Targeted Randomness

1. Does it take longer to fall down an up escalator? Of course the gravitational constant is the same, but you would fall down more stairs than a staircase of the same height, perhaps prolonging the fall since each step would slow the descent.

2. For a change, based on a hint from The Splendid Table, I've been cooking the past couple of days with brown butter. It's just salted butter cooked on low to medium for about five minutes. I can't say I've noticed a radical difference from normal butter, because before that I wasn't using much butter at all and thus have no basis of judgment. Nonetheless, it does end up very tasty with steaks and as a spread for garlic bread.

3. Every day, I leave Latin going to Wikipedia or the Oxford English Dictionary looking up words. A lot of them are analogues to vocabulary words. After learning oppugnō, derived from the prefix ob- and the verb pugnō, I searched for other words that might use the ob- prefix, which can mean, "in the direction of, towards, against, in the way of, in front of, in view of, on account of." Oblong thus is the direction favoring the long side. Object would be to throw in the way of (ject being from the Latin iacere). Some, like obsolete, the OED doesn't decipher beyond the Latin, which has the two together. I can only presume that it has some common form with "solent," usual or customary, which according to the OED takes from the Latin solere, to be wont. So maybe it can mean, "On account of being usual?" That is, something is obsolete when it's used so often that it is worn down, old, or outdated?

4. Latin was disconcerting at first for a few reasons. One, nominative pronouns aren't commonly used, as the subject of the sentence is incorporated with the verb. Sum simply means, "I am." I could say, Vir validus est, where "Vir" is in the nominative, but it would simply mean, "He is a healthy man." There also aren't any articles, and sometimes prepositions like to disappear, leaving only the noun ending to indicate possible prepositions for translation. Then I realized the system is quite efficient.

5. I spent two hours yesterday trying to figure out how to figure out a square root from a medieval text. It appears to be like the modern method, which is like long division with some catches. However, the directions are bewilderingly vague, and I can't piece together what to do from the examples. One step says approximately, "Now, go to the next digit before the double..." Which direction is that? It's especially confusing because explanations seems to switch inadvertently between left-to-right numbering (the Latin numbering system) and right-to-left numbering (the Arabic system). So I might be thrown by the next, even if there wasn't that countermanding "before."