Piggy’s description:
We could share factoids we’ve read, advice from personal experience, observations about the world, what-have-you. Everyone learns something new every day, and I’d like a place to share.
Continued from v. 2012.
Patience, Please
This site is under reconstruction and will look strange for a while. We regret the inconvenience.
I learned… How to make an ancient-looking tablet out of a toothpick, an old flat stone and some paint!
The word ‘snark’ (as in ‘snarkily’, not ‘the hunting of’) is apparently a portmanteau of ‘snide’ and ‘remark’. Discovering this blew my mind a lot more than it probably should have.
Huh. I can’t believe this never occurred to me. It makes so much sense.
Okay, I haven’t been able to find a source that I completely believe on this, but according to the more reputable sources (i.e. not urban dictionary) it looks like it’s actually related to/derived from Low German snorken.
Meaning… what? To snark? That seems about equally plausible, in any case. I don’t know a lot of German, so I can’t really say.
snore / snort, I believe. It could also possibly be derived from nark, “to irritate.” It seems fairly conclusive that the snide+remark thing is an ex-post-facto explanation, though.
I like the ‘nark’ one, I’m going to hang on to that one. Yeah, I probably shouldn’t trust urbandictionary for these things. ‘Snark’ doesn’t particularly sound like a portmanteau word.
I learned that two men in fedoras praying over a dying duck is way funnier than it should be.
Also, if you gliss too hard on a piano you can rip holes in your hands.
Nowhere in Japan is more than 75 miles from the sea.
That’s true of Britain, too, isn’t it?
Maybe, I read it in a book about underwater exploration where it was mentioned as a reason for Japan to be invested in marine sciences.
I learned yesterday that the feeling of inability to breathe due to nasal allergies seems to make me feel mildly claustrophobic. Which I find kind of odd, since isn’t claustrophobia supposed to make you feel like you’re having trouble breathing? Does this mean I’m a reverse – claustrophobic?
Radioactive sounds wicked cool on violin.
Lyndsey Stirling?
My post is kind of similar to R101’s post, so…
I learned- Yesterday in fact -That when your nose and throat are full of phlem <(I knew i wasn't going to get it right :idea:) and mucus you can't talk… At all! I just spent half of that day, saying nothing but "Hhhhhhnghhhhh" Trying to talk.
But then i coughed up some of the cake, so i could talk again… But my voice kept breaking and i sounded like a robot that was off for a few years 
I don't like learning that kind of stuff from experience!
Sarah Williams’s poem The Old Astronomer can be sung to the tune of “Empty Chairs at Empty Tables.”
(Like that song didn’t make me cry enough.)
That is the second-most interesting Les Miserables-related thing I’ve heard all day. Thank you!
Since so many Les Mis songs have the same rhythm, it can also be sung to other parts of the musical, but that one’s certainly the most fitting.
On a similar note, Will the Circle Be Unbroken can be sung to You Are My Sunshine. Do at your own risk.
The Beach Boys’ “Spirit of America” can be sung to the tune of “Snoopy vs. the Red Baron”.
Wow that’s really unexpected! So snoopy has th spirit of America?
How do you think he beat the Red Baron?
My great-great-great-great grandfather saw Lincoln and Douglas debate.
What you’ve all been waiting for… The difference between effect and affect! The difference is that affect is the action, and effect is the result.
I am now curious as to how one would use ‘affect’ in a sentence.
MuseBlog positively affects people’s lives in a lot of ways.
“The arrow affected the aardvark, the effect was loud screaming.”
Just to confuse you, “affect” can also be a noun. An “affect” is roughly synonymous with an emotion. But only if you’re still maintaining 18th century usage.
And “effect” can also be a verb! Meaning to bring about or cause to happen.
Psychologists still use it in that sense.
so do musicologists
(interestingly though when I’ve heard it spoken in that sense it’s been pronounced AA-fect, possibly to distinguish it from a-FFECT)
Man I was going to make a post like this but it was 4:30 in the morning so I couldn’t articulate properly.
All Imagine Dragons songs sound awesome on violin. All of them.
If one is trying to up one’s caloric intake, eating watermelon is a very, very bad way to do so.
What I refused to learn today, yesterday and the day before that: Eating chocolate after you’ve had a severe bout of the stomach flu is bad.
Nothing feels as good as chocolate tastes.Today I learned that a strong majority of all the recorded tornadoes that happen worldwide happen in the United States. Apparently our geography is uniquely well-suited to producing them. I never realized they weren’t as common elsewhere.
Three-quarters, according to the Time-Life book I was reading yesterday.
