Category: Uncategorized

As is my wont and pleasure, I looked up the origin of the word gibberish. Etymonline has the following:

gibberish (n.)
“rapid and inarticulate speech; talk in no known language,” 1550s, imitative of the sound of chatter, probably influenced by jabber. Used early 17c. of the language of rogues and gypsies.

jabber (v.)
“talk rapidly and indistinctly,’ 1650s, spelling variant of Middle English jablen (c. 1400), also javeren, jaberen, chaveren, jawin; probably ultimately echoic. Related: Jabbered; jabbering. The noun, “rapid, unintelligible talk” is 1727, from the verb. Related: Jabberment (Milton).

Two things come to mind. One is how cruel it is to speak of ‘rogues and gypsies’ as though the two are or were thought to be synonymous. Were I a gypsy, I would be offended to my boots. And in truth we are all gypsies displaced from somewhere or other.

The second thing that comes to mind is Jabberwocky by Lewis Carroll. He probably named it because it is a nonsense poem – and probably I am the last person on the planet to get the connection.

In Britain, a free range egg is one laid by a hen that lives its life scrabbling about on grass. In other words, it is ‘free to range’.

Chickens that are raised in a barn are not free range, of course. They spend their lives in barns. In the worst cases they are packed so tightly that they can do little more than shuffle in place. We know the damage this does because hens who live like that can suffer from underdeveloped leg muscles so that they can hardly walk.

Now, for the past four months, all free range hens have been confined to barns to combat a nationwide outbreak of avian flu.

And from Monday, eggs sold in shops in Britain will have to carry a sticker or label saying they are barn eggs.

Four months is apparently, the cut-off point between barn and free range.

So on the 20 March 2022, they will be free range. And on the 21 March they will be barn hens. And that is why the title of this post is ‘When’ rather than ‘What’ is a free range egg.

Lots of things have cut-off points. They enable humans to manage the world without having to negotiate everything every time. But it is a bit ludicrous, do you not think, to call an egg one thing and not another when it is not a matter of the egg producer cramming hens in a barn, but of Government policy to deal with a disease outbreak?

What will the label say, I wonder?

Following the example of Bhutan, other countries adopted the principle of GNH – and tomorrow the 20th March is Gross National Happiness Day – passed by the United Nations in 2012 (resolution 66/28) on the model of Bhutan

Quadruple witching days are the four days in the calendar year, when stock index futures, stock index options, stock options, and single stock futures all expire simultaneously.

• Stock index futures are contracts to buy or sell at a set price today, to be settled at a date in the future.
• Stock index options give the right to trade a specific stock index at a specified price by a specified expiration date.
• Stock options gives the right purchase stock in a company at a determined price within a certain window of time.
• Single stock futures are contract to exchange a specified number of stocks in a company at a price agreed today (the strike price) with delivery at a specified delivery date.

Quadruple witching days are the third Friday of March, June, September, and December.

Quartz news this morning (17 March 2022) says this:

The day is known for heavy trading volume and there can be a great deal of unpredictability in the market because “hedges are no longer needed or are adjusted for new positions,” said George Pearkes, an investment analyst at Bespoke Investment Group.
With Russia’s invasion in Ukraine creating new economic pains and a quarter percentage rate hike from the Fed, this Witching Day could be especially unpredictable.
The day can increase volumes so much that sometimes it makes it difficult to tell whether a stock is moving because of contracts expiring or business fundamentals. While a Witching Day doesn’t automatically mean more volatility in the market, some traders-especially new ones, choose to sit the day out.

The third Friday in March this year is tomorrow 18 March.

Scotomas are related to the neurological signals being sent from your eye to your brain. Anomalies in these neurological messages to your brain cause what looks like auras or blind spots as you look at the world around you.

Scotomization is a psychological term for the mental blocking of unwanted perceptions, analogous to the visual blindness of an actual scotoma. So, unwanted perceptions are scotomized.

Under the title ‘Waterstones/Blackwells: book-opoly?’ there is this piece in The Week. It is more than usually relevant to me because there is a Waterstones in Cambridge and also a Heffers bookshop. Which will be kept? Can Cambridge support two of them, my guess is that Heffers has been suffering. It is partly the location, but also the approach. It is just more fun in Waterstones.

Here is the article:

There’s nothing like a good book to distract from problems – especially if you’re the US activist hedge fund Elliott Advisors, which has suffered a series of setbacks in its efforts to shake up Britain’s pharma and housebuilding sectors. Bookselling, though, is a different story, said Ian Johnstone in the FT.

The UK’s largest book chain, Waterstones, which Elliott has owned since 2018, is close to buying its smaller rival Blackwell’s-“expanding its dominance” in the sector just as “sales experience a revival”. Last year, UK book sales reached their highest point in a decade, according to Neilsen data, with 212 million print copies sold.

The move brings Blackwell’s, with 18 stores including its Oxford flagship, under the same ownership as Foyles and Barnes & Noble, said The Bookseller. “Some indie booksellers” have “expressed concern” about the growth of Waterstones. But most are pleased to see family-owned Blackwell’s ” rehomed safely” after years of losses.

Page 41, The Week 5 March 2022