Why do they call them Saltines?

My lovely and curious wife asked, “Why do they call them Saltines, instead of just “Salted Crackers.”  My initial impulse was to say that it was a brand name, but no the brand name would be Nabisco… and in fact the saltines that she was looking at were generic “Wendy’s” crackers.  So then asked “what else ends in -ine?”

• Saltine
• Pristine
• Machine
• Latrine
• Wine
• Twine
• Pine
• Line
• Dine
• Fine
• Brine
• Nine
• Sine
• Cosine
• Spine
• Shine
• Stein
• Visine
• Vaseline
• Valvoline
• Maybeline
• Quarantine
• Marine
• Magazine
• Ravine
• Adrenaline
• Amphetamine
• Cocaine
• Dopamine
• Thorazine
• Flourine
• Iodine
• Supine
• Serpentine
• Lupine
• Porcine
• Swine
• Bovine
• Ursine
• Canine
• Feline
• Piceine
• Recline
• Decline
• Incline
• Refine
• Praline
• Thiotimoline

Pristine and machine came pretty quick and then we were stuck for a while and gave up.  An hour later my clever wife said “Wine” which led to a quick series of single syllable words which didn’t seem to bring us closer to solving the mystery at hand, but you never know which parts of brainstorming will lead to something fruitful.  If you did it wouldn’t be brainstorming it would just be thinking about something.

The main grammatic thrust of the suffix is either as a chemical ending, or for adjectiving an animal name (especially with the latin root).  Adjectiving an animal name is such a specific niche, but you don’t say purpline, and though you could get away with serpentish serpentine is definitely cooler.

The words that seemed to feel most close to Saltine were Vasoline, Visine, Praline.

My favorites were machine, marine, and magazine.

Now on to actual research:

Magazine came from the arabic makhzan (storehouse) and khazana (to store up).  The term was used in the military for an ammunitions depot and is now obsolete and is still in use in reference to a “clip” in an (semi)automatic weapon.  The term magazine for a periodical came from the first one, “Gentleman’s Magazine,” in 1731.  It borrowed it’s use from the inventory sheet of the weapons depot.

Mare is latin for sea, and machina is latin for device (though stolen from the greek maghana which derives from the word for power.  So both of these are following the Ursine rule.

Incline recline decline all come from klei (to lean)

Quarantine comes from the Italian (latin) for 40 and the medical definition derrives from the 40 days that ships suspected of carrying plague had to stay anchored in harbor before they would be allowed to dock in Venice.

Dopamine is named for a specific amino acid involved in the pleasure center in the brain.

Let me take this chance to tell everyone that etymonline is awesome.

According to Wikipedia, Saltine actually was a brand name back in 1876, which belonged to a company that eventually became merged with Nabisco in 1898.  The use of the word Saltine became too broad to refer to any “soda cracker” and they lost trademark control in 1907.  Which makes me realize how old somethings are.

How many times was the bow invented?

The random question I want answered is this:

Was the bow and arrow invented once and distributed throughout the world? Or was it invented independently in isolated populations?

The answer to this question is not as easy to determine as I would think.  You type the question into google and you get links to a bunch of people on sites like “chacha” and “yahoo answers” and “answers.com” making up explanations and arguing with eachother without siteing anything other than their own internal logic,“something I read somewhere,”  or worse “everybody knows.”

The concept of the bow does not seem like an obvious one to me.  The spear, yes.  “The pointy end goes in the other man.”  Fire hardened points and stone knapped heads seem inevitable improvements on the basic design.  Varying lengths of spear also seem inevitable for various applications.  A 5 foot spear for throwing balance and a 3 foot spear for infighting and a 8 foot spear for stabbing at someone over your friends shoulder.  The concept of the spear thrower. Or atlatl seems an easy enough leap, the end of a stick moves faster than my hand can and a stick would extend my reach (and thus the time I’m in contact with the object throw)n, therefore it could get my spear going faster.  I could’ve invented the atlat, however it might’ve gotten thrown in the trash if I couldn’t develop accuracy with it in a reasonable amount of time.

If I was to design my own primitive weapon it would be the lacrosse stick with a spearhead on the butt end.  I think I’ll make one on my next long-break.

The bow, on the otherhand does not seem to me to be a trivial upgrade, but rather the insight of a genius.  And genius is by definition rare.  And given the smaller world population back then you could easily wait generations between geniuses.  Not only are you involving spring tension, you are designing the string, and the concept of fletching the arrow for stability has to be invented at the same time (not as a later improvement) or else the arrows wouldn’t hit point first and your bow would be useless.

