karenika - things i learned today

Things I Learned Today

08 30 2001

To determine if a star possibly harbors planets that could support life, scientists have come up with five tests.

The first test is that a star must fuse hydrogen into helium at the core, thereby generating heat and light.

The second test is that a star must be the right temperature. If it's too hot, it may burn out too quickly and if it's too cold it may not produce the energy needed to sustain life.

The third is that the star must be stable. Instability causes the star's brightness to vary considerably, so it would alternately freeze or burn and life on the nearby planet.

The fifth test is that the star must have the chemical elements like carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, and iron needed to produce planets and life.

Proxima Centauri fails all five, Alpha Centauri B passes most, Alpha Centauri A passes all five.

08 29 2001

The Sumerians' number system was base 60, as opposed to our base 10, so they divided each hour into 60 minutes and each minute into 60 seconds, which is the source today's time measurements.

08 28 2001

The names of the months are derived from Roman names. The first six months are after gods (Janus, Mars, Aprilis, Maia, and Juno) or festivals (Februa), the next two months are named after emperors (Julius and Augustus), and the last four are the Latin names for seven, eight, nine and ten (septem, octo, novem, and decem).

only three Roman names remain for our days of the week: Saturday (Saturn's day), Sunday (Sun's day), and Monday (Moon's day). The rest are named after gods of Norse mythology: Tiu, the god of war (Tiu's day), Wodin, the supreme diety (Wodin's day), Thor, the god of thunder (Thor's day), and Frigg, the wife of Woden (Frigg's day).

08 27 2001

The U.S. Postal Service handles 40 percent of the world's mail volume. Japan, the second largest carrier of cards and letters, handles only 8 percent.

08 26 2001

The most common blood type is O and the rarest is AB. The breakdown in America is as follows:
Type A = 40 percent
Type B = 10 percent
Type O = 46 percent
Type AB = 4 percent

08 26 2001

Rossini wrote The Barber of Seville in just eleven days. A good copyist would take twenty days just to copy the score that Rossini wrote.

Mark Twain was the first author to submit a typewritten manuscript to a publisher. The novel was Tom Sawyer.

Edgar Allen Poe, in 1841, introduced the first fictional detective, Auguste C. Dupin, in his novel The Murders of the Rue Morgue.

08 25 2001

The world is divided into 24 time zones. To make communication easier, each time zone is given a letter of the alphabet (except for O and I). The letter designated to Greenwich mean time is 'Z' and since is Zulu in the phonetic alphabet, Greenwich time zone is known as Zulu time.

Time based on the earth's rotation is irregular. Only four days in the year actually have exactly 24 hours in them (around December 25, April 15, June 14, and August 31)

08 24 2001

The ancient Greeks believed that because the earth was a sphere, there had to be a large southern mass of land to balance the northern part of the known world. They called this the "unknown land to the south" Later mapmakers used the Latin name Terra Australis Incognita, which eventually became Australia.

08 23 2001

Hawaii is the only state in the U.S. that grows coffee.

08 22 2001

There are 21 colors of M&Ms available. They are black, blue, light blue, dark blue, brown, cream, gold, gray, green, aqua green, teal green, dark green, maroon, orange, pink, dark pink, purple, light purple, red, white and yellow.

The myths are: Green ones are aphrodisiacs, orange ones augment breast size, brown ones were in Van Halen's contract such that if they saw them anywhere in the area, the show was cancelled.

08 21 2001

It is easier to find gold than to win a state lottery.

Gold is measured in karat weights.

24 karat = 100 percent gold
18 karat = 75 percent gold
14 karat = 58.5 percent gold
10 karat = 41.6 percent gold

In the U.S. a jewelry must be at least 10 karats to be called gold.

08 20 2001

U.S. bills are currently available in denominations of $1, $2, $5, $10, $20, $50, and $100. Up until 1969, the government also produced $500, $1000, $5000 and $10,000. The largest bill ever printed was a $100,000 gold certificate issued in 1934. $2 bills are still being printed.