It was actually yesterday, but due to the context of the situation I was internet-less. Anyway, I learned that my stepmother comes from a family line of serious patriarchal political clout on a local level. (By local, I mean a single county. But still, that’s enough for me.)
Marilyn Monroe was at one point married to Arthur Miller.
(I’m trying to work this into my essay on The Crucible somehow.)
Today I’m learning that the sound of a team of roofers putting on a new roof is just about identical to the sound of the hailstorm that destroyed the old one.
I guess it makes sense that the energy that goes into nailing something down is similar to the energy needed to rip it up.
The scale system used in 13th century European music was called the “gamut” (contraction of gamma ut). Therefore, if you sing a scale, you run the gamut.
That’s what that means?? I’ve been wondering for years!
It makes a lot of sense now that I know that – you’re exploring the complete range of something.
You’re right… It does make sense.
Not all Etonians are good dancers!
Buzz Aldrin’s father had Robert Goddard as a professor and later, the founder of Grumman as a (flying?) student.
The term “pine barrens” refers to how the soil in pine forests tends to be dry and sandy, and this difficult to farm after the forest has been cleared.
I took Spanish for 12 years but only recently learned that “sorna” means “sarcasm”.
This means the second and third Jurassic Park movies take place on “Sarcasm Island”. Cue giggles.
Songs written to mock the meaningless songs played ad nauseam and beyond on the radio generally have a catchy tune as part of the mockery, making them very easy to get stuck in your head.
So if one comes in three nearly identical versions, under no circumstances should you listen to all of them in close proximity to each other.
Today I learned that the sum of all natural numbers (i.e., 1 + 2 + 3 + 4 + 5 + …) is…
-1/12.
Yes, negative one-twelfth. And apparently, aside from various mathematical proofs, this number is also important in bosonic string theory and some other areas of quantum mechanics.
How can this be possible? Isn’t the sum of all natural numbers impossible to find because it’s infinite?
I guess it depends on which branch of mathematics you ask, but the Wikipedia article mentions several ways to sum the series (which, being a liberal arts major, I can only pronounce), and the Youtube channel “Numberphile” just put out a video on it (which is where I learned about it). The main method for solving it shown in the video is based on the sum of the infinite series (1 – 1 + 1 – 1 + 1 – …), which equals one-half. It’s completely counterintuitive, but I think that’s probably because our intuition tends to lie to us about what “infinity” really means.
As best as I can understand wikipedia math articles at 1am, it seems to be saying that it’s not actually a sum in the way that that term is normally used – the series doesn’t converge on that value – but instead is a notational quirk.
(the 1-1+1 thing seems to be going off of Abel’s theorem but the series of natural numbers aren’t Abel summable? or something like that?)
at some point math seems to become essentially applied philosophy anyway
Huh. I want to watch that video now. But if what Lizzie’s saying is correct, that makes a lot more sense (that it isn’t a sum in the way the term is usually used).
The whole (1 – 1 + 1…) thing depends on how you define convergence. (I’m going to try to explain this using as little math as possible for those MBers who might be in junior high: I’ll try to use the standard terms so that those interested in the proofs can google them. Or you can ask me or other Math majors.)
The standard definition is that an infinite series converges if and only if the sequence of it’s partial sums converge.
A partial sum is when you take the first n numbers and add them together: for example, the 3rd partial sum of your sequence would be (if you start with a_0 and call your partial sums S_0, S_1, …):
S_3= a_0 + a_1 + a_2 + a_3 = 1 -1 +1 -1 = 0,
S_4 = a_0 + a_1 + a_2 + a_3 + a_4 = 1 -1 +1 -1 +1 = 1,
…
S_n = a_0 + … + a_n = 0 or one, depending on whether n is odd or even.
For those already more familiar with limits, this is probably starting to sound like a headache. The easiest way to (formally) prove that this series diverges (i.e. doesn’t converge) in with a Corollary of what we called the Cauchy-Criterion.
A Cauchy-sequence is a sequence where the absolute value of the difference of two summands gets arbitrarily small. (If that sentence sounds confusing, try to draw it: the larger the index of your summand, the closer it gets to the other ones). In the space of real or complex numbers, a sequences being Cauchy is equivalent to it converging.
((This doesn’t work (for example) in the rational numbers because a series of rational numbers might converge to an irrational number, so the limit wouldn’t exist (in the rational numbers) so the sequence wouldn’t converge. But it would still be a Cauchy sequence.))
