TIL what a Jonbar hinge/point is

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonbar_hinge

“the fictional concept of a crucial point of divergence between two outcomes, especially in time-travel stories”

1 hour ago, swansont said:

TIL what a Jonbar hinge/point is

Which led me to learn that the Butterfly Effect ( not the movie ) is a special case of a Jonbar hinge point, where a trivial change in the initial state can be amplified, and diverge, resulting in huge changes in the final/later state, for non-linear, chaotic systems ( just about everything ).

3 hours ago, swansont said:

TIL what a Jonbar hinge/point is

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonbar_hinge

“the fictional concept of a crucial point of divergence between two outcomes, especially in time-travel stories”

My TIL is, boringly, the same. Due to your posting this. The novel 11/22/63 is, as one might guess, stuffed with Jonbar hinges.

2 hours ago, MigL said:

Which led me to learn that the Butterfly Effect ( not the movie ) is a special case of a Jonbar hinge point, where a trivial change in the initial state can be amplified, and diverge, resulting in huge changes in the final/later state, for non-linear, chaotic systems ( just about everything ).

Thank Ray Bradbury for the term. In "A Sound of Thunder" the time travel tourist in the Mesozoic disobeys instructions, steps off the levitating path and crushes a butterfly. Huge changes, on their return.

... that a topic in the Sandbox can be sent to the Trash Can. While the particular topic in the Sandbox was the same as the topic in other forums that were also sent to the Trash Can, it struck me as a little odd that a topic in the Sandbox was sent to the Trash Can. That the topic was in the Sandbox was also odd, given the purpose of the Sandbox.

Edited November 26Nov 26 by KJW

TIL why the Who song is called Baba O'Riley. Released October 1971, so it only took me 54 years to make the connection to the father of minimalist composition, Terry Riley. Once you hear A Rainbow in Curved Air, you realize the Who hommage in their most misreferenced song ( I've even heard a DJ misname the track as "Teenage Wasteland.")

On 11/27/2025 at 3:24 PM, TheVat said:

TIL why the Who song is called Baba O'Riley. Released October 1971, so it only took me 54 years to make the connection to the father of minimalist composition, Terry Riley. Once you hear A Rainbow in Curved Air, you realize the Who hommage in their most misreferenced song ( I've even heard a DJ misname the track as "Teenage Wasteland.")

'Baba' I believe comes from Meher Baba (1894-1969), the name of an Indian Parsee guru whose teachings Peter Townshend was following at the time.

2 hours ago, toucana said:

'Baba' I believe comes from Meher Baba (1894-1969), the name of an Indian Parsee guru whose teachings Peter Townshend was following at the time.

..........Not to be confused with baba au rhum (rum baba), a French dessert cake soaked in rum and syrup, which derives from the Polish "baba" for a yeast cake, itself named in turn after the Slavic diminutive for a grandmother. 😁

3 hours ago, exchemist said:

baba au rhum (rum baba), a French dessert cake soaked in rum and syrup

Interesting.
I always thought the baba' was an Italian dessert ( popular in the Naples region ) and one of my favorite.

3 hours ago, exchemist said:

..........Not to be confused with baba au rhum (rum baba), a French dessert cake soaked in rum and syrup, which derives from the Polish "baba" for a yeast cake, itself named in turn after the Slavic diminutive for a grandmother. 😁

Out here in the fields, we fight for such meals.

1 hour ago, TheVat said:

Out here in the fields, we fight for such meals.

The last one I had was years ago, in Sceaux, a suburb of Paris. This thing arrived after I'd had about half a bottle of wine with the meal and it was was drenched in alcohol. Very nice but I was a bit geplästert by the time we got home. (My wife was the nominated driver on that occasion. We used to have the Dutch: "Bob ik of Bob jij?" negotiation before taking the mother-in-law out for dinner.)

2 hours ago, MigL said:

Interesting.
I always thought the baba' was an Italian dessert ( popular in the Naples region ) and one of my favorite.

I'm sure they are popular in Italy too, but I think the French invented them.

Never knew until today that Curved Air named themselves after a Terry Riley album. O my, Sonja Kristina...

Edited November 29Nov 29 by sethoflagos

42 minutes ago, exchemist said:

The last one I had was years ago, in Sceaux, a suburb of Paris. This thing arrived after I'd had about half a bottle of wine with the meal and it was was drenched in alcohol. Very nice but I was a bit geplästert by the time we got home. (My wife was the nominated driver on that occasion. We used to have the Dutch: "Bob ik of Bob jij?" negotiation before taking the mother-in-law out for dinner.)

I'm sure they are popular in Italy too, but I think the French invented them.

Bob means drive(r) ?

I like the Tiramisu we get in Lidl.(and elsewhere).

47 minutes ago, exchemist said:

The last one I had was years ago, in Sceaux, a suburb of Paris. This thing arrived after I'd had about half a bottle of wine with the meal and it was was drenched in alcohol. Very nice but I was a bit geplästert by the time we got home. (My wife was the nominated driver on that occasion. We used to have the Dutch: "Bob ik of Bob jij?" negotiation before taking the mother-in-law out for dinner.)

