Untranslatable is an online dictionary of idioms and expressions contributed by native speakers all over the world.
All entries are verified and insights are offered into usage, context, and/or significance.
Tuesday, October 21, 2025
Fliers of New York
"They're not just for missing pets or yard sales. Fliers these days are for internet memes, self-promotion, and extremely esoteric messages."
Japanese factory with one employee produces 400,000 screws daily
Doesn't look like much from the outside, does it?
"Asai Seisakusho Co., Ltd. manufactures and sells low-head screws, extra-low-head screws, standardized tapping screws, and small screws."
Address: 449-7, Tanizuka-kami-cho, Soka-shi, Saitama, 340-0024
Home Page: https://nejikouba.com
Monday, October 20, 2025
bookofjoe's Favorite Thing: Folding Wooden Tray Table
I've used these since forever: I currently have four (4) deployed at various places around my house.
Full disclosure: one is next to my treadmill desk and the other three (3) are on the sides of my main TV watching chair.
FunFact: I've always taken one on trips where I drive to visit and stay with people 'cause they're so darn handy as bedside tables etc.: invariably the peeps I stay with ask if I can leave the little table behind and get another one for myself.
The answer's always "Yes," of course.
So convenient, they fold flat and are easily carried/transported.
FunFact #2: Back when I discovered these wonderful tables they cost $5 at Bed Bath & Beyond — that amazed me, I thought to myself "How can they make a profit at this price?"
Anyway, they're very sturdy (at least those I still have that I got 15-25 years ago at BBB).
Set of 2: $43.48.
BookFinder — 'Find any book at the best price'
How is that I'm only learning of the existence of this site today?
It's been up since 1997!
News travels slowly to Podunkville, I get that — but for a bibliophile like me, it's ridiculous.
I'm impressed: it found all of mine, including the German translation of one title.
True, it didn't find the Hungarian translation, but I've been trying without success to locate a copy since it was published in 1994.
[via Kevin Kelly writing in Recomendo]
Sunday, October 19, 2025
AiryString: YKK reinvents the zipper after 100 years
Long story short: after five years of development, YKK — whose zippers are part of most zipper-closed clothing you wear — has succeeded in creating a zipper that does without the fabric tape that fastens zippers to clothing.
Above and below, the breakthrough zipper.
Coming soon to your jeans et al.
Today’s Wired magazine story takes a deep dive into what it took to make this happen.
More?
Have a look at YKK’s AiryString catalog.
Nobody but you will know you're wearing Birkenstocks
Up to now I've always thought Birkenstocks were kind of dorky even though I sometimes like them on others.
A few months ago I fractured a bone in my foot (base of the 5th right metatarsal, if you must know) and as it healed I explored the Birkenstock website, thinking perhaps their famous footbed might enhance recovery.
I happened on the shoes pictured here on sale ($140 reduced to $77) and thought they almost didn't look like Birkenstocks so I took a flutter and bought a pair.
They're exactly what I needed because of a serendipitous discovery: the deep footbed has a depression made specifically to cradle the wearer's 5th metatarsal bone.
Who knew?
Lagniappe: they're extremely comfortable (as one would expect, but still...)
Saturday, October 18, 2025
GOES Image Viewer — Our planet through many lenses
The GOES Image Viewer hosts the most up-to-date real time images of Earth available to the public.
You can view and download satellite images that capture the entire visible disk of Earth and are updated every 10 to 15 minutes.
From the website: "The U.S. government is closed. However, because the information this website provides is necessary to protect life and property, this site will be updated and maintained during the federal government shutdown."
'Toda la vida es sueño, y los sueños, sueños son'
"All life is a dream, and dreaming as well." — Pedro Calderón de la Barca (1600-1681)
There is a remarkable syndrome called Charles Bonnet, in which visual loss is accompanied by hallucinations which "fill in" what the eye fails to deliver to the brain.
Recently Sora and its ilk finally crossed the "uncanny valley" such that they generate video indistinguishable from reality by even the most expert eyes.