So here we move away from my conjectures and into the results of research.  The oldest evidence of archery is knapped stone arrowheads in Africa 64,000 years ago.  This is not proof of archery, but solid evidence.  It’s also worth note that if the bow was invented in Africa the technology was long lost to them by 1800 when the British were dealing with Shaka of the Zulu.  The oldest arrow was found in Stellmar Germany about 11000 years ago.  The end of the shaft is vertically knocked for the bowstring proving the existence of the bow and that we’re talking about an arrow and not an atlatl dart (which would have a round indentation).  Then 8000 years ago in Holegaard Denmark the oldest actual archeological bow was found.

The landbridge from Asia to N America closed about 11,000 years ago.  The people in North America didn’t show evidence of the bow until 2500 years ago, so here we have something to support an independent development of archery.  Unfortunately the bow migrated into the American continent from the north to the south, and since the Inuit populations travel along the islands of the bearing straights between the 2 continents with some regularity I remain suspicious that this was imported technology through cultural contamination.

The Australian aboriginals did not have the bow and arrow at all, and this is despite intermittent contact with the Malays who did have it.

After a fair bit of research I am led to believe that the bow and arrow was only invented once.  There were several design modifications along the way, and all bows are not equal.  I will discuss these in a future post, but for now I’ll leave it that these advances seriously improve the performance of the bow while adapting to local materials, but could be made incrementally and these adaptations of the technology were without a doubt developed numerous times independently.

So, If I went back in time and killed the inventor of the bow and arrow, how many thousands of years would this set back humanity?

What color is a lego person?

“I think we’re going to have to accept fleshtone minim-figs.”

So spoke my lovely and sensitive wife.  This decision is a hard one for us.

Background information:

In the beginning, there was a toy maker named lego.  He made his toys out of wooden blocks just like everybody else.  Then his son came of age and said:

“Dad, I’ve seen the future, and it is PLASTIC.”

Originally lego only made bricks, and told you to use your imagination and build things.  Then came the logic that since kids were building houses they should provide people for the houses.  So they made some people using pre-existing blocks.

These figures were too large to fit well into the houses that are practical to build with most lego sets.  So the redesigned them to fit better and we got this:

And 2 short years later in 1976 we got this:

note the sticker on the chest

And this has been the specs of a lego minifigure (from now on mini-fig) ever since. It’s important to note that yellow skin is part of this standard.

Lego has stated that they deliberately chose the not-a-real-skin-color-yellow so that children at play could project their own races on the mini-figs, and I bought into this. And these simple smiling figures were what I grew up with, and have since been integrated into my son’s lego collection (which is so vast compared to what I had as to be completely ludicrous).

I was completely unaware of the earlier figures… and this:

if not racist, definitely not raceless.  Though the papoose is kinda awesome.

So I was completely onboard with the raceless vision of lego mini-figs.  Largely genderless as well.  Then in 1986 they released a series of pirate legos”

I totally love the drawn on bust/hips/waist that they gave the females.  It reminds me of the drawn on abs in the movie 300.  Since then pirates also came out with special “peg leg” pieces and hooks for hands.  This was all awesome in my book.  There was an awesome castle that came out when I was little that was way too expensive for me to even consider.  It came with some evil knights to defend the black castle and 4 bright colored knights on horseback to defeat it.  And the faces were key to knowing who was good and who was bad.  I bought it off ebay for Alaric… yeah for Alaric, that’s the ticket.

in 1996 when I was too old to pay attention to legos they came out with a cowboy and indian series.  Their skin was still yellow, but the raceless argument lost some of it’s teeth.  And then in a controversy so large I heard about it in 2001 they released an NBA series.  Since these figures were meant to represent real people they decided the yellow skin was a bit silly and we got this:

Overlapping with these racial developments was the beginning of licensed movies with lego starting with 1999 and the Starwars series (timed with the phantom menace hype).  This was a powerful nexus of nerdom and it’s power could not be denied.  After releasing several sets people began to ask “where’s Lando Calrissian?”  Lego’s response was “We’d love to, but we don’t know how to make a mini-fig that looks like him without making him darker.  That would imply that all the yellow mini-figs are caucasian.”   So they found themselves caught between a racist rock and a raceless hardplace.  In 2003 they released the cloud city set:

Which was later re-released with no yellow pieces and fleshtones all around.

Lego’s new policy is that if the mini-fig is in a liscenced set and based on a real actor they would copy the actors flesh-tone, but in all their generic sets they would still keep their trademark yellow racelessness.

So we’ve been throwing away flesh colored heads and hands for a while now to maintain our raceless purity.  We then order some separate yellow heads and hands to fill the set back out.  Depending on the cut of the shirt you may or may not be able to use a body. We recently purchased Jack Sparrow’s hair separate from any set through bricklink.  And with the LOTR sets coming out Stanna is proposing that we’ve held onto this idea beyond it’s time.  Is our quest for a raceless world really just hiding all the other races out of sight as we assume all our yellow’s are actually white?  Was the yellow skin a farce all along?