Below are things I’ve learned or found interesting in the past month: Late because I forgot the month rolled over!
-
The standardization of political colors in the US (with democrats being blue and republicans being red) only dates back to the year 2000(!). Prior to that, every news station had their own color scheme.
-
Silphium was a miracle crop in ancient Greece.. It was said to be worth its weight in gold, with a wide variety of medicinal properties, use in cooking, and as a contraceptive. It was so revered, it appeared on most coins. Today, we have no idea what it could have been.
-
Use of the word “gulled”, meaning to be fooled or deceived, has been steadily falling for the past 200 years. It’s where we get the very common word “gullible”. Thought this was interesting, as I’ve never encountered “gulled”.
-
Citibike offers rewards to users who move bikes between areas of excess and areas of drought. A few clever people have found a way to farm rewards points by continuously cycling bikes between two nearby stations. Once the bikes move, the station is marked as depleted, offering the highest points total. Repeat endlessly for profit (one estimate said ~$6000 / month).
-
The famous WOW! Signal picked up by Big Ear has long been one of the most famous extraterrestrial signals of all time. A researcher saw the magnitude jump and wrote WOW! in big letters. Now, we have a new theory for what may have happened: “We hypothesize that the Wow! Signal was caused by sudden brightening from stimulated emission of the hydrogen line due to a strong transient radiation source, such as a magnetar flare or a soft gamma repeater (SGR)… [this] suggests that the Wow! Signal could be the first recorded event of an astronomical maser flare in the hydrogen line.”
-
Gerald Ford was born Leslie Lynch King Jr. but changed his name after his mother remarried. Though his step father (Gerald Rudolff Ford) never officially adopted him, Ford took his name upon his mother’s marriage.
-
Etymology fun fact: the word “skosh” meaning “a tiny bit” comes from the Japanese word “Sukoshi”. It took off in popularity in the late 1940s.
-
This balloon video:
9. Japan has a large number of people collecting pensions for dead or imaginary people: In 2010, the Ministry of Justice put out a memo noting that there were 234,354 people aged 100 and older whose addresses were not recorded. Some 77,118 of them were older than 120 and 884 were older than 150. These people largely didn’t exist; in some cases, they never existed, and in others they were long dead, including many cases where these dead people’s pension checks just kept coming. A simple check shows that Japan’s centenarian numbers were off by over 80%. To make matters worse, Newman documented that Japan’s regions with the most outstandingly long-lived people were, like Italy’s, quite poor, and among the least likely to actually contain the very long-lived. (source)
Months where I have fewer than 9 items in a roundup, I will refrain from posting a roundup