the brandensite

it's sugar 2025 Oct 5   wisdomlib.org
Sugar is a beautiful thing. It makes our food delicious, is an amazingly compact source of precious calories, and gives us the beetus. But sugar isn't just yummy to eat. It's also one of those English words with a weird spelling/pronunciation – shouldn't it be "shugar"? Even more interesting, "sugar" is a delightfully multi-lingual word. In Spanish, it's azúcar, German zucker, Russian сахар ("sakhar"), and Hebrew סוּכָּר ("suchar"), for a few of its many transliterated translations. So how did this happen?

Etymonline gives us a delightfully efficient history lesson:

Its Old World home was India (Alexander the Great's companions marveled at "honey without bees") and it remained exotic in Europe until the Arabs began to cultivate it in Sicily and Spain; not until after the Crusades did it begin to rival honey as the West's sweetener. The Spaniards in the West Indies began raising sugar cane by 1506.

The delightfully rich Etymonline entry also explains that in English, the switch from -k- to -g- is "obscure" but might be related to the same shift that struck flagon/flask, and that "the pronunciation shift from s- to sh- is probably from the initial long vowel sound syu- (as in sure)". The word's initial entry into our language is

from Old French sucre "sugar" (12c.), from Medieval Latin succarum, from Arabic sukkar, from Persian shakar, from Sanskrit sharkara "ground or candied sugar," originally "grit, gravel" (cognate with Greek kroke "pebble").

Even more, they also toss in the freebie that the leading a- in the Spanish word azucar is a lingering Arabic indefinite article. See? So many fun details!

However, one question is left unanswered: gravel. In that Sanskrit origin word sharkara, what does my sweet succulent sap have to do with gray gritty gravel? To this mystery, Etymonline yields no insight.

The answer I stumbled into is in the linked "Wisdom Library" page, which I really hope for once is some sort of generated text. It's either that or the most insanely thorough human on the planet. But deep in the well-referenced page, after excerpts about ancient elephant care and Ayurvedic medical advice, lies this key sentence:

The literal translation of Śarkarā is “pebbles” and eventually became the word for hard sugar crystals (drained from syrup).

...which is one of those explanations so obvious, at least in retrospect, that it's no wonder Etymonline didn't bother including it. The sugar look like pebbles, so its inventors called it "pebbles". Amazing.

An afterthought: there is some delicious full-circle irony with the sugary breakfast cereal called "Fruity Pebbles".

So you think you can read? 2025 Sep 22   en.wikipedia.org
I believe I can read. It's one of those things of which I believe myself capable, even when the language isn't English, of at least being able to match together similar words. And yet, when it comes to ancient Roman descriptions, what's on the inscription rarely seems to match what the scholar shows to me the words to mean.

And that's because of scribal abbreviations. Take normal abbreviations, and crank them up 1000% with steroids, and that's ancient scribal abbreviations. We have words in English common enough to be abbreviated (such as mister), but when you're engraving things in ancient times, every character is precious. And so, they would abbreviate any and every repeated phrase.

Most interesting to me, are the parts of the system that linger: such as the &, the @, the $, the % — just name a few. It's a Wikipedia link, so it's thorough to the point of banality, but there's plenty of juicy bits for a language nerd like me to feast upon.

dyson spheres are a joke 2025 Sep 21   youtube.com
Via a 55-minute video essay, physicist Angela Collier reads through with us in its entirety Freeman Dyson's famous 1960 physics paper where he proposes the existence of spheres built to enclose a star and therefor harness the complete output of the star's energy – theoretical objects which later became known as Dyson Spheres. She also recreates all the math and physics the paper contains. It doesn't take long, because there is none. The paper is... well, see for yourself.

An American Lynching: Robert Hall 2025 Sep 16   julianjohnsonlaw.com
The story of Robert Hall's death in the early 20th century is horrific: American racism at its most extreme. A wealthy black man living in Georgia targeted by the authorities for harassment, torture, and death, there was no ambiguity in who perpetrated Robert Hall's murder, Baker County Sheriff M. Claude Screws. In a case that got all the way to the Supreme Court, the sheriff, via an all-white jury, was acquitted. Not of killing Hall, for that the sheriff wasn't tried for some reason I do not understand, but 'not guilty' of "violating Hall's constitutional rights." What a crock of shit. In case you're wondering what the local community thought of this, Screws went on to not only be reelected, but to be later made into a state senator. The linked article claims that while Hall's family saw no justice, the net result was, for legal precedent reasons, an overall win.

The Supreme Court’s decision in Screws v. United States became the legal foundation for modern federal civil rights enforcement. It opened the door for police officers to be held accountable under federal law for violating constitutional rights.

Yet this Legal Clarity article provides more nuance (emphasis mine):

The legacy of Screws v. United States affirmed the federal government’s authority to prosecute state and local officials for civil rights violations committed “under color of law.” By refusing to strike down the federal law, the Court preserved a tool for federal intervention against official misconduct. This was a significant affirmation of federal power in protecting individual liberties against state-level abuse.

However, the “specific intent” standard established by the Court made these federal prosecutions difficult to win. Proving that an officer acted with the specific purpose of violating a known constitutional right became a formidable barrier for federal prosecutors. This high standard of proof was an impediment to justice for victims of civil rights abuses, as it allowed defendants to claim ignorance of the law as a defense.

For decades following the 1945 decision, the Screws standard shaped the strategy of federal civil rights cases. While the precedent upheld the government’s power in theory, in practice it made securing convictions a challenging endeavor. The ruling highlighted the tension between holding officials accountable and protecting them from prosecution based on vague legal standards, a tension that continues to be debated.

There is still no justice for Robert Hall.

Robber Emoji 2025 Sep 16   emojidrive.com
I have clear and distinct memories of using the robber emoji, the exact one linked above. And yet, the internet is now telling me my memories are false – that they are the result of the Mandela effect. And as far as me personally digging through the Unicode history can show, this appears to be the case – the robber emoji has never existed. So what do I do with my implanted memories of using this emoji?

Apple Rankings 2025 Sep 14   applerankings.com
Comedian Brian Frange has created this website which lists all the available varietals of apple in North America, and their relative merits. Metrics include Visual appeal, texture, crispness, skin, density, and of course taste. Each apple gets its own page with a full description, along with photos and videos, certainly been far more work dedicated to ranking apples then I would've thought necessary. Or maybe that's the joke? I mean, no offense to this Frange guy, but I've never heard of anything else he's ever done. He jokes of this is his legacy, but I think maybe it's not really a joke. Anyway, whatever, neat website.

I didn't bring my son to a museum to look at screens 2025 Sep 10   sethpurcell.com
Seth Purcell writes a compelling peace about something that I've noticed without noticing, putting his finger on the problem of what's wrong with modern children's museums: screens are not as interesting as actual physical demonstrations, things you can actually play with using your actual hands.

Maybe that's why I found the small, low budget children's museum in downtown Lodi, California so compelling: they hadn't "modernized" with a bunch of screens.

Lowtax is (still) dead 2025 Sep 10   vice.com
I just stumbled across a reminder that, back in 2021, lowtax died. Founder of somethingawful, lowtax was always a jerk, as this Vice article reminds us. But it's still strange to me that lowtax is no longer with us.

Jeanloup Sieff 2025 Aug 28   jeanloupsieff.com
French photographer, 1933-2000, beautiful photographs for your inspiration.

Companies That Tried to Save Money With AI Are Now Spending a Fortune Hiring People to Fix Its Mistakes 2025 Aug 14   futurism.com

Oopsie.