The basic idea of the Cauchy-Criterion that we want to use here is that the partial sums are a series of real numbers: so the absolute value of the difference of two partial sums has to get arbitrarily small. But this difference is basically just a bunch of our summands: for example, S_n – S_(n-1) would be equal to the summand a_n. From this, we can conclude that the summands a_n have to tend to zero for n tending to infinity.
((Technically, we need to prove the Cauchy-Criterion and we also need to prove my statement about the summands. Two more things worth noting: 1) The Cauchy-Criterion only works in spaces where every Cauchy-sequence converges (we call them Banach spaces) and 2) the statement about the summands is only an implication, not an equivalence: just because the summands go to zero doesn’t mean the series converges. But it they don’t go to zero, it can’t converge). For example, google the harmonic series.))
So if we use the Corollary, we see that the given series (1 -1 +1…) can’t converge because the summands don’t go to zero, which means the partial sums aren’t Cauchy, which means they don’t converge, which means the series doesn’t converge and so doesn’t have a limit, so we can’t write that it equals anything other than infinity (which is how we defined divergence).
BUT.
In class we also mentioned that our definition of convergence (and the structure of Math and our curriculum) have changed a lot in the past two centuries. For instance, Euler claimed that Piggy’s series converges, with the following reasoning: we can apply the geometric series formula. This gives us 1/ ( 1 – (-1)) = 1/2.
Why this doesn’t work for us: the geometric series only works of the absolute value of the summands is lesser than 1. (For example, in the proof I saw, a summand equal to one would result in dividing by zero. Oops). However, if we define the sum of an infinite series as the result of aforementioned formula, we get that it equals 1/2. This is used in some branches of Mathematics, I think in number theory. (It was something my math prof briefly mentioned in a lecture about ten months ago and this is the guy who talks like ViHart so please cut me some slack).
A funny anecdote from class (i.e. why bookgirl remembers this):
Aforementioned prof holds class at a breakneck speed, then spends the last two weeks before finals going over the material again. At some point in these repetition, he wrote the series (-1)^n on the blackboard and asked if someone could prove (or disprove) that the series converges. A student volunteered, came up the blackboard and said that the series diverges.
Cue an outburst from the professor “What? Euler claimed that the series diverges, how dare you say he erred, etc…”. The prof is somewhat imposing and fairly terrifying when he flies into a passion.
Somewhat cowed, the student answered “But I can prove it.” and started to explain the Cauchy- Criterion. The prof cut him off; saying he could sit back down: “I know that you know the proof (student name), but you have to know you know it as well.”
((I hope I’ve explained this somewhat correctly: I’m a bit in a hurry and I learned all the terms in German: hopefully, google has not led me astray with the translations. If anything’s unclear, please ask!))
SFTDP:
Obviously, Euler’s summation (and argumentation) was a lot more complicated than plugging into a formula, but it reduces down to it in this case and I don’t really know enough about it myself to tell you more.
The best way to find a cut on your hand: Hand sanitizer.
The best way to find a cut on your lip: Barbeque sauce.
Ouch!
stumbled upon two blog posts explaining the -1/12 false fact:
http:// scientopia. org /blogs/goodmath/ 2014/01/17/ bad-math-from-the-bad-astronomer/
http:// skullsinthestars. com /2010/05/25/ infinite-series-are-weird-redux/
During the first world war, American manufacturers renamed sauerkraut “liberty cabbage.”
When pink roses dry, they keep their color beautifully. (Red roses go a bit charred-looking, though.)
How to shoot a bow! (And that I’m actually pretty good!)
A lot of prom dresses can be classified as looking like either sausages or dead marine life.
The word “ambisinister” is the opposite of ambidextrous: it refers to someone who uses both of their hands equally poorly.
Wouldn’t that make it technically a synonym as well as an antonym? I mean, if the use of both hands is equal then by definition it’s both equally good and equally bad. (I wonder if there’s a word for words that simultaneously have the same and opposite meanings.)
There are several names for words like that. The Wikipedia article “Auto-antonym” gives some entertaining examples.
Fascinating…
Shadowkat and Bibliophile have the same first name.
Today, I learned that Sweden was one of the first countries to declassify homosexuality as an illness because in 1979 (the year it happened), people protested by calling their workplaces and saying they weren’t going to work because they were gay.
The New York State gubernatorial line of succession is officially only three officials deep. I would have thought it was more.
And I just learned that the word “gubernatorial” means of or relating to the position of governor. I’m glad you used it so I could look it up.
You’re welcome.
How to successfully install a Minecraft Mod.
Which mod?
how do you successfully install a minecraft mod??? Every time I try it deletes all my saves.
