Old fashioned ka-boom

According to 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus, the explorers Lewis and Clark were often entertained in the evenings by their native guides.  The guides would set fire to sap-rich pine trees, and the party would sit back and watch them burn, sporadically exploding like a giant Roman candle.

I don't know what that says about either Lewis and Clark or the guides.

Interestingly, no one seems to be completely sure why Roman candles are named as such.  The OED ducks the issue slightly, claiming that it might be "probably after a parallel compound in another European language," but not making a definitive ruling.  They do offer two additional comments, however; first, that it was perhaps a "reference to the transmission of the firework technique from China to Europe via the Eastern Roman (Byzantine) Empire," and secondly that "it is possible that Roman candle originated in English and was semantically motivated by anti-Catholic feeling."

ETA: typo fixing.  Alas.

Thomas Nast

Some heretofore unknown (by me) facts about Thomas Nast, famous post-Civil War political cartoonist.

He was not American-born.  He was instead born in Landau, Germany to a Bavarian trombonist and his wife, and moved (with his mother) to the USA when he was 6 years old.  His father joined them a few years later when a tour of naval duty ended.

He was credited not only with creating the iconic figures representative of our current political parties (the elephant and the donkey) but with the "modern" image of Santa Claus as well.  It's NOT COKE'S FAULT.  I am actually a bit dubious about that claim, since A Visit from St. Nicholas predated Nast by several decades, and even though its depiction of Santa isn't quite how we usually portray him, it certainly lay a lot of groundwork ("chubby and plump" especially).  And of course, there are apparently pieces of evidence predating that with a lot of the same imagery.

Theodore Roosevelt appointed him the United States' Consul General to Ecuador in 1902, where he died a few years later during an outbreak of yellow fever.

That Face

Man, the stomach flu sucks.  But I already knew that, so I guess I'll have to post about something else.  Fortunately, I have a few gems set aside for such an occasion...

The original manikin upon which most people learn CPR was not just a randomly sculpted generic face.  It was modelled in 1960 by toymaker Asmund Laerdal, based on L'Inconnue de la Seine, a young unidentified Parisienne who drowned in the late 1880s.  The air of romantic mystery surrounding her body inspired quite a few artists, and for a time death masks made from her visage were quite the rage in Bohemian society.  It was one of these masks, seen hanging on a wall, that inspired Laerdal in his creation of Resusci Anne-- a doll inspired by a drowned woman that helps train people in saving (among other things) drowning victims.  Beautiful, no?

Except of course that it's not quite true.  According to a recent episode of Radiolab, there probably wasn't actually any drowned woman.  An interview with a gendarme who worked the riverbanks revealed that women who were pulled from the Seine simply did not look that good.  Other reports agree-- these plaster masks were based on a living girl, probably just some model doing a day's work.  So much for romanticism.

Polar Orientation

This is one for the "duh" file-- those things that are more or less obvious in retrospect, but unknown because you never have any reason to stop and think about them.

To start with, let's have a quick refresher on magnets.  All magnets have two poles, conventionally called "north" and "south."  Opposite poles attract, and like poles repel, so the north pole of one magnet will push away the north pole of another, or be instead pulled toward its south pole.

Now we shift gears, and refresh our geology a bit.  The earth has a magnetic field, generated [oversimplification] by its spinning molten iron core.  The North Magnetic Pole is in the north, although NOT at the geographic north pole.  It's actually in Canada, up north of Baffin Bay, and currently wandering in a vaguely Russian direction.  See above re: molten core; fluctuations and eddies and whatnot cause movement etc etc and that's beside the point.

Now put them together.  Look at a compass.  The needle is a magnet, with a north and south pole.  The north end points north-- that's the whole point of the compass.  But wait-- the north end of a magnet is attracted to south poles of other magnets.  Which means, logically, that the magnetic pole in the north is actually a south pole.  The North Magnetic Pole is a south magnetic pole.

I thought that was rather cool, actually.

Chamber Music

Tonight, instead of orchestra rehearsal (we just had a concert so we got a week off), I got together with a couple of new friends and played some piano trios for a change.  A little Haydn, a little Schubert.  It was really nice!  And since I've been playing almost exclusively in orchestra-type groups for the last {mumble} years I was glad to learn that I hadn't completely lost the knack.  We're nowhere near performance level at this point, but we stayed together well, and started getting a feel for reading each other's styles and mannerisms.  We're definitely going to keep getting together, although we have yet to work out a plausible schedule.

