Philip Newton's journal

Interesting thought experiment on what would happen to the oceans if the earth slowed down its rotation until, after a few decades, it stopped rotating completely, with several maps.

Short version: since the earth “bulges” a bit at the equator and it’s centrifugal force that keeps the water level high there, if rotation stopped, water would move “down” under the force of gravity and collect around the poles. You’d end up with flooded Canada and Siberia and a huge circum-equatorial continent.

Interesting!

A while ago, I found a Postcrossing user who lives on the Pescadores (Penghu Islands) near Taiwan Island, and asked them whether they would swap postcards with me.

She agreed, and so I sent her a postcard (with Krtek the Czech mole, I think).

A couple of days ago, I got a notification in my letterbox that there was a registered letter waiting for me at the post office (since the postman hadn’t encountered anyone at home when he tried to deliver it). Strange, I thought: who could have sent it?

I went to pick it up today and it was from Kate! Inside were not only a viewcard of Tongpan Island (with a distinctive look due to the basalt columns on it) and some bookmarks from Tungpan Artist Village, but also a chop with my Chinese name on it! What a surprise!

Now I need to find some red stamp ink, I suppose.

The chop is made of 文石, Kate said; Perapera-kun says that’s aragonite, though a quick google gave me the impression that on Penghu (or possibly in Taiwan in general), that term may refer to something else.

So! I has a chop.

Daša, a friend of mine from Slovakia whom I met through Postcrossing, visited Hamburg last weekend and I had the chance to meet her again. Yay!

I came across this Romanian Wikipedia article on Cetatea Albă street in Chișinău (while looking for the diacriticful spelling of a Postcrosser’s address), and what struck my eye was this bit:

Strada Cetatea Albă (până în 1991 str. Krasnodonskaia) se află în sectorul Botanica, cartierul Muncești. (emphasis mine)

That reminded me of Sursilvan Romansh sesanfla for “to be located (somewhere)”, literally “to find oneself”, which I believe comes from a Latin root along the lines of anflare. (Rumantsch Grischun uses sa chattar for this instead, and I think Vallader also has as chattar.)

Hm, checking MeinPledari.ch, it seems that Vallader is as rechattar; ah well. And Sursilvan also has secattar, though it seems to me that sesanflar is more common. (The non-reflexive forms are cattar, anflar.)

So! I guess this Romanian sentence means that C.A. street “is located” (se trouve) in B sector, etc.—and I imagine that the verb is cognate to the Sursilvan one, which I hadn’t otherwise come across in Romance before.

Whee!

Something that’s been going through the news recently is the status of members of the Catholic church who do not pay church tax.

For historical reasons, certain religious communities in Germany (including the Roman Catholic Church) can have contributions collected from workers’ salaries automatically, at a fixed percentage of their income tax (IIRC); these monies are collected by the government and passed on to the religious community that the person is affiliated with. (Which is why your religion is part of the tax forms, though they only care whether it’s one of the dozen-odd religions that church tax is collected for, or “other or none”.)

A fair number of people are unhappy with paying church tax and have left their church in order not to be obligated to pay it. (Sometimes waiting until they have got married in a church ceremony.)

Now the news is that the Catholic Church in Germany is considering barring non-church-tax-paying people from receiving the benefits of church membership, such as a religious burial.

Now while I think that wanting to enjoy the benefits of association with a group without paying the associated dues (if the group regularly charges such does from its members) to be hypocritical, I’m a bit confused by the theological background of the new turn of events.

From what I had understood, the Catholic Church position was that once you are baptised, you’re a member, and it’s nearly impossible to leave the church voluntarily. For example, if you went off and converted to Islam, you’d still be a Catholic in their eyes (though probably a heretical one).

By those lines, what people are doing is not leaving the church (which is nearly impossible) but changing their declared religious affiliation with the government. So it’s between them and the government and doesn’t negate their baptism.

So I’m curious where they got the understanding from that suddenly it’s possible to say that somebody now isn’t a Catholic.

Or maybe I’m misunderstanding and the official line is that they are still, indeed, Catholics, but that not all Catholics enjoy the same rights (for example, to a religious burial), so that these non-church-tax-paying people fall into a second-class group that already existed previously.

Or something?

One day, I’d like to drive down the Fosse Way from beginning to end: either in one go (at 370 km according to Wikipedia, that shouldn’t take more than a day even if parts of it are byways and the Way is no longer contiguous, requiring detours to rejoin the Way after existing roads leave the original alignment) or in a couple of stages with B&B stays in between.

I just read an advertisement for a weight-loss product in a newspaper from the chemist’s which was accompanied by three testimonials… all of which said, essentially, “I weighed [higher number], then I started taking [product] and exercising regularly and only [time] later, I only weighed [lower number]!”.

Gee. I wonder how much of the weight loss was the product and how much was the exercise. (They did specifically mention exercise in all three testimonials. One even put it this way: “I started taking [product] and a bit later also started to exercise regularly. Now I weigh [smaller number].”)

Kind of like, I don’t know, “We had a drought here last summer and my crops were starting to wither, so I prayed to God to save my wheat and I also started watering the plants. Only a short time later, my plants recovered and I was able to get a good harvest after all!”. Maybe the prayer helped, maybe it didn’t, but since you did two things, it’s hard to prove how much of the effect came from each “ingredient”.

While looking through Postcrossing profiles (I sometimes click on names in the ticker of recent events ont he home page), I came across a mention of a city called Police, in Poland.

A bit more investigation showed that there are several places of that name, in Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovenia, and Croatia.

Apparently, the name is derived from a word meaning “field” (pole, polje, etc.).

I also found it interesting that the German names for those places aren’t identical: there’s at least Politz, Pölitz, Pullitz, Polleitz.

Today, I came across a facebook account with the first name “Leonimama”: presumably, to provide some anonymity and non-searchability while remaining recogniseable to her friends who know that she has a daughter called Leonie.

It reminded me of Arabic kunyas where people will be referred to as the father/daughter of their eldest child (for example, Umm Khalid, a user in our local Freecycle group, or Abu Mazen, as Mahmoud Abbas is sometimes known).

I’m not sure I had seen a German teknonym in print before this, though :)

(Though certainly heard of it: when parents of children who attend the same kindergarten/school/daycare/etc. speak with each other, I’ve heard them introduce themselves as “Ich bin die Mutter von Leonie”: where the parents will be familiar with the other child’s name from their own child’s reports of their day or from a class list, or where they may even know the other child—but not the parent.)

Eben in meinem Spamordner als Betreffszeile entdeckt: „Warum sind Sie nicht beantworten meine E-Mail?”

Meine spontane Reaktion: „Weil du nix können sprechen deutsch.”

(Meine zweite Reaktion: *ungelesen lösch*)