Today, I was Googling my old Internet usernames and found the following from when I was younger:
– Lots and lots of Warriors RPGs
– Virtual dragon eggs
– A copypasta about being the unique snowflake girl who dances in the rain and reads a book at school dances
– A mediocre unfinished Death Note fanfic about L’s backstory as a teenage detective
– Bad, bad anime cat OCs
– Bad, bad anime wolf OCs
Overall, I’m not too ashamed of my younger internet self. I had fun and strengthened my drawing and writing skills, although I do wish I hadn’t been so into the ~*not like the shallow normal girls*~ mentality. That copypasta was the only descriptor on my profile page, and followed by a list of usernames of every deep, misunderstood preteen who reposted it.
Monophobia is the fear of being alone. You can learn lots of things with this dictionary called Mrs. Byrne’s Dictionary of Unusual, Obscure, and Preposterous words.
That googling “do a barrel roll” causes the search page to spin like 360 degrees and googling “askew” causes the search page to be slightly tilted.
Islam has guidelines for prayer in space.
TELL ME MORE. I’m not Muslim but there is literally nothing I care about more than religion in space.
For starters, ZNZ and shadowfire, what do you know about Islam’s guidelines for prayer on Earth? They’re quite specific.
The Christian Science Monitor had a very good article on this a few years ago, “How does an Islamic astronaut face Mecca in orbit?” Searching for the title should bring it up easily. There’s also some interesting info about how Ilan Ramon observed certain Jewish traditions in space that can be found in a number of places online.
This came up because several Malaysian astronauts are practicing Muslims and weren’t sure how to handle facing towards Mecca when you’re, y’know, orbiting the planet at thousands of miles per hour. So a group of Muslim scholars got together and created official guidelines. As far as prayer goes, they’re instructed to use the time at the launch site to determine sunrise and sunset, and create a mental image of the Kaaba (the site in Mecca Muslims pray towards). There’s more info available if you’re curious.
Basically we live in the future and it’s kinda rad.
I think it’s so cool that Islam is willing to make up new rules to accommodate to present-day problems. Religion and science working together instead of being opposing forces.
Indeed.
Peeling peaches is incredibly easy: cut an x in the bottom, and put them in boiling water for like half a minute; once they’re out, the skins come right off.
The American Revolutionary War had a European, a Caribbean, and an East Indian Theater and has been considered a world war by some historians.
Yes, I know it sounds weird, given that the American Revolutionary War as most of us learn about it in US History classes is about the American colonists (with help from the French and Spanish after Saratoga) fighting the British in North America.
But the French, Spanish, and Dutch were all Great Powers with colonies of their own elsewhere in the world, and once they declared war on Britain in alliance with the American colonies, they were simultaneously fighting the British in those places, including India, the Caribbean, and the Mediterranean at the same time as the battles in North America. That includes the French invasion of Menorca in 1781 and the French-Spanish siege of Fort San Felipe, which would mean there was a battle of the American Revolutionary War fought right here in Mahon Harbor, which is really weird to think about.
Of course, these conflicts have names of their own (the Anglo-Spanish War of 1779-1783, the Fourth Anglo-Dutch War, etc.), but they were all resolved by the Treaty of Paris in 1783.
If you happen to find yourself in Southeast Asia, and if you are the kind of person who likes to go jogging barefoot at one in the morning :
do not
DO NOT
go running right after it rains.
Leeches
Related: if it is two a.m. and you are having to deal with leeches, This American Life is an excellent thing to listen to. Always make sure you have an appropriate soundtrack for this kind of thing.
oh god why did you go anywhere barefoot in Southeast Asia
Sand on the moon is more sharp and irregular shaped than Earth sand because there’s no wind or water to erode it. This is how it held the shape of the Apollo astronauts’ footprints more clearly than dry sand on Earth would. (Mythbusters)
The Earth doesn’t fall into the sun because it was first pulled toward the sun at an angle, and spins around the edge of the gravity “funnel” created by its mass, like the coin donation funnels at the zoo. However, unlike the zoo donation funnels, space has no friction to slow down the Earth and allow the sun to pull it any closer, so it remains on the same orbit.
The Pokemon Wooper is called that because it’s based on the axolotl and axolotls and other pet salamander species are sold under the nickname “wooper looper” in Japan. Only Japan could make the axolotl even cuter than normal.
In Spain, late-summer “silly season” news stories are called “serpientes de verano” or “serpents of summer” because so many of them involve sea serpents and other cryptids.
Summer Serpents would be a great book title, I think.
