In the spirit of Tom Whitwell and Jason Kottke (and others, I’m sure),
I am going to keep track of the interesting facts or evidence that I learn about.
Becuase it’s cool!
This the first edition of Fascinating Facts, things that I was surprised or happy or found interesting or just generally helpful to learn of.
I learn lots of things most days, and reporting them all would be boring and a lot of work for not much reward (for you or me).
Many of them aren’t that interesting, even to me.
Often times they’re operational things, or things like what a setting on the dishwasher does.
But I reserve the right to share the surprising things that dishwashers are capable of.
If I manage to keep this up, I’ll compile a best of at the end of next year (December 2024).
Week 51
Began on
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Spiral Waves in Saturn’s Inner B Ring via Astrum (SLYT). I also am a huge fan of the Daphnis ripples, but I learned about those when they were discovered over 10 years ago. So cool! Update: just realized that I didn’t know before that those ripples also project above and blow the plane of the rings!
The word for a person with autism is autist (via).
Poll taxes ended in the US only in 1964. This is still very very recent.
There is a 10x difference in energy use per capita between the US and developing countries such as India or Sub-Saharan African countries. Energy use drives everything in an economy and is a useful indicator of standard of living. Oil is still the cheapest energy source. This is one of the many reasons why getting off of oil is going to be really hard. Via Ed Conway’s Substack, which is a very good explainer.
Week 52
Began on
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Bird Weather is a site with live listening stations and reports of bird species detections, with audio and other cool features. Via MeFi.
In medieval times a fire cover was used at night which prevented the fire from spreading, and it’s called a “curfew”. The word curfew is derived from the French couvre-feu. My question is how long have these curfews been in use, it seems quite a useful idea. I see ambiguous claims that the fire cover is named for the order from William the Conquerer, or it’s just descriptive. Anyone know?
Diamond is not thermodynamically stable at standard temperature and pressure. It is metastable. If thermodynamics is all we need to consider, diamond should turn into graphite which is a lower energy configuration of the atoms. However, the energy barrier to make the transition from diamond to graphite is very high and there isn’t enough kinetic energy around to make the transition very often. This means that practically speaking diamond is stable; your diamond ring isn’t going to decay away on anything less than geologic time scales. Reference and what ChatGPT 4 has to say about it.
It used to be that you needed to remove the stones or pits from raisins. Via Max Miller. I suppose this is kind of obvious in hindsight but I had never been prompted to consider this before.
10% of aerosols in the stratosphere contain Aluminum and other metals from spacecraft that have burned up on re-entry. Reference, via MeFi (a lot of other interesting space things at that link too). Some context from the reference: meteors deposit approximately 130 tons per year (T/yr) to Earth, of which 20 T/yr are ablated in the stratosphere, and spacecraft debris 210 T/yr of spacecraft aluminum ablate in the stratosphere. There are other metals too from spacecraft that are not naturally present.
For the first time a human played Tetris deep enough to trigger a known bug in the scoring system that caused the game to crash. Reference, also via MeFi.
The White Shark Cafe is a mid-Pacific ocean winter and spring habitat for sharks from all along the North America coast.
There is a version of the English language for art: International Art English. Via The Life-changing Science of Detecting Bullshit by John V. Petrocelli.
The ideomotor response is a subconscious motion of the body that reflects what is being thought about. Also via Petrocelli’s book.
Multicellular life evolved multiple times since the origins of life on Earth. Via Jason’s list at the top. Many other good ones too.
