Matt

@Andrew Watt's that?

@Fact Boy I'd heard a different story for the origin of the English word "tsarina": that it was a double-feminization via German. That is: the Germans used the feminine form "tsarin" for a Russian empress just as they would have used the word "kaiserin" for their own empress, and then English speakers took that German word and tacked on the English feminine ending "-a". I wonder which of those etymologies is correct.

@Stephen Yeah, I had C# first too, not F#. I bet most people who had heard of either language did too. Either way... Does anyone actually spell out "S H A R P" when talking about either of those languages? In both cases I think the official name uses the # symbol.

@el Yeah, I didn't like that either. The plural of блин (blin) is блины (blini). The plural of blini is... I dunno, more blini?

@ST My impression is that physicists and mathematicians remember her for very different aspects of her work. I didn't know if a mathematician would hear "Noether's Theorem" and think of the same theorem that a theoretical physicist would.

@Gerry Kingsley Yeah, I was reluctant to let it be that. My first thought was that maybe there was a rebus or something that would let "lumens" fit, or maybe that this was misdirection that was playing on light as not-heavy, so I left it blank until crosses made it obvious.

@Steve L No. Bosons are named for the early 20th century physicist Satyendra Nath Bose, in honor of his work on the theory of what's now called Bose-Einstein statistics. The audio company was founded by an MIT electrical engineer named Amar Bose.

@Mango I wanted it to be ”complex", but that obviously didn't work.

@Steven M. I'm familiar with the word in the context of "Indic languages" like Hindi and Bengali, and "Indic scripts", the alphabets used for writing some of India's languages.

@Keith Yeah, I was reluctant to fill today one in without crosses, since USSR would also have fit, and the four-letter abbreviation for Союз Советских Социалистических Республик doesn't use Latin letters even if they look a little like them.

@Steven M. But the Axiom of Choice is self evidently true! Unfortunately, as they say, the well-ordering theorem is self evidently false, and who can tell about Zorn's lemma?