Yeah, there’s a lot of adaptability there, too. It could be silly or menacing or fantastic or… My first thought, though, is that it would be a cute lighthearted Slice of Life thing about kids getting into whacky adventures during the summer while trying to see if the crazy stories in the local papers are true (kind of like “The Hot and Cold Summer”.)
And there’s a family from Spain who just moved into the neighborhood that has a kid the same age as the other kids, so everyone’s parents are like “hang out together so they aren’t lonely when school starts” and the ongoing plot is the new kid becoming friends with the others. And the new kid mentions their mom calls stories like that “serpientes de verano” and what it means in English and the other kids think it sounds cool so they call their “investigation group” The Summer Serpents…
And alternatively or additionally, they are also trying to do or find something weird enough to get into the newspaper. (This could be the motivation for their investigations– “the newspaper said there was a monster in the woods, so if we can catch it, we’ll get in the paper!”)
I just realized that almost everything I know came from Muse.
You could do worse.
Same.
(Okay, less so now than it used to be, but I do remember many a class where I’d learned about what we were talking about already via Muse.)
I just learned that there are all these awesome Google Easter Eggs! Apparently, just about everyone else in the world knows about them, because I tried showing some to people that I know, and they just say, “Oh, yeah! I’ve seen that before!” But it’s so cool! I found one where you can go INSIDE the TARDIS! And play Atari Breakout on Google Images… and ride Nessie… There’s a whole Wikipedia list of them! Awesome!
You can ride Nessie in Google?
Well, sort of. It’s not like there’s a picture that looks like you’re riding the “sea monster”, but if you go on Google Maps and say that you need directions for travelling from Fort Augustus to the Urquhart Castle, it will give you the option for ‘Loch Ness Monster’. The trip takes 28 minutes. (I think it only works on UK Google Maps, though, because I can’t get it to work, and the source cites the UK systerm, so…)
*system
It would appear you can do it from either UK or US Google Maps, provided you’re in the newer map view they came out with in the last year or two (which I hate and reverted back to the classic map view ASAP) and not the older map view.
Oh yeah. I guess that would be true *heads over to Google Maps to try it out* Hey! I just did it! That’s awesome! I’m happy now! Yay!
Tee-hee, that’s cute, I just tried it!
(Although Nessie is technically a lake monster rather than a sea monster. Loch Ness has been cut off from the sea since the end of the Ice Age, although it is now reconnected to the sea by the Caledonian Canal that eventually reaches the sea after going through several other lakes. The canal has locks between the lochs, though so I don’t think a monster could swim all the way out to the sea without some human help.)
Okay, I just learned what the “I’m Feeling Lucky” button on Google actually does. When you mouse over it, the button changes to something else, like “I’m Feeling Stellar” or “I’m Feeling Wonderful”. Then if you click on it, it takes you to a page about something stellar or wonderful. That’s cool. I didn’t know that at all!
It originally took you to the first result for whatever you were searching for.
I’ve never understood why anyone would want to do that. The new button makes much more sense to me.
I feel like for some reason it made more sense before google began tailoring results so heavily to individual search history.
Huh. But if you go to “Search Settings” and change It from “Only show instant results” to “Never show instant results”, it changes the button. If you click it, it brings you to the Google Doodle page! Not that I’m complaining, because I love Google Doodle.
In the “spreading the news” scene from Finding Nemo, the lobsters have New England accents as a joke on Maine and Massachusetts’ lobster-fishing industries.
“It’s wicked dahk down there!”
In my “personified subs” thing, my head-canon is that young Alvin was generally an overexcited Genki Guy 9-year-old when he was launched (kind of like Calvin in a dinosaur museum except with the ocean) explaining how he got into scrapes like being stabbed by a swordfish and sinking. And for maximum comedy value, he talked like that because of his homeport.
(*Bounces up and down next to scientist who has just left his “shell” and is trying to give a serious report to a colleague. “And oh man oh man it was wicked cool, it was like wicked dahk down theah, but theah were these ugly fish wi’ these lights on theyah faces…” *Navy guy rolls eyes and mutters something about wasted money*)
Of course, as he grew up he became more mature and restrained (spending a year on the bottom of the ocean in quasi-suspended animation will slow anybody down) and his accent became less pronounced. And just like anyone else, he’s embarrassed by how he was as a little kid.
Ooh, and Lulu, who was named after Allyn Vine’s mother, was his exasperated nanny trying to stop the poor kid from hurting himself too badly.
Actually, thinking about the sinking is sort of harsh, it was basically being in a coma for a year with broken bones and then taking another year and a half to get back to full health. (And then he had to go in for surgery again two years later to get the titanium pressure sphere.) Poor kid.