A single letter benaeth the date on a coin indicated the U.S. mint that produced it. If it has no letter, it means it was minted in Philadelphia. 'D' indicates Denver, Colorado. 'S' is for San Francisco, California. 'CC' is for Carson City, Nevada. Pennies are only minted in Denver and Philadelphia.

During World War II, copper was needed for bullets and cartridges. In 1943 pennies were made from zinc-coated steel and were referred to as "war pennies". Older pennies were 95 percent copper, modern pennies are 2.4 percent copper.

The first coin with the words "United States of America" was a penny coined in 1727. It also had the simple motto "Mind Your Own Business."

08 19 2001

English boasts by far the largest number of words of all languages - 616,500 officially enshrined in the Oxford English Dictionary. That's almost four times the vocabulary size of its nearest competitor, German.

Much of that versatility issues from the distinctive three-tiered vocabulary of Anglo-Saxon, French and Latin synonyms.

08 18 2001

Approximately 70 percent of the U.S. population wears eyeglasses or contact lenses.

08 17 2001

Charles Pierce, son of Benjamin Pierce, was supposed to have been able to write with both hands simultaneously - problem with the right hand and its solution with the left.

08 16 2001

Contrary to popular belief, the Eskimos don't have more words for snow than do speakers of English.

Emerson scandalized the Unitarians by renouncing organized Christianity in favor of personal revelation during an address at Harvard Divinity School in 1838 and was not invited to speak at Harvard again for thirty years.

08 15 2001

Phyical scienctists are adamant that their thinking is geometrical, not verbal. Michael Faraday, the originator of our modern conception of electric and magnetic firelds, had no training in mathematics but arrived at his insights by visualizing lines of force as narrow tubes curving through space. James Clerk Maxwell formalized the concepts of electromagnetic fields in a set of mathematical equations and is considered the prime example of an abstract theoretician, but he set down the equations only after mentally playing with elaborate imaginary models of sheets and fluids. Nikola Tesla's idea for the electrical motor and generator, Friedrich Kekule's discovery of the benzene ring that kicked off modern organic chemistry, Ernest Lawerence's conception of the cyclotron, James Watson and Francis Crick's discovery of the DNA's double helix - all came to them in images. Albert Einstein arrived at some of his insights by imagining himself riding a beam of light and looking back at a clock, or dropping a coin while standing in a plummeting elevator.

08 14 2001

Languages differ in their inventory of color words: Latin lacks generic "gray" and "brown"; Navajo collapses blue and green into one word; Russian has distinct words for dark blue and sky blue; Shona speakers use one word for the yellower greens and the greener yellows, and a different one for the bluer greens and the nonpurplish blues.

If a language has only two color words, they are for black and white. If it has three, they are black, white and red. If four, you add either yellow or green. Five adds both yellow and green. Six, blue; seven, brown; more than seven, purple, pink, orange, or gray.

08 13 2001

When speakers of different languages have to communicate to carry out practical tasks but do not have the opportunity to learn one another's languages, they develop a makeshift jargon called a pidgin. Pidgins are choppy strings of words borrowed from the language of the colonizers or plantation owners, highly variable in order and with little in the way of grammar. When children were isolated from their parents and were tended collectively by a worker who spoke to them in pidgin, not content to reproduce the fragmentary word string, the children injected grammatical complexity where none existed before, resulting in a richly expressive language. The language that results when children make a pidgin their native tongue is called a creole.

Until recently there were no sign languages at all in Nicaragua because the deaf people were isolated from one another. When the Sadanista government took over in 1979, they reformed education and the first schools for the deaf were created.

