Category: Stuff

A relatively shallow (up to 200m) continental shelf extends over the northern part of the Black Sea. Beyond that is the Euxine Abyssal Plain of the Black Sea with depths ranging from 2,000 to 2,200 m. The deepest measured point is 2,216 metres, located south of Yalta in Crimea.

The Sea of Azov, connected to the Black Sea by the Strait of Kerch, is the shallowest sea in the world, with a maximum depth of 15 meters.

To get from the Black Sea into the Mediterranean a ship has to pass through the Bosphorus (which ranges from very shallow to 110m with and average of around 65m) and into the Sea of Marmara and then the Dardanelles Strait (55 to 90m deep) and from there out into the Aegean and the Mediterranean.

The Euxine Abyssal Plain gets its name from the archaic name for the Black Sea, from Latin Pontus Euxinus, from Greek Pontos Euxenios, literally ‘the hospitable sea,’ originally Pontos Axeinos, ‘the not-clear or the inhospitable sea.’

“How mundane”, we say. And how do we use that word, what do we mean? We mean how dull and uninteresting, lacking in anything out of the ordinary.

Where does the word come from? It comes from the Latin word mundanus – meaning belonging to the world as opposed to the transcendent, the spiritual. So effectively we mean – how lacking in uplifting qualities.

Spaying as a procedure only applies to female animals. Castration as a procedure only applies to males. Neutering is the general term that applies to animals of either sex.

The verb to spay dates to the fifteenth century from spaien, meaning to stab with a sword or to kill a hunted animal. It was also used to mean to remove the ovaries of a hunting dog from the word espeier meaning to cut with a sword.

An article on the rising costs facing bands wanting to play at venues mentioned the word cabotage.

Cabotage is the transport of goods or passengers between two places in the same country by a transport operator from another country for the purposes of hire and reward.

There’s a consultation document issued by the Department for Transport under the title “Road Transport Cabotage: Consultation about further flexibilities during 2022 for foreign hauliers”

The article said venues had closed and more were closing because of COVID and Brexit.

Perhaps soon there will only be remote recording – hard to imagine given the powerful feelings that concerts bring out in audiences

The death of cells which occurs as a normal and controlled part of an organism’s growth or development.

About the Indian Rail crash

“India’s rail network has seen 58.580 lakh passengers in 2022-23, but has fallen short of the traffic measured during 2019-20, before the COVID-19 pandemic, by 24%” (the Indian Times)

A lakh is 100,000 – so 58,580 lakh is 5,858,000,000 or nearly six billion journeys

I couldn’t find stats for fatalities, but I found this on Sky News about notable crashes

November 2016: An express train derailed in Uttar Pradesh, killing 146 people and injuring more than 200.

January 2017: In Andhra Pradesh, 41 people died when several coaches of a passenger train left the track.

October 2018: At least 59 people died in Amritsar city, northern India when a commuter train crashed into a crowd gathered on the track for a festival. Fifty-seven people were injured.

So put all this together and that is a very very low accident rate on the railways. Just to give a more rounded picture – and it doesn’t take away from the poverty, and the sadness of it.

For comparison of fatalities only –  893 railroad deaths in the United States in 2021

How many passenger journeys? Difficult to get statistics because of all the separate railways, but for Amtrak – over 30 million passengers per year – only a fraction of the rail journeys in India