Andrew Dalke's Comments

The link is concerned with the false urban legend "that the changes were done at the entry point and that the immigrants were unwilling participants in the modifications". It makes clear that immigrants certainly changed their name after arrival.They couldn't change their name upon boarding the ship as the ticket was issued to the original name. This name went on the passenger manifest, which was cross-checked at Ellis Island. Any pre-transit name change would have to be done before purchasing a ticket, or at least before the name was put on the manifest.

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Have you seen their name in the ship manifest or arrival records? Perhaps they changed their name with citizenship? Given how easy it is to change one's name - under common law they could simply use the name MacNaughton, see Lindon v. First National Bank, 1882 - why did they care to keep using MacNaught?The article points out that starting in 1906 federal law made it easy to legally change one's name during the citizenship process, so that was another opportunity to change it back if they didn't want the common law process.
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In "The Wizard Of Evergreen Terrace" entry, the second equation was meant to imply Homer had come up with a counter-example to Fermat's Last Theorem. 3987¹² + 4365¹² is very close to 4472¹², with a ratio between them of 1.0000000000189426. If you tried to verify it with a standard hand-held calculator there wouldn't be enough digits to show you the values were different.
Today I learned the "Ich bin ein Berliner" definite article use, implying a jelly doughnut instead of someone from Berlin, is a false urban legend.
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I know the Mongols killed European knights using horse archers. I thought they killed the knights from a distance, and not by killing the horses followed by close-up stabbing, but I can't find anything one way or the other.
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To misquote Tolkein: “some things that should not have been forgotten were lost. Conjecture became theory. Theory became fact.”
Now I have to train myself, when I look at an avocado, to stop thinking about extinct sloths pooping.
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Ahh, they excluded ? , ?, and ? because they are extinct. Then again, until now I didn't even know that sauropod, T. rex, and dodo existed as emoji. Don't worry hoopoe, hiding away in the Egyptian hieroglyph ? - your day as an emoji will come! Clearly there should be a followup study using all Unicode characters, as the hieroglyphs include tilapia, dung beetle, horned viper, and baboon. Time to apply for a grant.
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Profile for Andrew Dalke

  • Member Since 2012/08/04


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