User:Soap
Accomplishments
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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.
- New England and eastern Canada
Lesser-known placenames
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- Everywhere else
- Attapulgus, GA
- Opelousas, LA
- Tampa, FL
- Osceola, a Seminole name that also turns up in New Hampshire
- Tunica, Mississippi
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.
I grew up thinking that Tampa was a Greek plural.
Edge cases
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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.
- 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.
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.)
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
Let's give Parapropalaehoplophorus septentrionalis the award for longest binomial name. Parastratiosphecomyia stratiosphecomyioides is longer only because most of the first word is repeated within the second word.
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.
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.
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.
Spacetime#Privileged_character_of_3+1_spacetime has the "tachyons only" chart
Other notes
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? | 
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Answer
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An octopodotropholophophorophosphostroboscoposporogonoconophonospodosolopornopomponoctophobodontoproctoplooooprotozoon. |
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?
Alternatively, is the children's song referencing something older than all three of these other things?
Funny edits
Many of these diffs are from quite early, when I was more active here.
- hyvempi :-) Note the very early diff, with just seven digits, where today we have ten.
- Why yes, I've heard of them!
- This AFD is a longshot, but maybe if we nominate it seventeen times people will understand that we really mean it.
- Gotta try, right?
- Yes, those are much better words.
- I've heard it's poor form to laugh at our own jokes, but I had help with this one.
- Considering this happened in 1780, I doubt we'll ever get a photo.
- Oh yeah, this stuff will make you feel reeeal gooood.
- Who better than an eternal infant to teach us about infants?
- the only vandalism on this list
- I didnt really witness what this was all about, I just remember the user's name.
- Just in case we forgot what page this is already.
- [1]
Gallery of interests
Round things resemble breasts; they are generally more attractive to pacific temperaments than straight lines and hard corners. -- Xiong
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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
My mobile account is user:Lollipop. I actually had that username before this one, 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, so I would be willing to give up Lollipop if offered a reasonable request.
I am old enough to remember when Edmonton had a January low of −8 °F (−22 °C).