Showing all posts tagged with history.
Earth Apples, Anyone?
I was reading a recipe for some gross Dutch soup with potatoes in it when I noticed that the Dutch word for potato (aardappel) literally means "earth apple," just like the French "pomme de terre." The only other language I know how to say potato in is German (kartoffel), so I wondered how many words there were for it. It turns out that there are only three main ones: potato, earth apple, and truffle. I enjoyed learning about this, so maybe you will too.
So it looks like this mess is Spain's fault. When they brought potatoes back from Peru, the word they used to describe them was patata, a combination of the Taino batata (sweet potato) and the Quecha papa (potato). Because Spain's empire at the time was pretty big, we ended up calling the potatoes, same as in Portugese, Italian, Greek, Norwegian (potet), Swedish (potatis), and Turkish (patates). Arabic uses batata, which it got from Spanish but replaced the p since their alphabet doesn't have one.
Why does American Internet Suck so Much?
Just look at the kind of speeds they're getting in Japan!
That example's a little extreme of course, but you can get 100Mb/s for €19.90/month in France or 32Mb/s for €39.90 in Germany. In the US on the other hand, you're lucky to get 6Mb/s for the same price. That's DSL; Comcast's website sucks too much for me to check, but it's not any faster.
