Today I Learned...

[SkStu]

(the concept is stolen shamelessly from elsewhere, but a place to share with the foot.ie community the things that you were blissfully unaware of before very recently)...

I will start us off

There is a patron saint of work-related stress St. Walter of Pontoise and his feast day is today.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_of_Pontoise

[SkStu]

I am reading a (fairly decent, actually) book called "The Bushmans Lair: On the Trail of the Fugitive of the Shuswap" and at the beginning of Chapter 4, there is an extract from a 1986 report entitled "A Suggested Remote Viewing Training Procedure" which was released with numerous other previously declassified documents by the US Government in 2017. The excerpt states:

Fifty years of laboratory parapsychology experiments have demonstrated that many people can perceive information inaccessible to the 'conventional five senses'...a few individuals have so developed this process that they can provide detailed descriptions of hidden or concealed events, places, people, objects, feelings, and color with considerable consistency.

The report also states that it is something that can be taught. Anyway, I found it extremely interesting! And obviously had no idea that it was even remotely possible.

https://documents.pub/document/a-suggested-remote-viewing-training-procedure-title-a-suggested-remote-viewing.html?page=13

[ontheotherhand]

I actually knew you were reading that already.

[dahamsta]

I knew that you knew that.

I learn new things from my kids constantly, because they're far smarter than me. I will be joining in on this thread.

[John83]

Frank Zappa's album "Jazz From Hell" was required to have an "Explicit lyrics" sticker.

It has no lyrics.

[pineapple stu]

When Werner von Braun was building rockets for Nazi Germany (before defecting to the US and becoming a key part of the space programme) he was having a problem with one of his early designs. It wouldn't land where it was supposed to, and he couldn't work out why.

So he said he'd stand exactly where it was supposed to land, the better to observe the end of its trajectory and try see what was going wrong.

Sod's law - that was the one time the rocket landed exactly on target. He just about managed to get out of the way, but still ended up in hospital with injuries from the accident.

(Space Race by Deborah Cadbury)

[tetsujin1979]

The "key" in "Key Lime Pie" comes from the Florida Keys, where it is a local speciality

[SkStu]

One of the major differences between "abduction" and "kidnapping" is that demanding a ransom will usually change an abduction to a kidnapping!

The word kidnap dates from the late seventeenth century and was derived from the process of stealing African and other children to provide servants to the American colonies [kid- (child) and -nap (seize, snatch away)]

[osarusan]

Can I add in cool stuff I did not actually learn about today, but did learn on equally random days in the past?

[John83]

Only if you lie about when you learned it.

[osarusan]

So today I learned that the word 'indentured' (indentured servants, etc) came from the French word endenture, meaning indentation.

When contracts about work were written, each party involved would receive a copy. To prevent forgery, the originals would be aligned perfectly, one on top of the other, and then a random jagged line would be cut (indented) into the corner.

If the issue of forgery ever arose, the originals (or supposed originals) would be aligned perfectly on top of each other again, to see if the original indentation matched or not.

[dahamsta]

Are we allowed to add things we learned not-today? EDIT: Ack, I see that was already asked and answered. I learned these things today. Definitely today!

I was surprised to learn that demesne is pronounced "duh-mayn".

And that the decorative blocks at the corners of houses are called quoins. I had to look that up so I could correctly direct my anger at the pretention.

[osarusan]

Another interesting thing I learned just today is that the length of a day is increasing at an imperceptbly slow pace. The dinosaurs that roamed the earth 250 million years ago would have experienced a day that was around 23 hours long, and whatever creatures roam the earth 250 million years in the future will experience a day of around 25 hours.

At the time of the formation of the moon, an earth day would have been only 2-3 hours long, but has lengthened ever since in an incredibly gradual process. This is because the gravitational interplay between the moon and the earth, and the transfer of angular momentum, is causing the moon to move farther away at a rate of approximately 1-2cm a year. Accompanying this is the earth's rotation slowing down by 1/500th of a second every century, leading to an increase of about an hour every 200 million years or so.

Billions of years in the future this interplay will finally end when an equilibrium is reached where the length of an earth day is the same length as a lunar month, which will be about 45 hours. At that time, the earth will always show the same face to the moon, as it now does to us (because the same process just described has already resulted in the earth's mass slowing down the rotation of the relatively smaller mass of the moon until one rotation on its axis lasts as long as one circle around the earth).

[pineapple stu]

Wham only released two studio albums.

[osarusan]

When planning the construction of Egypt's Aswan Dam in the 1960s, surveyors drilled down into the river Nile looking for bedrock. To their surprise, they had to drill down much farther than expected, as they found nothing but sedimentary rock for hundreds of metres. Further drilling and study revealed that the sediment had filled up what was a massive canyon under the Nile, as much as 1000 miles long and with a deepest point of as much as 2000 metres.

This canyon was formed during the Messinian salinity crisis, which occurred approx 5.9 million years ago, when the Strait of Gibraltar was forced closed through tectonic movement, and the Mediterranean Sea was cut off from the Atlantic ocean.

Over time, the Mediterranean gradually evaporated down to virtually nothing (causing it to become hypersalinated also). As the level of the Mediterranean dropped, the level of the Nile (which drains into the Mediteranean) began to drop also as it eroded the rock beneath it, carving out a canyon.

This erosion continued until the Zanclean flood (5.3 million years ago), which was the Atlantic ocean refilling the Mediterranean basin through the Strait of Gibraltar. As the sea level rose again, this caused the Nile to stop eroding its bedrock, and the entire canyon was eventually filled in with sediment.