What do these things tell us?
Well, they tell me that it is becoming increasingly clear that reality is a construct, what we make of the world we think we live in.
We're not just passing through.
If this is the case, then it should be quite reasonable to believe that we can indeed create our future, just as it appears we create our present and past, with memories changing each time we recall them.
It seems to me that there's a quiet, unstoppable revolution in our thinking taking place, which is going to result in an entirely different view of ourselves in the world.
I predict we will take an increasing role directing and framing our lives — not so much in what we choose to do but, rather, in how we choose to view and value what we do.
FunFact: Sora ascended to #1 in the Apple App Store soon after its September 29, 2025 release and has remained there ever since.
Fair warning: there goes the rest of your (so-called?) life.
Friday, October 17, 2025
Chuckles — Throwback Halloween
Amaze the kids trick-or-treating in your 'hood with this retro candy they've never heard of instead of ramen.
Thursday, October 16, 2025
Dawn Chorus — 'Beautiful Bird Songs From All Over The World'
Wrote Claudia Dawson in Recomendo:
I am absolutely enamored by Dawn Chorus, a sound project that collects and maps bird song recordings from all over the world.
Using it, I relived the first morning I woke up in Berlin to the most charming bird chirps I’ve ever heard.
Although I can’t remember the sounds I heard on our road trip through the Czech Republic, this recording perfectly captured the magical landscape I experienced.
It’s so refreshing to discover projects like this that induce awe and reverence for the natural world.
Wednesday, October 15, 2025
Paparazzi
I don't know about you, but I have trouble remembering how to spell this word.
I know there's at least one double letter — but which one?
Or are there two?
Last night the penny dropped.
Because what other association can anyone have with a double z than ZZ Top?
So when you try to remember how to spell paparazzi, from now on all you have to do is imagine them trying to get a candid shot of... ZZ Top.
Two z's, two Z's, and Bob's your uncle.
FunFact: Giuseppe Paparazzo, the celebrity-chasing photographer in Fellini's epic 1960 film "La Dolce Vita," was the real name of one of the photographers for the gossip columnists of Via Veneto back in the days of Sophia Loren and Marcello Mastroianni.
Fellini thus knew the name and used it for his character, coining the nickname for the whole category.
NATO Phonetic Alphabet Converter
This tool converts letters and numbers into the NATO phonetic alphabet, which is used to clearly communicate spelling over radio, phone, or in any situation when clarity is critical.
For example, "BAT" becomes "Bravo Alfa Tango".
This helps avoid confusion between similar sounding letters like "B" and "P" or "M" and "N".
Very entertaining, at least to me.
More?
I hear you: your wish is my demand.
[via Mark Frauenfelder writing in Recomendo]
Laptop Screen Cleaning Hack
I just stumbled on this and wanted to make it widely known.
You know how when you want to clean your laptop screen, it's hard to see all the smudges and streaks because of the bright backlight?
Sure, you can put it to sleep, but if your computer's anything like mine, just breathing nearby wakes it and renders all the dust and fingerprints and coffee splashes etc. pretty much invisible again.
But what's most vexing is having to use your microfiber cloth on the screen in its position of function: it's tiring and inefficient and ergonomically taxing.
In the video above, you can see my nifty discovery in action.
Just tip the computer 90° such that the side of the screen is flat against a firm surface and all of a sudden you have an easy task that's much faster than the old way.
Tuesday, October 14, 2025
'So What Should We Call This: a Grue Jay?'
The Rare Hybrid Offspring of a Blue Jay and a Green Jay is Likely a Result of Weather-related Shifts in the Range of the Two Species.
Biologists at The University of Texas at Austin, who have reported discovering a bird that’s the natural result of a green jay and a blue jay's mating, say it may be among the first examples of a hybrid animal that exists because of recent changing patterns in the climate. The two different parent species are separated by 7 million years of evolution, and their ranges didn't overlap as recently as a few decades ago.