08 12 2001

By the 1920s it was thought that no corner of the earth fit for human habitation had remanined unexplored. New Guinea, the world's second largest island, was no exception. The European missionaries, planters, and administrators clung to its coastal lowlands, convinced that no one could live in the treacherous mountain range that ran in a solid line down the middle of the island. But the mountains visible from each coast in fact belonged to two ranges, not one, and between them was a temperate plateau crossed by many fertile valleys. A million Stone Age people lived in those highlands, isolated from the rest of the world by forty thousand years. The veil would not be lifted until gold was discovered in a tributary of one of the main rivers. The ensuing gold rush attracted Michael Leahy, a footloose Australian prospector, who on May 26, 1930, set out to explore the mountains with a fellow prospector and a group of indigenous lowland people hired as carriers. After scaling the heights, Leahy was amazed to see grassy open country on the other side. By nightfall, his amazement turned to alarm, because there were points of light in the distance, obvious signs that the valley was populated. After a sleepless night in which Leahy and his party loaded their weapons and assembled a crude bomb, they made their first contact with the highlanders. The astonishment was mutual.

08 11 2001

A dolphin has two brain hemispheres, like humans. But a dolphin's hemispheres operate independently. For eight hours, both hemispheres are awake, for the next eight hours, only the left hemisphere sleeps and for the eight hours after that the right hemisphere sleeps. When one of the hemispheres is sleeping, the dolphin moves as little as necessary.

When we breathe, we exchange only about 17 percent of the air in our lungs, a dolphin exchanges 80 percent.

08 10 2001

Because it has no collarbone, a cat can squeeze through an opening that's no larger than the size of its head.

A cat can jump five times the length of its tail.

A typical cat spends about one third of its life grooming itself.

08 09 2001

Santa Maria Nuova, which was originally called Santa Maria, had the first recorded example of a nursing staff made up of oblats, religious women dedicated to the service of the sick. It was opened in 1288 by Folco Portinari, the father of Beatrice who was the love of Dante's life. The same Beatrice seen guiding Dante in his Divine Comedy. The hospital is still open and one of Florence's leading hospitals.

08 08 2001

Of all the animals living, the elephant has the largest brain. It's four times the brain of a human.

A dolphin's brain size to body mass ratio is higher than a human.

08 07 2001

Fish obtain water through osmosis. It seeps into their body through the tiny holes in their skin. When a fish lives in salt water, the ocean contains more salt than the liquid in the fish, thus, osmosis draws water out of the fish and the fish needs to continuously drink water to replenish itself. If the fish lives in fresh water, the fish's body has more salt than the water in which he is so the water is drawn into the fish's body, so the fish doesn't have to drink. But it does swallow some water when it opens its mouth to drink.

08 06 2001

Seahorses are monogamous and stay with a single partner all their lives. Each morning they perform a greeting dance to reaffirm their pledge to each other. If a partner dies, it's a long time before the seahorse will search for a new partner.

The male seahorse becomes pregnant and nourishes the young until they are born.

08 05 2001

Neuroscientists have known for many years that the brains of men and women are not identical. Men's brains tend to be more lateralized--that is, the two hemispheres operate more independently during specific mental tasks like speaking or navigating around one's environment. For the same kinds of tasks, females tend to use both their cerebral hemispheres more equally. Another difference is size: males of all ages tend to have slightly larger brains, on average, than females, even after correcting for differences in body size. [ source ]

08 04 2001

The first meal that astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin ate on the moon was roast turkey in foil packets.

08 03 2001

In New York City, our neighborhood is named Kips Bay. It is named after a 17th century farmer, Jacobus Kip, whose farm extended from 2nd Avenue and 35th Street to the bay that came to bear his name.

08 02 2001

The year 1816 was known as the "year without a summer". New England had no summer that year. In June they had snow up to 10 inches and more ice in July and August. The frost continued all fall. Because most crops were destroyed, it's referred to as the "eighteen hundred and starve to death."

08 01 2001

The strange scoring method in tennis was derived from the four quarters on a clock: 15, 30, 45 and 60. Since 60 minutes is the end of the hour, it signified the end of the game. For some reason, 45 was eventually changed to 40.

A Pyrrhic victory is one where the loss is greater than what's won.