I learned what Ringworm was… since I have some on my chin.
I think I caught it from mom, who thinks she caught it from a sick-looking kitten that she pet.
Yikes. That’s too bad. Ringworm is pretty easy to treat, though, isn’t it? (Not that I just looked it up on Google to see what it actually is…)
I had Ringworm once when I was younger (also from a stray cat)- it should clear up pretty quickly given the correct medication. I feel for you
Bruce Lee was not just born in the Year of the Dragon, he was born in the Year of the METAL Dragon. That explains so much.
The National Geographic Society started producing globes that could be rotated in their cradles (i.e. as opposed to just spun around the north-south axis, you know, the kind where you can point the North Pole horizontal if you want) in the early 60s because the society’s president, Melville Grosvenor, was tired of having to bend down and crane his neck every time he wanted to keep track of Antarctic expeditions.
“Virga” is a meteorological term for rain or snow that falls from a cloud but evaporates before reaching the ground.
It’s a common sight in the sky over the deserts out west. Very pretty!
The story about the packet of biscuits and the train station that Arthur tells Fenchurch in So Long and Thanks for All the Fish actually happened to Douglas Adams in 1976.
I’ve always wondered about that. It had an autobiographical ring to it.
Paradoxography was a form of Classical literature that consisted of lists of stories of strange people, places, and things.
So basically, they had TIME-Life books/Ripley’s Believe It Or Not/”Weird fact” blogs in Ancient Greece. That amuses me greatly.
Me, too! Just out of curiosity, in what context did you find out about that?
A discussion of ancient ghost stories on a history-related subsection of a Popular External Website that included a link to the Wikipedia page, on the subject, which in turn included links to JSTOR and a blog that is attempting to post translations of all known ancient paradoxographical texts.
Also, I now realize that Increase Mather’s broadside on “Ilustrious Providences” that “Storm Kings” quotes extensively for having one of the earliest known accounts of a tornado in North America was the same thing for the 1600s, except with an added religious motive.
this is what my oxford classical dictionary (third edition, revised) has to say:
paradoxographers – Interest in the unexpected or unbelievable (paradoxa, thaumasia, apista) is prominent in the Odyssey and Herodotus. Collections of marvels attributed to 4th-cent. authors (Aristotle, Theopompus, Ephorus) are not genuine, but paradoxography as a distinct literary genre came into existence in the 3rd cent. with paradoxa by Callimachus (fr. 407-411) and his pupil Philostephanus, Antigonus of Carystus, Archelaus of Egypt, Myrsilus of Methymna, and others. In the Roman period there are substantial collections of marvels by Isigonus and Phlegon, and several anonymous collections survive in medieval manuscripts. The material is taken from geography, botany, zoology, and human culture. Several ancient writers dabbled in the subject (Cicero, Michael Psellus) and others (Varro, Pliny the Elder, Aelian) used paradoxographers as sources.
—-
if I have a kid I’m naming it Phlegon
The earliest recorded ampersand is a graffito on a wall in Pompeii.
Knowing Pompeii, I’m willing to bet it was in either an insult or an ad.
Jorunna parva is a sea mollusk less than an inch long that resembles an oblong rabbit, with the “ears” being smell/taste organs that help it detect chemicals in the water. (The slugbunnies are yellow or white, fortunately.)
Not only are armadillos carriers of leprosy, but they also often become roadkill due to their tendency to jump 3-4 feet in the air when startled, thus colliding with the bottoms of cars and dying.
They can also swim across rivers by inflating their intestines, and always have 4 babies at once, all of the same gender.
One time we had to make mock political parties for government class, and I picked the armadillo as my party’s mascot because it’s adaptable, native to the USA, and generally peaceful but still able to defend itself. I ended up researching way more about armadillos than politics and my teacher had to cut me off from explaining armadillo facts.
I hope you didn’t learn either of those facts from personal experience.
A capuchin monkey named Crystal was in both Community and Night at the Museum. Sometimes she goes to premieres and conventions in tiny clothes.
One of the common words in Spanish to mean “compassion” is “misericordia,” which, of course, shares an origin with “misericords,” the mercy seats installed in churches for people who had to stand for very long periods of prayer. Which Muse had an article about goodness knows how long ago.
Also a misericorde is a long thin dagger that was designed for mercy-killing knights. Useful information!
Lincoln was laughing at the moment he was shot.
Which is awful because it should have been just a happy and innocent night at the theater with his family after four years of war, and even more so because Booth timed his shot to be covered by laughter at one of the funniest moments of the play.