"We think it's the first observed vertebrate that’s hybridized as a result of two species both expanding their ranges due, at least in part, to climate change," said Brian Stokes, a graduate student in ecology, evolution, and behavior at UT and first author of the study.
Stokes noted that past vertebrate hybrids have resulted from human activity, like the introduction of invasive species, or the recent expansion of one species' range into another's – think polar bears and grizzlies – but this case appears to have occurred when shifts in weather patterns spurred the expansion of both parent species.
In the 1950s, the ranges of green jays, a tropical bird found across Central America, extended just barely up from Mexico into south Texas and the range of blue jays, a temperate bird living all across the Eastern U.S., only extended about as far west as Houston. They almost never came into contact with each other. But since then, as green jays have pushed north and blue jays have pushed west, their ranges have converged around San Antonio.
As a Ph.D. candidate studying green jays in Texas, Stokes was in the habit of monitoring several social media sites where birders share photos of their sightings. It was one of several ways he located birds to trap, take blood samples for genetic analysis and release unharmed back to the wild. One day, he saw a grainy photo of an odd-looking blue bird with a black mask and white chest posted by a woman in a suburb northeast of San Antonio. It was vaguely like a blue jay, but clearly different. The backyard birder invited Stokes to her house to see it firsthand.
"The first day, we tried to catch it, but it was really uncooperative," Stokes said. "But the second day, we got lucky."
The bird got tangled in a mist net, basically a long rectangular mesh of black nylon threads stretched between two poles that is easy for a flying bird to overlook as it’s soaring through the air, focused on some destination beyond. Stokes caught and released dozens of other birds, before his quarry finally blundered into his net on the second day.
Stokes took a quick blood sample of this strange bird, banded its leg to help relocate it in the future, and then let it go. Interestingly, the bird disappeared for a few years and then returned to the woman's yard in June 2025. It’s not clear what was so special about her yard.
"I don’t know what it was, but it was kind of like random happenstance,” he said. "If it had gone two houses down, probably it would have never been reported anywhere."
According to an analysis by Stokes and his faculty advisor, integrative biology professor Tim Keitt, published in the journal Ecology and Evolution, the bird is a male hybrid offspring of a green jay mother and a blue jay father. That makes it like another hybrid that researchers in the 1970s brought into being by crossing a green jay and a blue jay in captivity. That taxidermically preserved bird looks much like the one Stokes and Keitt describe and is in the collections of the Fort Worth Museum of Science and History.
"Hybridization is probably way more common in the natural world than researchers know about because there's just so much inability to report these things happening," Stokes said. "And it's probably possible in a lot of species that we just don't see because they're physically separated from one another and so they don't get the chance to try to mate."
The scientists' work was supported by a ConTex Collaborative Research Grant through UT System, the Texas EcoLab Program and Planet Texas 2050, a University of Texas at Austin grand challenge initiative.
The researchers did not opt to name the hybrid bird, but other naturally occurring hybrids have received nicknames like "grolar bear" for the polar bear-grizzly hybrid, "coywolf" for a creature that's part coyote and part wolf and "narluga" for an animal with both narwhal and beluga whale parents.
Your name spelled out in moon features
Wrote Clive Thompson:
The UI/UX expert David Charney has created "Alphabet Moon," a website where you can type in any word and it will spell it out via a series of photos of lunar features that are shaped like each letter.
Above is my name: "Clive"
Alphabet Moon will also tell you the details behind each lunar feature.
The letter "C" in my name, for example:
Visible from Earth, a giant "C" is formed by Sinus Iridum, or the Bay of Rainbows. This dark, 147-mile-wide bay is a plain of ancient lava. The distinctive "C" shape is formed by the Jura Mountains, a massive mountain range that curves around the bay's edge, leaving one side open to the vast Mare Imbrium. This mountain range is actually what's left of the original crater rim that was flooded by lava long ago.
Monday, October 13, 2025
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