To appreciate this story (Anatoly is reposting from Yulya Fridman), you need to know that for Russians, the surname of Niels Bohr, Бор, is identical to the name of the element boron (Бор). With that out of the way (I translate from the Russian original):
Incidentally, [V.I. Kogan] boasted that many years ago, when a fellow student found him with Brillouin’s book Атом Бора [translation of L’atome de Bohr, i.e., The Atom of Bohr — but the Russian could also mean The Boron Atom] in his hands, V.I. managed to convince him that such books had been written on the entire periodic table […], that is, there were books The Aluminum Atom, The Copper Atom, and so on, from the Mendeleev series. He proudly said: “I convinced him with ease! I don’t really know why… Actually, there are no such books about other atoms…” From the audience someone objected that there certainly were, showing the book Атом гелия [The Helium Atom].
Anatoly adds “У физиков есть ‘Атом Бора’, а у программистов – ‘Язык Ада'” [Physicists have The Bohr/Boron Atom, and programmers have the language Ada/of Hell] — ‘hell’ in Russian is ад [ad]. If you read Russian, there are some funny comments in the thread.
A typographical question: when Russian uses a dash for an ellipsis (more precisely gapping), as in the last sentence, what kind of dashes are used? I see that you used there an en-dash, where Engllish would use an em-dash.
I just copied and pasted his sentence, so I can’t really be said to have “used” the dash. I confess I haven’t gone into the details of Russian dashery.
Traditionally an em dash, with en dashes only being used recently for date ranges, but I did find this in an article:
https://type.today/en/journal/dash
The mineral Cummingtonite [courtesy Stephen Colbert].
Thanks for the link, Dusty!
Testing  :
test – test
test – test
test — test
test — test
Testing some more: full space,   (#8201), hair space (#8202), no space:
H — H
H — H
H — H
H—H
I’ve heard a joke on the same principle like this: “Every physicist should know that Bohr’s atom [атом Бора, a model for hydrogen atom developed by Bohr] is not an atom of boron [атом бора], but the hydrogen atom”.
The day before yesterday, 80 years ago something happened. I don’t want people to forget what did, but they already have.
Jan. 6, 1945? Wiki has also forgotten, in its this day in history page.
I might have guessed a concentration camp liberation. But Auschwitz was liberated later in January, and Majdanek, the first, months earlier. The Rhine was crossed in March. The Trinity test was that summer. So I’m not sure. What was it? A first colonial revolt against the British or French empire?
Well, something happened. Undoubtedly there was fighting in the war. My parents might have done some homework.
Wedding of George H.W. Bush and Barbara Pierce?
Did V have a brainfart and think January for August?
Ryan: Jan. 6, 1945? Wiki has also forgotten, in its this day in history page.
Not completely. A Welsh rugby player was born. A Soviet scientist died.
Keith Ivey has the perhaps most prominent-in-hindsight wedding of the day, which is also WW2-related – i.e. it was scheduled when it was because the 20-year-old bridegroom had just been sent back to the U.S. after a tour of duty flying combat missions in the Pacific to be assigned to a new squadron that would be training in new tactics to be used in the forthcoming invasion of Japan. Lots and lots of people got killed that day because of the war of course, with one notable instance being Lieutenant-General H.W. Lumsden, CB, DSO etc etc who was supposedly the most senior British Army officer to be killed in combat during the entire war. He was present as some sort of observer on the bridge of the USS New Mexico, which was shelling Japanese positions on shore in Luzon when it was struck by a kamikaze, causing around 30 deaths including that of the ship’s American commanding officer as well as their distinguished British visitor.
FWIW you can get more stuff like this by looking at the wiki article for e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/January_1945 than by looking at the wiki entry for a specific day in January covering all years since January became a month.
I didn’t see it in the Bulgarian Wikipedia entry for 1944, either.
Y : 1945, January, Christmas. Serbian paramilitaries. genocide. The USSR has already declared war on Bulgaria and has invaded. Stalin is allied with Tito. Bugarian troops are at the Hungarian front fighting the Germans. “Yougoslav” “Partizans” are killing anyone who identifies as “Bulgarian”
@V: I’m sorry I was flip about your comment. The English Wikipedia article is at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloody_Christmas_(1945)
I had looked at a few (English-language) wikipedia summaries of the time period for Bulgaria thinking there might be something there but of course borders in the Balkans shift back and forth and I should have instead been looking toward the end of the very lengthy and depressing chronological listing under https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mass_executions_and_massacres_in_Yugoslavia_during_World_War_II.
(The Bulgarian Church now observes Christmas on Gregorian Dec. 25 rather than Julian Dec. 25, but had not yet made that shift as of 1945. My best guess is that the until-recently-canonically-irregular dominant Orthodox faction in North Macedonia still sticks to the Old Calendar like the Serbs do, but I am not 100% sure of that.)
That’s a VERY Serbian POV aricle.
Not a date that I’d come across and then forgotten. But certainly a sad one worth giving some consideration when it’s raised. Sorry V.
At a meeting in Cracow five years ago I realized why the Polish unit of currency was the złoty. On the wall of the lecture theatre there was a large periodic table (in Polish, of course). I saw that the element where gold ought to be was called złoto. Not much gold in a modern złoty, however, I suppose.
I’m listening to Belle and Sebastian right now, and I know they’re from Glasgow, but I would not know — it does not register. It’s just Stuart’s singing voice.
Athel, my wife had a similar experience, only she was realizing why she was seeing her great-grandmother’s name on storefronts. I’m not clear on which Eastern European country, nor exactly how her great-grandmother spelled Zlata/Zlaty. One part of the family was from a Polish-speaking town in what is now Lithuania, and another from a Ukrainian city in modern Belarus.
Here is a related jazz quote from a page on Golda Meir: “
>In some Slavic languages, the name may appear as “Zlata,”
FWIW, Bohr the atomic scientist and bor the element sound exactly the same in Danish, and we should know innit.
<In some Slavic languages, the name may appear as “Zlata,”
I think that it’s a baseless claim, perhaps arising from misunderstanding of the basic fact that both “Golda” and “Zlata” זלאטא were traditional Ashkenazi feminine names (the latter belongs to the wide layer of traditional feminine names of Slavic (generally Old Czech) origins such as Czarna, Dobra, Nezla and probably also Slava.
You’re right, of course. I had wondered about the name Golda, googled, but didn’t pursue it very far. On going back, it looks baseless. Sorry for the misinfo. I also don’t know I’d meant to type that auto-corrected into the word jazz in my post above.