But I agree with Sarah Vowell’s conclusion that it’s also kind of nice in an “at least he was happy in his last conscious moment” way.
Last night (though after midnight, so technically today) I learned how to fold paper boats, and went on to fold a bunch of them in progressively smaller sizes, and then I put thread through them to make this mobile which is now hanging on my wall.
And if you get some nesting dolls, they can double as hats, too!
Ros posted in one of the older iterations of this thread that she found a color of paint called Voldemort. Four years later we found it again to figure out what color it actually is. It’s a dark desaturated purple. Not very Voldemort-like, idk?
Is it a creepy kind of dark purple?
I haven’t the foggiest.
SFTDP: actually, it’s more or less the color of my icon. Um.
I guess that could be creepy. Depends on the circumstances.
“Jurisdiction in rem” means that court cases can sometimes be named for objects or concepts they involve as if those things were the plaintiffs. This leads to hilarious case names like “One 1958 Plymouth Sedan v. Pennsylvania”, “United States v. Forty Barrels & Twenty Kegs of Coca-Cola”, “Quantity of Books v. Kansas”, and “United States v. One Tyrannosaurus Bataar Skeleton”.
In the 1860s, cheese from Cheshire was sometimes sold in the shape of a cat, and typically these shaped cheeses would be sliced up starting with the tail and ending with the face. Thus, the smile of the Cheshire Cat was the last part to disappear.
Also, the Mock Turtle is half turtle and half calf as a joke on Victorians making “mock turtle soup” from veal.
The Alice in Wonderland exhibit at the Morgan Library made me aware of both of these jokes– Alice is certainly supposed to be strange and comical, but some things like this seem stranger to us today than they did to people in the 1860s because we don’t realize that they were topical humor. It’s like if a modern book had a crown shaped like a burger as a joke on the name “Burger King” and in 150 years that brand no longer existed and most people had forgotten it.
What I knew: Ian Fleming chose the name “James Bond” for his fictional hero because he happened to read a book on birds by an author with that name while writing the first story about the character.
What I learned: Fleming later sent an autographed copy of one of his novels to the ornithologist with the message, “To the real James Bond, from the thief of his identity…”
bonus: the book is called Birds of the West Indies, we have a copy at home, and I was using it to look up our local birds before I’d ever even heard of Ian Fleming!
Did you confuse the author and the character as a kid?
I don’t think I ever did? but then I’ve never spent very much time thinking about James Bond the character. (I’ve genuinely spent more time reading Birds of the West Indies than I have watching James Bond movies!)
What I learned today that is even better:
This spring, a new species of hutia, a family of cat-sized rodents related to Guinea Pigs, was identified in the Caribbean and named for the naturalist.
And when they interviewed the scientists who found it, one of them said:
“Species found on isolated islands, such as those in the Caribbean, have been shaken and stirred by human activity and are very vulnerable to extinction. However, we hope that conservation efforts will mean that hutias are forever.”
I demand a cartoon about spy hutias.
Apparently, the retired space shuttle (and future SLS)’s main engines are environmentally friendly. The exhaust of the RS25 engines isn’t actually smoke, it’s water, and sometimes it gets so thick that it literally makes it rain at the launch site. Cooool.
The mosaic art of beavers in the Astor Place subway station are an allusion to the fact that the Astor family (for whom the street and plaza are named for) made the first part of their considerable fortune from the fur trade.
I knew both of those facts independently (it’s probably named for the family, they made their money from fur fading) seperately, but never connected them with the mosaics until someone pointed it out to me today.
(Yesterday) I learned the may finger size fluctuates enough throughout the day (as a result of temperature, activity, etc.) that the same ring can, at different times, fit my index finger or thumb (on either hand).
Also, if you have a spinner ring that squeaks you can oil it using trombone slide oil.
*that my. I apparently just cannot type.
A camoufleur is a designer of military camouflage.
One of the invasive invertebrate species found in the British Isles is a species of flatworm native to North America. Fortunately, it has only been observed in one lake so far– Loch Ness. It’s believed the flatworm stowed away on underwater equipment brought in by monster hunters some time in the 1970s or before.
I can’t tell if that’s funny or sad.
The current world water speed record was set way back in 1978.
Somebody call Chad, we have a Kokonspiracy project…
Yes… but don’t attempts to break the record have only a 15% survival rate, or something crazy like that?
Yes, but no challengers to the record thus far have ever had Chad as their engineer.
Anthony Hopkins has played two people who set world speed records for driving particular types of vehicles (Donald Campbell for boats and Burt Munro for motorcycles), but says he personally drives very slowly.
