Below are things I’ve learned, remembered, or found interesting in the past month:
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Etymology: The word “ascorbic” in “ascorbic acid” comes from fending off scurvy. “1933 (in ascorbic acid), from a- (2) “off, away from” + scorbic, scorbutic “of scurvy,” from Medieval Latin scorbuticus “scurvy,” which is perhaps of German or Dutch origin. Originally in reference to Vitamin C, which is an anti-scorbutic.”
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Pipe Four, a search engine for Penny Arcade.
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Ants outnumber people in every single city in the world. For every person, there are more than 2.5 MILLION ants.
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Tom Scott, retired Youtuber and current podcaster, has a weekly newsletter full of gems he finds online. I need to make sure not to drink too deep from this well for my own segment here!
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1% of the United States’s federal budget is spent on kidney dialysis. That seems high!
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Some elevators have a seismic button, which calls the elevator to the nearest floor, opens the doors, and applies brakes. More interestingly, elevators have a fandom wiki! I can’t believe it isn’t called “Liftipedia”.
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This article about using Anki to learn, memorize, and understand complex topics. I’ve not started to use Anki myself, but have started a small list of things I would use it for, mostly vocab words that I consistently struggle to remember.
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The Wikipedia page for the world’s largest statues. I was surprised at how many of these I wasn’t familiar with! The Guan Yu statue is a new favorite.
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I like to read advice columns. Sometimes they’re funny, like this Miss Manners post about a runner who gets distracted by people saying “Good Morning”. The comments here are especially unkind — “Do all your thinking before leaving the house. It shouldn’t take long”. Other times, advice columns are just full of good advice (even if it’s not a situation I expect to find myself in). This 2020 Dear Therapist letter from the Atlantic from a mistress is one of the best I’ve seen lately.
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Completely unrelated to my last post, 12 ft ladder is a great site for circumventing a paywall. Obviously if you find yourself reading paid work regularly, you should subscribe, but it’s useful for the one-off article.
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The Pig War, a 1859 conflict between the US and England (no humans died) over a pig. One likely apocryphal account has Cutlar saying to Griffin, “It was eating my potatoes”; and Griffin replying, “It is up to you to keep your potatoes out of my pig.”
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I recently made my own list of things I recommend, but I was inspired by this collection of lists
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Docdrop, a tool which automatically transcribes videos. I expect there are many, many tools that do this with AI now.
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This Bluesky thread from Rahaeli about what to do if your insurance decides a procedure isn’t medically necessary. The original thread is good, but the gist of it is to ask in writing for the name, license number, and speciality of the doctor making the decision that it was not necessary, as well as the materials they used to make that decision.
![Bluesky post]()
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Courtesy of this comic, I learned that domestic pigeons used to be bred in all kinds of colors and varieties.
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From the cyberpunk chat: Coca-Cola has a corporate propaganda arm, and has been found using shell companies to basically do that one scene from Thank You For Smoking over the past twenty years (or more!)
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Illinois is in the process of designing a new flag. The top ten finalists (PDF link) include some good designs, as well as one that is just the existing flag plus a couple additional lines. As funny as it would be to go through this whole process and barely modify the flag (I live in a county that renamed itself to the same name), I do have to admit that the addition of the lines is a marked improvement over the existing.
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If you’ve ever been to the Sistine Chapel in the Vatican, you’d know that there’s no photography allowed. I tusked at the new Indiana Jones game when a sidequest had me take a picture of the ceiling, which made me wonder if this rule would have been in effect in 1936. It turns out no!
The Sistine Chapel’s ban on photography is not out of religious respect or to preserve the paintings, but because a Japanese company paid for exclusive photography rights in exchange for funding renovations. The kicker? The restrictions never applied to tourists. The bigger kicker? The last of these restrictions expired in 1997!
And yet we follow this rule blindly, unaware of why the tradition started. It’s like that old joke about the army private guarding a bench. -
I was curious how reliable the “Ask the Audience” lifeline is on Who Wants to Be A Millionaire. There is a lot of data available, but it’s incomplete and summarized, so difficult to analyze. On at least three occasions, every audience member declined to vote on the final answer, presumably due to having no idea. Additional shout out to (not that) Steve Perry, who blazed through the first 14 questions (of 15) and walked away on the last question, which has been considered “the most obscure question” the show has ever asked (what was Carol Brady’s maiden name in the Brady Bunch?)
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In today’s entry of “things you didn’t realize were named after people”, I present the fictional land speeders in Warhammer 40k. They are, of course, named for Arkhan Land, who discovered them.
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This bit of trivia from Memento (courtesy of IMDB):
Cinematographer Mark Vargo turned down an interview with Sir Christopher Nolan because he didn’t understand the script. He later admitted that this was a mistake. Wally Pfister, who got the job, had previously worked with Vargo as a camera operator. He later admitted to Vargo that he didn’t understand the script, either.