Bacon scripting

Two small things today.

First-- today I learned that the line "s%%%g;"* in a Perlscript, which should do nothing, will actually cause otherwise inexplicable problems.  Learning this took me about an hour, which is sad, but at least the script works now, which is a good thing.

Second, I verified that Bacon numbers are calculated using film roles only, which is sad, because I also learned that if they included stage performances as well, I would have a Bacon number of 4.

*Basically, the line means s(earch) for the character string between the first two percent signs, replace it with the character string between the second and third percent sign, and do it g(lobally) throughout the document.  So it should have replaced nothing with nothing, and therefore done nothing (it had been left in by accident anyway).  Instead, it caused random bits of file to disappear.

Cookies!

This one's a little trick I just learned while making a batch of snickerdoodles.  If you are making shaped cookies, and you need to roll the dough into balls, but the dough is very wet and sticky?  Spray just a little cooking oil on your hands first.  It makes rolling the dough significantly easier, and doesn't adversely affect the cookies.  Until you run out of Pam, of course.  D'oh.  Dough.  Whatever.

According to the Joy of Cooking, the name "snickerdoodle" is a corruption of German Schneckennudeln, the name for a traditional pastry (lit. "snail noodles").  Although modern snickerdoodles aren't spiral or otherwise escargotesque, they are cinnamon flavored, like the traditional pastries.  

Alternatively, the name might just be made up.  These things happen sometimes.

Daisy Roll

This is one I ran into in the meat section of our friendly neighborhood megasuperepicmarket.

Its label proclaimed it to the world to be a Smoked Daisy Roll (Pork Shoulder Butt) ((water added)).  Its ingredients featured: water, sugar, salt, sodium phosphate, sodium acetate, flavorings (spice extractives [extractives? -Ed], lemon extract and grapefruit extract), sodium erythorbate, and sodium nitrite.

A little Googling, and I learn that the Daisy Ham or Daisy Roll is a New England thing.  Apparently, an employee at the ham manufactury at Boston's Famous Faneuil Hall decided that the cross section of their boneless picnic ham roll "looked like a daisy."  Presumably the ham in question had suffered minimal processing, simply being deboned and rolled up, and possible compressed.  Very popular in the 70s, it has faded somewhat from the culinary scene, but, like many similar items, still lurks in the depths of the local supermarket, ready to spring upon the unwary, and... um, be eaten, I guess.

It appears to have many names, including "boneless picnic ham," "cottage roll," "shoulder ham," and "New England Boiled Dinner."

Stamp Bombing

In 1968, Liechtenstein was worried about its economy.  It was pretty fragile, and largely dependent on the sales of stamps.  If a rival country (any of the other tiny philatelic nations) took it into their heads to interfere with Liechtenstein's stamp, the principality could be thrown into complete ruin.

So they struck first.  Using the purpose-built twin-engine DV "Flying Stamp Dispenser" airplane, they flew a daring overnight mission to dump millions of rolls of counterfeit stamps on San Marino, Monaco, and Luxembourg, who were, naturally, awfully confused the next morning.

To this day, the airplane is still classified as a military secret by the Liechtensteiners.

The cost of entertainment

Back from vacation!  Did you miss me?

While I wait for the crickets to stop chirping, here's what I learned on vacation-- hopefully it may be of some use to somebody.  Eventually.

A "half-hour" television program (actually 23 minutes plus commercials), watched on my iPhone via Hulu.com consumed approximately 65 MB of my plan's allotment cellular data.  34 minutes of music downloaded from Pandora consumed 15 MB of data.

If this is indicative (for proper results, I should have measured several shows of varying lengths and averaged the results out), I should be able to watch at least 15 hours of television on my phone per month and still allow a decent amount for browsing, etc.  And I basically don't have to worry about Pandora at all-- I'd have to listen to close to 2 hours a day (assuming I wasn't also watching TV) before nearing my limit.  Even if I gave up on podcasts and listened exclusively to Pandora on my work commute, I'd still be nowhere near that.

