The Most Useful Thing I Know Today

The bedroom floor has been replaced by laundry and I can't adult my way clear to filing my taxes, but at least I know THIS.

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"Why did the chicken cross the road" is a joke about suicide.

Cause it’s “the other side” as in “the spirit world.”  It is a pune, or play on words.  

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Moons can have moons, and they are called moonmoons.

No really.  

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Knitters and weavers were a vital part of the Apollo moon-landing program.

The Apollo space program used a kind of super-robust read-only memory made of conducting wire threads strung with tiny donut-shaped magentic cores as beads. Bits of information were encoded in the beads: a bead with wire threaded through the center represented a 1; an empty bead represented a 0.

These “rope memories “ were made by master crafters — mostly weavers and knitters, mostly women — and known as LOL or “little old lady” memory. 

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The metal band that joins a pencil and eraser is called a ferrule.

fer real.

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Your body’s signals have different speeds.  If you stub your toe, you feel the pressure right away because touch signals travel at 250 feet per second. But you won't feel the pain for another two or three seconds, because pain signals generally travel an only two feet per second.

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Julius Caesar was once kidnapped by pirates.  When they tried to ransom for 20 talents he got huffy with them and demanded that they charge 50.

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Big Bird was supposed to be on the Space Shuttle Challenger when it exploded, killing its crew.

NASA had asked the Children’s Television Workshop to help them get kids interested in the space program, and muppeter Caroll Spinney was ready to go, but somewhere in the planning someone decided that zero-g Big Bird was too complicated.  NASA sent a teacher, Christa McAuliffe, instead.  

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Humans are bioluminescent (like fireflies) but the light we give off is too weak for our eyes to pick up.

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Hardness and toughness are opposites. That is, the quality that the sword has to have to hold a sharp edge, hardness, also makes it more likely to shatter. And the quality that the sword has to have to take or give a blow without shattering, toughness, also keeps the sword from holding an edge.

The trick is to fold them around each other of course.  Whelp, back to writing a novel.  

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Before telephone companies came to the American West, ranchers and farmers kludged together their own telephone networks, using their barbed wire fences as telephone lines.

The no-switchboard party lines functioned kind of like chat rooms.  

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Werewolf fiction writers please take note:  the full moon always rises at sunset.

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Most cultures invent color words in a particular order.  First black and white, then red, then either green or yellow, and so on.  Blue is very late.  The Iliad, the Odyssey, the Torah, and the Mahabharata all contain no  mention of blue.

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In 1859, a solar storm caused auroras as far south as the Caribbean -- and knocked the telegraph grid offline.

If “the Carrington Event” happened today, it would take out communications satellites, the internet, and the electrical grid.

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“Flying off the handle”: it’s about axe heads.

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Trees contain a polymer called lignin, which has parts in common with the polymer vanillin. That's why old books smell great and faintly like cookies.

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The carousel was originally a combat training device for cavalry troops. Even the word reflects this: it’s “carousel” through the French, borrowed from the Spanish “carosella,” meaning"little battle.”

“Carosella” (or the Italian “Garosello”) was used by Crusaders to describe a ride-in-circle-passing-a-ball exercise common among Turkish and Arabic horse soldiers in the 12th century.  Later they actually built the thing to practice on.  

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British carousels go clockwise, and American ones go counterclockwise. This probably reflects the fact that Britons drive on the left side of the road, and Americans drive on the right.