Actors are not their characters.
While great white sharks are sometimes found in San Francisco Bay, they do not hunt there. There are other species of sharks found in the bay, but most are not kinds that attack humans, and only one shark attack is ever recorded to have occurred in the bay.
Therefore, the idea that prisoners attempting to escape from Alcatraz by swimming would be immediately set upon by man-eating sharks is pure sensationalism. (As seen in, among other places, “What’s New, Scooby-Doo?” and the children’s book “Impossible Quests”. I want to say it was in one of the “True Stories From the Edge” books, too, but neither “Escapes!” nor “Tunnels!” seems to have an entry about Alcatraz in their table of contents…)
The smaller sharks may well have eaten the already-dead bodies of failed escapees who had drowned or died of hypothermia, the true dangers posed by such a swim, which may be why no bodies were found in some cases, including the infamous 1962 escape. So, attacked by sharks, probably not. Eaten by sharks, maybe.
However, it would make sense if such hype was encouraged by the government in older sources from the time when the prison was in use, to discourage escapes.
Today I learned that the fruit fly gene Smaug is so named because inhibits the activity of another gene named “nanos,” which is Greek for “dwarf.”
Sonic hedgehog is another great one to know about. Basically, scientists identified a Drosophila mutant which made the embryos be covered with small pointy projections. It kinda looked like a hedgehog, so the researchers named that gene hedgehog. Then some other scientists looked for homologous genes in vertebrates and found three. They named them after different species of hedgehogs: two real ones, desert hedgehog and Indian hedgehog, and sonic hedgehog, obviously named after the video game character. Turns out, SHH is *really* important in development – like, patterning entire axes of the body, telling the spinal cord to become the spinal cord, etc. So, geneticists and teachers worldwide now have to keep a straight face while teaching their students about sonic hedgehog, the gene named for a video game character!
The French version of the original Pokémon theme song is mostly literal, but it has some nice flourishes of its own. One of them, the alternative to “It’s you and me/I know it’s my destiny” (C’est notre histoire/Ensemble pour la victoire), you can even swap into the English version with a slight tweak without messing up the tune: “It’s our history/Together for victory!”
Things I learned in my first year of seminary:
– Mosquito and chigger bites no longer make me itchy.
– I can only stomach about 1/3 of a cigar.
– Cinnamon raisin bagels require Nutella.
– Priests and kung fu masters are frequently mistaken for each other.
– Fluorescent lights were a horrible mistake.
– Most people sing much better after ~1.5 beers.
– Beards are a symbol of wisdom and honorability in Nigeria.
– Honey locust thorns pierce straight through heavy-duty off-road tires.
– When stressed, some people quickly lose basic comprehension abilities.
– Bookshelves should be dusted more often than every 16 years.
– When you light a large burn pile, the fire will get to the other side of it before you can.
– Mulberries make excellent milkshakes, salad dressing, and marinade for steaks.
– You can make a bed to hotel-quality standards in under a minute.
– People from other areas may not understand that “tornado warning” means “there is a tornado outside right now”.
– When you plant a tree, make sure the soil is dry and loose so that there are no air pockets around the root ball; otherwise, you will have to spend a week shoulder-deep in mud to correct the problem.
– Many lighter, hoppier beers benefit from a slice of lemon.
– Beware of free books.
Vanilla honey cream cheese is also good on cinnamon raisin bagels, but not often found outside of specialty shops.
It sounds as if it would be fairly easy to make.
True, you could probably get a very similar taste from just putting honey, vanilla, and cream cheese on in layers.
Not sure how you’d make a layer of vanilla, but yeah I’d probably mix vanilla and cheese and then layer that with honey.
You’re not actually supposed to eat the cigars, Dad… (jkjk I know.what you mean but ambiguous phrasing and my awful sense of humor)
The image of Athena/Minerva on the California state seal symbolizes that California was never a territory and Athena was born as an adult.
A few days ago I learned that Lorenz and Lorentz were two different physicists. Whoops. I’d always assumed that it was just a spelling error in my notes.
Same, I thought I was just reading it wrong!
One was Danish, the other Dutch. Both worked during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Hm… I sense comedy potential here.
Like the letter the two Lord Russells wrote to The Times.
Contrary to what I was told by adults as a kid, lionfish had been discovered in waters off the US East Coast as far back as the mid-1980s, so the idea that the entire invasive population is descended from pet lionfish washed out to sea by Hurricane Andrew in 1992 is almost certainly untrue, although some of them might be.