Blood Limes

I've heard of blood oranges, of course-- they're still kind of hip amongst the foodies.  But I'd never heard of a blood lime before.  It's grown from a cross between a mandarin and a kind of small lime with a red skin (called the red finger lime).  The taste is pretty acidic, like a regular lime, but a little sweeter.  The flesh is roughly the color of a dark grapefruit.  They're only grown in Australia at this point as far as I can tell, which may be why they haven't shown up much at Whole Foods.  I predict we're going to see some domestic varieties in a year or so, though.  This could be the next hot thing!

Stetson

The original hat designed by John B. Stetson was called "The Boss of the Plains," and it didn't actually look much like the iconic hat that we all think of.  But it was very popular, and the cowboys all bought it and took it out on the trail with them.

And as they wore it, and slept on it, and whacked cattle on the rump with it, the round domed brim tended to acquire a typical dent in the middle, from where the cowpokes grabbed it.  And the flat brim tended to curl up a bit, from being folded and stuck in saddlebags.  Newer cowboys wanted hats that looked like those that their older role models were wearing, so the design slowly shifted.  And so the iconic Stetson shape evolved-- not according to a milliner's design, but organically from the demands of the market.  Or something.  I could probably make some sort of really sappy metaphor about the democratic nature of the frontier and the will of the people and how it means Ron Paul should be president or something, but even I have my limits.

Hat Additional-- supposedly, the "Ten Gallon hat" (also a Stetson model) got its name not from its mythical capacity, but rather from the Spanish word galón, for the ten braids in the hatband.  This may be apocryphal, however.

Bicarbonate of cola

I always kind of wondered why some sodas had noticeable amounts of sodium listed on their nutrition information labels.  After all, they're not especially salty.  But Coca-cola has 45 mg of sodium per can.  Canada Dry Ginger Ale has about 55 mg, and Sprite has 65 mg.

It turns out that it has to do with the industrial carbonation process.  In natural carbonation (such as found in expensive fizzy alcoholic drinks), yeast will consume sugar and produce carbon dioxide, which slowly saturates the liquid, forming a soft, gentle bubble.  This process has some downsides for mass production, however-- it's slow, slightly imprecise, and tends to leave dead yeast at the bottom of the container.  It also doesn't work on drinks with sugar substitutes.

So instead, they simply take big vats of water and quickly force carbon dioxide into it under extreme pressure.  This creates a "sharper," "harsher" bubble, and has the benefits of consistency and speed.  However, it also produces a certain amount of carbonic acid, which, in sufficient quantities, can add a sour taste to the carbonated water.  So, to counteract this, many companies add a basic substance, to wit: baking soda, or sodium bicarbonate.  This naturally ups the sodium content in the soda, but that's not a big concern to the soda companies.  Or to most of the consumers, frankly-- it's not really a huge amount, just a couple percent of the US RDA per can.  But I did always wonder.

Al(OH)3

Alumina trihydrate (or ATH) is one of the most common commercial flame-retardant compounds on the market.  When heated to about 350 degrees F, Al(OH)₃ decomposes into Al₂OH₃·3H₂O, absorbing a lot of heat energy and releasing water vapor.  Both of these processes naturally tend to slow the generation and spread of flames.

I have to admit, I don't really find this very interesting, but I spent 2-3 hours today wrestling with the distinctions between alumina trihydrate, aluminum hydrate, and aluminum hydroxide (all of which are basically different names for the same thing in different contexts), and by the time I was done I had definitely learned something.

Country Internet Codes

Ok, .ch is NOT China, it is Switzerland.  I'm not sure why, there's doesn't seem to be a .sw in use, but the IANA database doesn't seem to come with explanations.

(EDIT: Thanks to eBryan, I now know that CH stands for "Confoederatio Helvetica" (Swiss Confederation), the name of the alliance of cantons formed in 1291 in opposition to Hapsburg rule.  That actually makes a lot more sense-- thanks, eBryan.)

China is actually .cn, which looks like it should be Canada, but Canada is .ca.  Which should be easy to remember, except for all of the other freaking countries that start with C-A-.

There's also .cat, which is apparently "Reserved for the Catalan linguistic and cultural community."  That's kind of cool, although I don't have any idea how much use it actually gets.  And there doesn't appear to be a domain reserved for the Basque, which seems kind of unfair.  There is one for Gibraltar (.gi), which I don't think I even knew was a territory (Spain keeps trying to claim their land, but it technically belongs to the UK).  And of course, there's always .இலங்கை, reserved for Sri Lanka (they have .lk too).  I don't even know what script that is.  Tamil?  Maybe?