Peace on Earth
The biblical phrase “peace on Earth, and goodwill to all men” is probably a mistake, a mistranslation because of a single missing letter.
Month: August 2020
The nearest planet
What’s the nearest planet to Earth? On average, it’s Mercury. What’s the nearest planet to Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune? Also Mercury.
Pi poetry
“One. A Poem. A Raven. Midnights so dreary, tired and weary, silently pondering volumes extolling all by-now obsolete lore.” The beginning of a short story that also encodes the first 3835 digits of pi.
Kilometre zero
All roads lead to Rome… but where in Rome do they lead?
The pelican in her piety
Jesus Christ is associated with many images: the Lamb of God, the Good Shepherd… and the Pelican?
Chicago River, reversed
120 years ago engineers permanently reversed the flow of Chicago River.
The Amazon, reversed
The rise of the Andes reversed the direction of the Amazon River’s flow from the Pacific to the Atlantic.
Elementary programming
If you want a job as a programmer, you need to know how to fizz buzz.
Word frequency laws
In 1945 the linguist George Zipf observed two strange word frequency phenomena: the longer a word is, the less common it is; and the most common word is used twice as much as the second most common, three times more than the third.
Feed sack dresses
When US farmers bought seeds or flour during the Great Depression, the most important question was this: what patterns were printed on the sack?
The origin of life revisited
The 1952 Miller-Urey experiment synthesised amino acids essential to life from inorganic materials. The experiment’s vials were then sealed, and when scientists re-examined them 55 years later they were surprised at what was inside.
Transparent aluminium
A plot point in the 1986 film Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home features the fictional material transparent aluminium. Around the same time, actual transparent aluminium was patented.
Ghost station and ghost trains
Since 2006 no-one could enter the Newhaven Marine railway station in England. From then until 2019 one train passed through the station each day, and it was not allowed to carry any passengers.
First clothes
When did we start wearing clothes? We don’t know for sure, but the genetics of lice, prehistoric needles, and ivory carvings give us some clues.
First clothes
When did we start wearing clothes? We don’t know for sure, but the genetics of lice, prehistoric needles, and ivory carvings give us some clues.
Banned in the United States
Blackcurrants, Kinder Surprises, and haggis have all been illegal in the United States at some point.
The Generalist Academy 