffic light shells, which at the time had the colors as part of the material, not dependent on lights shining from behind. Indeed, I think they were lit up from within and the arrows were coated with a black substance so that the light would only get through the arrow-shaped gaps. I think newer traffic lights use LED's and therefore the shells are just blank.

Other interests

I have contributed a lot of climate data, particularly for places with unusual climates and places I've lived or visited before. However, this is now very difficult for me. I may adopt other interests only to drop them months later, though I still check in with edits I've made in the past. For example, I will probably never get around to finishing the parasitism project I started in 2017, as I was unable to work on it for over two years and had completely lost interest when I got free time again.

If I knew more about chemistry, I'd be better able to contribute to the soap and detergent articles. Theyre not wrong, but they provide surprisingly little information.

Identity

Stimming and habits

This section is very embarrassing, and I may remove it later, but for now it reminds me who I am. The habits themselves are no longer embarrassing to me, for reasons I explain at the end. What embarrasses me is that there seems to be little else to write about me that distinguishes me from other people.

This section is now archived, but I will come back and re-add a permanent link soon. The content will be updated at User:Soap/stim.

Phobias

Trypophobia and fear of falling

I have mild trypophobia (if you don't know what it is, and you're worried you might have it, I recommend using this link to get just a bare dictionary definition with no pictures). I've mostly gotten over this through exposure, but I don't recommend exposure therapy to everyone, particularly those who suffer more severely from it than I ever did. The fact that my phone shower looks quite a bit like a lotus head may have helped me get over the fear, because I associate showers with pleasant things.

Unrelatedly, I also have a fear of falling, such that even as an adult I was unable to play a certain video game that had a bug in which the player sometimes fell through what looked like a solid floor. I'd been the same way as a child with a different video game where there was not a bug, but a Game Genie code that led to false floors as a side effect of an otherwise fun cheat. I describe this as a "there/not there" ambiguity and that is what scares me. Both of these fears involve holes, but I think they are unrelated.

Since nearly drowning at age 2, an event I no longer remember, I've had an instinctual fear of deep water. It's possible that this was the trigger for my fear of falling, because being in deep water means losing contact with the ground, even if I am not actually sinking. This is just a wild guess, though.

Other information

Likewise, although I've never had koumpounophobia, I have a few edits on the page because I want to make it clear that it is the fear of clothing buttons, and does not extend to buttons in the modern sense such as the flat circular things we used to press on early smartphones. I believe the claim that Steve Jobs removed buttons from the iPhone because of koumpounophobia is inaccurate, as the "buttons" on an iPhone are very different from clothing buttons and it's just happenstance that we use the same word for both. Even so, it's possible that some people with koumpounophobia do extend the fear to flat circular machine buttons; I can't read minds.

Mobile account

My mobile account is user:Lollipop, a name I chose purely for its sound. I've never been particularly fond of candy, although I did eat candy when I was young just like my friends did. I actually had the name Lollipop before I had Soap, but I was much more interested in getting this name, so I usurped the old inactive Soap (who had never edited at all) and ended up with both names. I am much less active than I once was, and I don't really need two short names, but nobody seemed interested in taking over the Lollipop account, even after years of leaving up a notice saying I was willing to part with it. Perhaps it's best to just hang on to it now that I've had it for 16 years.

Notes

  1. ^ (The roundness of some early video game characters may be explained as a graphical limitation, since sprites in early video games were usually squares (Big Mario was actually two squares stacked), but Bob-ombs were styled after cartoon bombs and similar characters have appeared in other media, probably pre-dating video games)
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