A list of curious facts
One: The world speaks many different languages—even online. Did you know that internet-speak varies from one country to another. Take, for instance, the lol, lmao etc used to express laughter. The Japanese instead text warau or w—the Kanji letter for ‘laugh’. The Turkish version is ‘asdfghjkl’—which is just keyboard gibberish. And Nigerians have their own acronym, ‘lwkmd’—short for ‘laugh wan kill me die’. If you want more, Big Think has a comprehensive list of the many ways to say ‘lol’—or just check out the excellent map in the lead image. A related good read: Art Review has an interesting take on the odd ways we laugh on the internet—through acronyms, sounds or emojis.
Two: Nvidia founder Jensen Huang has plenty of reasons to dance with joy today (see: quarterly report). But in China, he didn’t have a choice. Huang put on his dancing shoes for the performance of the folk dance Yangge. He was honouring a time-honoured tradition in Chinese factories—which requires business leaders to dance and sing on stage to huge crowds. The reason:
In China the business-leader-boogie plays a special role. Corporate life tends to be hierarchical and regimented…Thus company parties are an opportunity for leaders to build rapport and show gratitude.
Btw, Elon Musk walked like an Egyptian back in 2020—while Alibaba founder Jack Ma put on an entire production for his Michael Jackson-inspired performance in 2017 (watch it here). You can see why Huang likely will never be a John Travolta below. (Wall Street Journal, paywall)
Three: Did you know that fish are very, very noisy? We first figured it out back in the days of Aristotle but our modern imagination of the ocean was shaped by Jacque Cousteau documentaries. His diving tanks masked the sounds in the water—leaving us with the false impression that oceans are a quiet place. In fact, fish bark, chatter, groan, drone and cry. Some—like the Black drum fish—make a deep bass sound so loud when they get it on—that it alarmed Florida residents a month ago:
Black drum fish, which typically live off the Atlantic Coast, produce a sound similar to a speaker’s bass when they mate, [scietist James] Locascio said. He said the fish flex their muscles against their swim bladder to produce drum-like sounds at low frequencies. While underwater sounds rarely transfer into the air due to their different densities, Locascio said black drum noises travel through the ground and tunnels, sometimes reaching people’s homes.
New York Times has more on the history of fish vocalisation research while The Guardian has more on the Tampa story. The Guardian video below has a sampling of fish sounds from a coral reef.