I was often Bob. Except one evening when I tried tequila. In the US, the rum baba is often served as rum-raisin baba (as if it weren't already sweet enough). This led to a National Lampoon magazine character (1970s) named Baba Rum Raisin, who was a satirical version of Baba Ram Dass, a popular guru who was born Richard Alpert, and was a Harvard colleague of Timothy Leary in his consciousness research.

A chat which starts at Terry Riley and arrives at Timothy Leary has definitely circled back on itself. 😁

12 minutes ago, geordief said:

Bob means drive(r) ?

I like the Tiramisu we get in Lidl.(and elsewhere).

Yeah there was a road safety campaign about drink-driving while we were living in The Hague: posters everywhere. Bob was just a name they used for the nominated driver in the group.

Amusingly, or perhaps not really, when my son was doing a summer job last year in the US and was out with a group including a couple of black guys, there a discussion about who was going be the nominated white person, in case of being stopped by the cops.

2 hours ago, exchemist said:

The last one I had was years ago, in Sceaux, a suburb of Paris. This thing arrived after I'd had about half a bottle of wine with the meal and it was was drenched in alcohol. Very nice but I was a bit geplästert by the time we got home. (My wife was the nominated driver on that occasion. We used to have the Dutch: "Bob ik of Bob jij?" negotiation before taking the mother-in-law out for dinner.)

I'm sure they are popular in Italy too, but I think the French invented them.

"geplåstert" is Dutch-or bastardised?

I found this ,anyway:

"England around the 12th century, Plasterers (many of which were Italian) would mix wine or beer in with the plaster. It was felt the plaster would last longer..however the plasterers also didn’t mind a glass or two as well and this is where the saying “to get plastered” comes from."

15 minutes ago, geordief said:

"geplåstert" is Dutch-or bastardised?

I found this ,anyway:

"England around the 12th century, Plasterers (many of which were Italian) would mix wine or beer in with the plaster. It was felt the plaster would last longer..however the plasterers also didn’t mind a glass or two as well and this is where the saying “to get plastered” comes from."

When we lived in NL I got into the naughty habit of making up pseudo Dutch/German words, because a lot of Dutch sounds like Germanised English. You get your injections and blood tests done at the “prikpost”, for example.

Although not today, I recently learned a very surprising bit of trivia...human are the only animals that have that protruding bit of bone and flesh we call a chin--and there's no agreement in science on why that is. Furtherstill, niether our primates cousins nor our hominds ancestors have or have had chins.

1 hour ago, DrmDoc said:

human are the only animals that have that protruding bit of bone and flesh we call a chin

As we are the only 'thinking' animal, it serves the convenient purpose of giving us a body part to 'cup' with our hand as we sit and think.
I believe there is a statue illustrating this ...

It might be a consequence of morphological changes due to things like hormonal changes, and the rest of the face getting smaller around it. It could be a non-functional byproduct of other processes. That's one hypothesis I've read about.

Yup - probably related to alterations in our dentition and how food is chewed - some sort of leverage thing with the muscles. Also possible sexual selection involved. So it could have started out as a spandrel (in the SJ Gould, Lewontin sense) and then later on various cultures fostered an aesthetic of prominent chins in men as indicative of virility (also would make beards, a secondary sexual characteristic, stand out more).

There's also the longer noses, which I've heard as relating to migration out of the tropics and finding it useful to have a longer narrower nasal passage to warm very cold air. And again, there could be some sexual selection effect, too.

What about moustaches? Soup strainer?

Edited December 10Dec 10 by TheVat

Today I learned that @TheVat is unnaturally interested in sex as he considers all sorts of physical traits to be associated with sexual selection 😁 😄 .

6 minutes ago, MigL said:

Today I learned that @TheVat is unnaturally interested in sex as he considers all sorts of physical traits to be associated with sexual selection 😁 😄 .

Heehee. My interest is (harrumph!) purely scholarly and it's entirely coincidental that I happen to focus mostly on the traits of pretty women. When I observe these phenotypic traits, I do so to better understand the complex interplay between.....sorry, I forgot the topic.

Today I learned that box occupancy behavior is scale invariant within the Felidae family.

6 minutes ago, Otto Kretschmer said:

Today I learned that box occupancy behavior is scale invariant within the Felidae family.

That IS interesting. I knew it was standard in the smaller and domestic species (leave a new empty box sitting anywhere in our house and there will be a member of Felidae there within five minutes), but hadn't thought about the big cats. Leave a refrigerator box out on the savannah, see what happens...😀

TIL the origin of "bellwether." A wether is a castrated sheep. Put a bell around the neck of the lead wether and you can hear where the herd is going even if they're out of your line of sight.

6 minutes ago, TheVat said:

That IS interesting. I knew it was standard in the smaller and domestic species (leave a new empty box sitting anywhere in our house and there will be a member of Felidae there within five minutes), but hadn't thought about the big cats. Leave a refrigerator box out on the savannah, see what happens...😀

TIL the origin of "bellwether." A wether is a castrated sheep. Put a bell around the neck of the lead wether and you can hear where the herd is going even if they're out of your line of sight.

Edited December 13Dec 13 by Otto Kretschmer