The Universe of Discourse

Recent addenda to articles 202304: Inappropriate baseball team names and anagrams in Russian

• In 2006 I wrote an article about sports team names, inspired by the amusing inappropriateness of the Utah Jazz. This month, I added:

  I can't believe it took me this long to realize it, but the Los Angeles Lakers is just as strange a mismatch as the Utah Jazz. There are no lakes near Los Angeles. That name itself tells you what happened: the team was originally located in Minneapolis

• I missed it when it came out, but in 2017 there was a short article in LanguageHat about my article about finding the best anagram in English. The article doesn't say anything new, but the comments are fun. In particular, January First-of-May presents their favorite Russian anagrams:

  • австралопитек (/avstralopitek/, “Australopithecus”)
  • ватерполистка (/vaterpolistka/. ”Female water-polo player”)

  I will have more to say about this in a couple of days.

• Eric Roode pointed out that my animation of cubic Taylor approximations to !!\sin x!! moves like the robot from Lost in Space.

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