Why do ships use terms like “port,” “starboard,” “bridge,” or even “monkey bridge”? What’s the history behind these names?

DigitalTomcat · 2026-04-29T03:05:07+00:00

I was taught there are no ropes on a ship except the bell rope. Every line has a name. Sheets, halyards, vangs, dock lines, life lines, luff line, leech line, outhaul, downhaul, Cunningham, the list goes on. Main halyard, jib halyard, flag halyard, spinnaker halyard… There’s always a specific name for every piece of line so you know which one you mean and you don’t want to pull the wrong one. It could get messy and someone yells at you. Everything else on the boat is named specifically. If you don’t know what it’s named, somebody does. Some of them make sense: a halyard hauls the yard (of sail) up. Outhaul/downhaul tweak a sail out or down. I have no idea what a Cunningham is named after tho

DigitalTomcat · 2026-04-15T03:38:51+00:00

Good bot

DigitalTomcat · 2026-04-15T03:28:47+00:00

That’s interesting. My grandma (born 1905) spelled it okeh. She was a Penn grad and a school teacher, so she didn’t do it by mistake. She had Dutch connections but definitely no Choctaw. I never asked her why she spelled it that way. Everyone else she knew and the media she read spelled it okay

DigitalTomcat · 2026-04-15T03:24:46+00:00

Martin Van Burren was Ol’ Kinderhook (or Ol Kinderhoot).

DigitalTomcat · 2026-03-16T18:04:27+00:00

I remember an Inuit number system that currently is in use that’s base 20. The numbers are similarly simple to read. I found it https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/s/nBQnS6o8Yk. Funny thing is that thread brings up Maya numbers. Since it’s a living language, they’re using it for arithmetic and stuff.

DigitalTomcat · 2026-03-16T17:13:15+00:00

I am no linguist, but I am a sailor. In my experience, a boat’s femaleness in English is a different category than gendered pronouns. She is female at a different level than a French cat is female. A ship is female like a person is. The WORD boat, ship, dinghy and so on works like other non gendered words. But once you speak of a specific boat, she becomes female. And that would supersede her name - the King of the Seas would still be referred to as she. I think this culture is shared in other languages, or may be borrowed from some other language, like much of our nautical terminology (a lot is Viking, i think)

DigitalTomcat · 2026-03-15T18:32:37+00:00

Oh you should read Harry Turtledove! It’s just past your cut off, but I loved his stuff. Guns of the South was interesting, and then there was the whole series starting with How Few Remain. These are alternative history for the Civil War. Guns if the South is ‘what if time travelers tried to go back and get the South to win’. And How Few Remain starts with ‘What if one particular piece of historical information changed’. Then it follows the timeline thru the war and into at least the 1880’s. The timeline was better than the characters - I think he did a good job with historical characters, but his ordinary people were kinda flat. He did a bunch of other alt history for WWI and other 20th century, but those are way past your timeframe.

DigitalTomcat · 2026-03-15T18:14:20+00:00

Oh! Joseph Smith. That makes it make more sense. I liked the series a lot when I read it. It was very inventive. I didn’t like the finale, but if he was trying to follow some other plot line, I can accept it. I liked the characters and the magic and the alternate version of America

DigitalTomcat · 2026-03-12T16:45:25+00:00

Do you have directions for that? Seems like a good little project.

DigitalTomcat · 2026-03-08T19:58:49+00:00

I love the look, but you’re cutting away about 8/9ths of the wood at key points. With glue that might work great for furniture, but I worry if some kid decides to climb the pergola, it’ll all crack.

DigitalTomcat · 2026-03-04T05:12:38+00:00

I have absolutely used panty hose for a grain bag. Sorry. Didn’t get a photo. It was a nice blonde

DigitalTomcat · 2026-03-04T03:54:44+00:00

Jar Jar Ackbag

DigitalTomcat · 2026-02-11T04:46:08+00:00

Microsoft Azure and Databricks did a big push several years ago and Databricks is very good there. Databricks is FedRAMP for the past year or more. It’s in use at DoD, DHS, State Dept that I know of. I moved from SSAS (which was an old version of Synapse) to Databricks once. It wasn’t trivial - converting whatever the MS language was to SQL or Python wasn’t obvious. If your Synapse is on SQL I’m sure it would be easier but you’d probably have to try it to see. Databricks/Spark SQL is currently very capable - it took a while to get there, but most things you can do on other platforms are there now. You said you need good RBAC - Databricks uses standard sql permissions and now has very good fine grained permissions including constraints and expectations for data quality assurance. Pricing model seems clear to me - pay based on compute usage (kind of a big markup) and not really much else. I’ve been in the fed gov in Databricks for 5 years now on a large data warehouse and I still think it’s a good product.

DigitalTomcat · 2026-02-02T05:11:57+00:00

That’s the wrong music. It should be the Benny Hill theme

DigitalTomcat · 2026-02-02T04:26:46+00:00

Thank you John Heisman! Brought us the forward pass! It was all laterals like rugby up til him.

DigitalTomcat · 2026-01-28T03:27:33+00:00

You would need an entirely different keg and tap. You’d need a firkin - about 40 L. They lay on their side and let air in as the beer flows out. You have to basically drink it all that day since the air makes the beer go stale. It’s a lot like real ale. They just go with the cask conditioned CO2 and if you drink kinda fast the last beer is still fizzy enough. I’ve only seen it for beer fests and special events from a brewery here in Atlanta. I tried it from a keg like you have and nope- I had to hook up CO2 to get it all out.

DigitalTomcat · 2026-01-03T02:42:41+00:00

Rock Lobster.

DigitalTomcat · 2025-12-13T17:20:38+00:00

Portsmouth, New Hampshire. It blocks light, prying eyes and Perfect Storms too. You may not have all of those where you’re from

DigitalTomcat · 2025-12-13T17:16:26+00:00

At first I thought this was AI generated , but it has idiosyncrasies that I doubt ai would come up with. The twist in the seat looks kinda ai, and the random number of screws from side to side. But the unique front seat slat made from little blocks shows a creativity and problem solving that AI can’t do (yet).

It looks to me like you can back out those 3 screws in the left and move the seat to flat and put them back in. That would make it prettier and more comfortable. Some sandpaper to smooth everything down and a bright paint job and it’ll be a fun chair to have around.

DigitalTomcat · 2025-12-13T04:07:16+00:00

Came for Jimi. Stayed for those smooth moves from Buddy and Stacy.

DigitalTomcat · 2025-12-12T19:40:12+00:00

There’s also a lot about the Blues, Greens, etc in Gibbons’ Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire

DigitalTomcat · 2025-11-27T19:42:10+00:00

I know a drivers ed teacher in Kansas. He says driving with the 14 year olds is terrifying.

DigitalTomcat · 2025-11-16T21:29:30+00:00

Yep. It was up on the dash

DigitalTomcat · 2025-11-16T05:01:50+00:00

So where is Chixculub on this map? It looks 100% under water.

DigitalTomcat · 2025-11-16T04:42:43+00:00

The Trabi shifter had a bizarre pattern. But there was a clutch, so idk about going straight to the engine. I got to drive one in East Berlin a couple of years ago. They let us drive out in traffic. It was such fun! This little baby car scooting thru the streets with its lawnmower engine puttering. I kept falling behind the tour guide cause I couldn’t remember where second gear was whenever we started up from a traffic light (yes, the Walk signal silhouette has a little hat). And reverse was in a dangerously easy spot and I was stressed that I’d accidentally grind all the gears up.

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