Just five things

[fivethingslearntthisweek-blog]

Five things learned this week - 26 July 2013

1. The architectural term "brutalism" refers not to, err, its brutality, but to "raw" concrete, from the French

2. Most new desktop computers operate a form of NUMA (look it up!) but hide it from the user.

3. The cores of numbered bus routes in London are essentially the same as they were 70 years ago, though have generally been shortened in response to congestion.

4. In recent weeks, cyclists in London seem to be increasingly aggressive towards drivers of vehicles who behave badly (this is a good thing) but as impervious as ever to their own crimes against pedestrians (this is a bad thing)

5. The Pythagorians did not formulate their famous proof of the irrationality of the root of two in terms of the root of two at all - rather they stated that you could not find a common unitary measure between a square's sides and its diagonal. It amounts to the same thing, but not having the mathematical language to express it succinctly makes the Greek proof even more impressive.

[fivethingslearntthisweek-blog]

John Banville special

As I was out of London on Friday I missed the opportunity to add five things. But over the weekend I began reading John Banville's "The Book of Evidence" and so can now present the following pieces of learning from the first 70 pages....

Villous: Hairy

Accidie: Torpor

Canted: At an oblique angle

Chiaroscuro: The use of strong contrasts between light and dark in art

Euphorion: The son of Achilles and Helen

[fivethingslearntthisweek-blog]

Five things learnt this week - 12 July 2013

1. The Corsican Republic (1755 - 1769) was the first state to introduce universal adult suffrage

2. The universal stop sign on the world's roads - a red octagon - was first adopted by a Michigan committee in 1915

3. New born babies can discriminate between 600 sounds - speaking English to them rapidly reduces that to about 45.

4. Cookeen is still available

5. Nasturtiums and cabbages taste similarly because they both contain a poison designed to ward off insects

[fivethingslearntthisweek-blog]

Five things learnt this week: 5 July 2013

1. Martin Bell still wears a white suit

2. Snails make a whining noise when you lift them up and chuck them away.

3. The word 'filibuster' comes - via Spanish - for the Dutch word for a "freebooter" (ie a pirate)

4. If you weigh 79kg then adding a couple of hills to your 5k run burns another 200 calories

5. I am possibly the only Irish man in the world who is symathetic with Warren Gatland, even if I am not sure I agree with his decision and it makes me sad

[fivethingslearntthisweek-blog]

Five things learned this week

1. What used to be called "junk" DNA is not junk at all - but essential to regulate the rest of the DNA

2. Hiring a bike in central London is theoretically simple, but not all the machines work

3. If the first eight thousand words are very difficult, the next eight thousand are too easy

4. Running slowly burns more calories per kilometre travelled than running fast

5. Around 40,000 people are buried in "pauper's graves" (unmarked and often communal) in Britain every year.

[fivethingslearntthisweek-blog]

Five things I learnt this week

1. JFK spoke quite good Latin - he pronounced the 'c' in 'civitas' as a hard c (as in k) when in Berlin 50 years ago this week.

2. Lough Erne, from the Irish language Loch Éirne, is derived from the name of the Goddess Érann, which is also where the Irish name for Ireland, Éire, comes from.

3. I need to buy a proper bike and not a cheap one.

4. If we had computers that could represent an infinite number of digits we could solve the Halting Problem.

5. Malcolm Rifkind still looks quite young while Kenneth Baker looks quite old 

[fivethingslearntthisweek-blog]

Five things I learnt this week

1. For tax purposes a car's value depreciates at a maximum of £3000 per annum.

2. Ringo Starr walked out of the Beatles and Paul McCartney and John Lennon between them did the drum parts on "Back in the USSR"

3. Most westerners consume more than enough protein and so the marketing for protein drinks is fundamentally dishonest

4. I don't know many Stone Roses songs

5. Persia (or Pars) is just one province of Iran - like Holland the common English name comes from one part of the country

[sciencecubed]

They are made out of cells and exposed to UV rays nearly all the time. So why shouldn’t the UV rays ionize their cell nucleus and corrupt the DNA?

Any complex multicellular organism can be suseptible to defects in cell proliferation causing individual cells or groups of...

[obamaischeckingyouremail]

[fivelearnedthings-blog]

1st - 7th June 2013

1. North America is less than 5% of the Earth’s surface 2. “Cupidity means “greed for money or possessions” 3. Eating a handful of peanuts while reclining in a deck chair is surprisingly hard 4. An Indian in the United States is ten thousand times more likely to have a PhD than an Indian in India 5. The US military withdrew its agreement to provide equipment and other support for the filming of “Independence Day” after the film’s makers refused to remove all references to Area 51.

[fivethingslearntthisweek-blog]

Five things learnt this week

Five things learnt this week:

1. The official title of the Croatian governing centre-left alliance is "Cock-a-doodle-do" (Kukuriku in Croatian): the nick name it took after the restaurant in which it was formed and which stuck before being made official.

2. A field of oil seed rape smells very pleasantly sweet.

3. The bluebells in my garden are very much of the evil Spanish variety.

4. New soil from a packet and high sided pot plants are not enough to stop slugs destroying your seedlings.

5. The flag of Anguilla includes three orange fish

[fivethingslearntthisweek-blog]

Five things I learnt this week

1. Adam Higgitt has great ideas, so great that I am forced to steal them.

2. Alan Turing believed telepathy was scientifically proved and was also a little bit racist

3. May 1943 marks the most important month in the Battle of the Atlantic and that while Engima decrypts allowed the allies to get through the previous months, it was other scientific advances that won the Battle

4. While trade union membership is in long term decline it is growing in some growth sectors of the economy

5. Apple (and presumably other phone manufacturers) deliberately under-power their phones to make the battery last longer