Today I found out why the Moon looks bigger on the horizon than when it is higher in the sky. This is a question that has been debated for several thousand years. One popular myth, dating all the way back to Aristotle in the 4th century BC and which still endures somewhat today, is that it is simply a case […]
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Today I found out Woody Harrelson’s father, Charles Voyde Harrelson, was a contract killer. Charles Harrelson is most noted for having been convicted of assassinating U.S. District Judge John H. Wood, Jr. outside of a parking lot in San Antonio, Texas, as well as being convicted of killing a grain dealer, Sam Degalia, Jr., for money. In the latter case, […]
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Myth: Lemmings commit mass suicide. So when did this myth get started? Well, nobody knows exactly, but it was a 1958 documentary by Disney, which won an Academy Award, by the way, that appears to have popularized the myth. In the wildlife documentary White Wilderness, a few dozen lemmings were imported to Alberta, Canada so that they could be filmed […]
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Today I found out where the word “wiki” comes from. Howard G. Cunningham, the developer of the first wiki which was launched in 1995 called WikiWikiWeb, upon his first visit to Hawaii was informed by an airport employee that he needed to take the wiki wiki bus between the air port’s terminals. Not understanding what the person was telling him, […]
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Myth: “Hot dog” was coined at a New York Giants baseball game. You’ll often hear that the name “hot dog” comes from a cartoon drawn by T.A. Dorgan during a New York Giants baseball game at the Polo Grounds around 1902-1906 (date varies depending on who’s telling the story). At this game, he supposedly observed a vendor, Harry Stevens, selling […]
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Today I found out why the hottest part of the summer is called the “Dog Days”. The earliest reference to some aspect of this expression goes all the way back to the Ancient Egyptians. They noted that the heliacal rising of the star Sirius heralded the hottest part of the summer. However, it isn’t exactly known why the ancient Egyptians […]
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Myth: It has been 823 years since the last time October had 5 Fridays/Saturdays/Sundays You may have seen this spread about in little cartoon pictures and on twitter/facebook/etc. In fact, it’s actually not rare at all for this to happen (last time it happened was 2004). It actually happens in the following pattern for months containing 31 days, not just […]
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Today I found out where the word “lego” comes from. In 1934, Danish carpenter Ol Kirk Kristiansen, the founder of what we now know of as Lego®, asked his staff to come up with a good name for his growing toy company. The two names that ended up being finalists were “Legio” and “Lego”. The first was a reference to […]
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Myth: The reason there is no Nobel Price for Mathematics is because Alfred Nobel’s fiancée wife had an affair with a mathematician. You’d be hard pressed to take any upper level university level mathematics course and not hear some variation of this story at least once per term from your mathematics professor (I personally have heard it from three different […]
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Today I found out why milk is white. Milk is made up of about 87% water and 13% solids, such as fat and various proteins. Chief among these proteins is something called casein, four types of which make up about 80% of the proteins in milk. The casein protein molecules are typically suspended somewhat uniformly throughout the milk and are […]
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Today I found out the Snickers candy bar was named after one of Frank Mars’ favorite horses. Frank Mars was the creator of the Snickers candy bar and founder of Mars, Inc, originally called Mar-O-Bar Co., which is currently the 6th largest privately held company in the world with annual sales of around 21 billion dollars. The company is still […]
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Today I found out why crabs, lobsters, crayfish, shrimp, and some other crustaceans turn red/orange when cooked. Typically, the exoskeleton of most crustaceans has a blue-green to grayish color and sometimes they appear a brown or olive green, with just a hint of red; with a few exceptions like the blue and yellow lobsters and crabs. The exoskeletons of such […]
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Today I found out the United States once planned on shooting a nuclear bomb at the moon. If you presumed that the reasoning behind such an act was “because we can”, you are absolutely correct. That is exactly why the U.S. wanted to do it, in order to one-up the Soviet Union, who were perceived as leading the space race […]
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Today I found out why you used to have to use #2 pencils when using scantron forms. Now, you might be saying, “Used to? Don’t you still have to?” It turns out, despite what pretty much all teachers will tell you, not really. Modern scantron systems are quite high-tech, using image sensors and sophisticated image processing algorithms. These algorithms can […]
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Myth: Listening to Mozart will make you smarter. This myth was popularized by an experiment published in Nature in 1993 by the University of California at Irvine. In this study, they had 36 students listen to 10 minutes of Mozart before taking a spatial IQ test. Their claim was that this increased the spatial IQ score of the students by […]
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Today I found out where the term “rock and roll” came from. The word “roll” has been used since the Middle Ages to refer to, among other things, having sex: “Let’s go for a roll in the hay”; “Rolling under the sheets”; etc. The word “rock”, again among other things, has been used since at least the 17th century as […]
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Today I found out that the tongue on a Red-Bellied woodpecker, along with some other species of woodpecker, is so long that it can extend at least three times the bill length and, when retracted, wraps around its skull. According to a study conducted by the Dalian University of Technology in China, Grey-Faced woodpeckers have a tongue that measures around […]
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Myth: Alcohol kills brain cells. Now, to qualify that title, pure alcohol will absolutely kill brain cells and many other types of cells, which is why it is used as a disinfectant. However, recent research has shown that the quantity of alcohol you could possibly take in, without killing yourself, does not introduce enough alcohol into your bloodstream to kill […]
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