history
as of february 8 (an auspicious day for a few reasons), 2016 is now the year of the fire monkey! congratulations to anyone born this coming year — you will be curious, creative, and a natural prankster! each chinese new year (based of the lunar calendar) the animal of the year
history
in recent research, published here, four scienceticians compiled a list of words that have very old cognates shared across at least three of major language families in Eurasia (those being, Altaic,Chukchi-Kamchatkan, Eskimo-Aleut, Indo-European, and Uralic OR Altaic, Indo-European, Uralic, and Kartvelian, if you take the Nostratic macro-family structure). basically,
history
our friend, tim urban, from waitbutwhy, is, unknowlingly, taking over trivia wednesday today. maybe that makes me a sellout or lazy but i think the article he wrote with the diagrams he built are such a fabulous model of historical trivia that they are too good to skip over. see
fauna
from bomb-sniffing to house clearing to covert ops, our canine friends have proved invaluable resources for effective and tireless pursuit of criminals and enemies the world over. you can find a raft of videos related to police dogs, their use in the field, and their training — most of them are
etymology
belwether a person or thing which identifies a trend or leads in a direction | origin: a castrated male sheep, called a wether, given a small bell to wear, used to be used to help lead a flock of sheep gardyloo a warning cry, not unlike ‘heads up’ | origin: scotland; used
history
qi or chi, according to traditional chinese culture, is the life force flowing within any living thing. there are a multitude of correlates from other cultures, including prana (Hindu), mana (Hawaaian), pneuma (Greek), and ruah (Hebrew). as an aside, both pneuma and ruah have been used in Scripture to describe/
beer
in the middle ages (very specific dating) in western europe, people started to brew beer using the more plentiful of grain crop at their disposal — switching from barley malt to wheat malt. this resulted in a beer-style tradition called ‘weizenbeir’. weissbier, wit, weizenbier, hefeweizen, dunkel weizen, kristallweizen, lambic, and gose
games
dating way the eff back to mesopotamia with ‘the royal game of ur‘, board games have been around for a long time — maybe even older than that if you count dice as a board game, which i don’t. around 3500 BC, egyptians were playing senet and would bury people
christmas
this week’s topic: yule logs a merry yuletide to you all! ‘yule’ comes from germanic roots and even so far back as norse mythology: “The word is attested in an explicitly pre-Christian context primarily in Old Norse. Among many others (see List of names of Odin), the long-bearded god
anatomy
this week’s topic: exorcist owls we humans are wonderfully created predators with highly maneuverable heads and with eyes on the front of our faces that we can move in lots of directions in tandem but are also rounded so that we can see a great deal in our periphery
typography
this week’s topic: typography as it turns out, it is no longer typographically appropriate to add a double-space between sentences (q.e.d. here) one space, not two. it’s hard to do. that’s all for today. tune in next week for other fun also, this is still
biology
this week’s topic: the sneeze when something irritates the upper lining of the nasal cavity, the trigeminal nerve (transmitter of all facial sensation to the brain) sends a signal to the medulla (great and mighty controller of autonomic and involuntary functions) telling it to fill the lungs with air,
