The Origin of Everyday

Sunday

Owls have large, intense eyes, a stoic demeanor, and were often pictured with Athena, goddess of wisdom, and for these reasons they may have become considered wise. Great hunting instincts aside, however, owls are not particularly bright among bird species, nor are they very apt learners compared to other birds.

Monday

Intelligence critiques aside, however, owls are night hunters of the highest order, with remarkable adaptions for that lifestyle. They don’t have eyeballs, but rather “eye tubes” which act as low-light telephoto lenses that can spot movement at distances and in darkness that would be impossible for humans. Their neck can spin 270 degrees to spot prey, all while pooling the blood needed to feed their brain while this twist otherwise cuts off flow. Also, their wings have feather edges furled upward on both the front and back to make their flight among the quietest of raptors, all the better to snatch unsuspecting prey.

Tuesday

You may have seen owls bob their heads while they stare ahead. Since owls cannot move their eyes, this head bobbing gives it a view from several positions so as to judge distance, triangulate, and gather a picture of the world in which they live and hunt.

Wednesday

Owl on owl violence is real. Though the vast majority of the raptor’s diet is rodents, several owl species will eat smaller owls if the opportunity arises.

Thursday

Don’t typecast all owls as hooters! They also hiss, shriek, toot, coo, cry, growl, and in the case of the Saw-whet owl, sound like a whetstone sharpening a saw.

Friday

Owls are among the bird species which regurgitate odorless pellets of undigested food, much of it hair and bones, and from these pellets you might find the bones of six or more small animals.

Saturday

Owls are poor nest builders, so they have to move into vacant nests built by other birds or use low-effort spots like cavities in trees and rocks or move into empty spots in human buildings.

Sunday

Wheat is old and popular. Cultivated for at least 10,000 years, wheat is now the most common crop on Earth, supplying about 20% of all human calories and protein.

Monday

To “separate the wheat from the chaff” means to isolate the more valuable thing in a group from the less valuable, since the edible wheat kernels were more valuable to farmers than the papery husk, or chaff. They are separated by the processes of winnowing and threshing.

Tuesday

Wheat is a member of the grass family with thousands of varieties, but six are the most common, each best for producing particular products, like breads, crackers, pasta, cookies, etc. These are known as hard red winter, hard red spring, soft red winter, soft white, hard white, and durum. The “wheat berries” or seed kernels are the part of the plant which is actually eaten.

Wednesday

The difference between whole grain wheat flour and white or “refined” flour is that whole grain is made from the entire wheat kernel, including the nutrient-dense bran and germ portions, whereas white flour is just the endosperm, which is primarily starch and some protein.

Thursday

Gluten is protein found in wheat, rye, and barley products. It makes dough from those flours stretchy (like pizza dough) and chewy when eaten. However, those with a gluten allergy, or celiac disease, have adverse reactions to this grain protein.

Friday

Globally, the biggest wheat producers are in Asia, with China and India leading the pack.

Saturday

The “amber waves of grain” described in the patriotic poem-turned-song “America the Beautiful” were vast wheat fields. These were among the many sights author Katherine Lee Bates encountered in her 19th century westward journey.

Many parts of your anatomy are named for people real and mythical. Some among the many:

Sunday

Broca’s Area of the brain, which is connected to speech processing, is named for French neurologist Pierre Paul Broca

Monday

Fallopian tubes are named for Gabriele Falloppio, Italian anatomist.

Tuesday

Achilles tendon are named for Greek mythological hero Achilles.

Wednesday

Eustachian tubes are named for Bartolomeo Eustachi, Italian anatomist.

Thursday

The Grafenberg spot (AKA G-spot) is named for Ernst Grafenbert, German-American physician.

Friday

Cowper’s Gland is named for William Cowper, English anatomist.

Saturday

Atlas, the uppermost vertebrae which supports the skull, is named for mythological titan Atlas, who bore the weight of the heavens on his shoulders.

Sunday

IYKYK = If you know, you know

Monday

TOEFL = Test of English as a foreign language

Tuesday

DOB = date of birth

Wednesday

BOLO = Be on the lookout

Thursday

HARIBO = Hans Riegel, Bonn, which is the name of the company founder and original location in Bonn, Germany.

Friday

AFAIC = As far as I’m concerned

Saturday

OATUS = On a totally unrelated subject

Sunday

Globally, about 1.2% of live deliveries are twins. This number has increased dramatically in the last century, both due to improved fertility treatments, and because twins are more likely with older mothers, who are having more children these days.

Monday

Identical twins look alike because they come from a single fertilized egg which splits in two, and so have the same genetic info. Fraternal twins come from two eggs fertilized by two sperm, so genetically, they have no more in common than any other two siblings, despite arriving together. Fraternal twins are about twice as common as identical.

Tuesday

Global mythology is packed with twins, particularly Greek and Roman mythology. After all, it was twin brothers Remus and Romulus who founded Rome, and we still see the Greek twins Castor and Pollux in the night sky within the Gemini constellation.

Wednesday

Since people traveling near the speed of light experience time more slowly relative to the slower-moving, the “twins paradox” describes a situation where one twin leaves Earth to travel near the speed of light, to find upon returning that her twin has aged more than herself, despite both starting at exactly the same age. Because of their real-life space travels, twin NASA astronauts Mark and Scott Kelly are about 0.01 sec different in age.

Thursday

There is no genetic predisposition to having identical twins, since they come from an egg which splits randomly. However, fraternal twins come from multiple eggs, so women with a gene for hyperovulation, or releasing multiple eggs per cycle, are more likely to have fraternal twins. As such, fraternal twins can run in families.

Friday

The term “Siamese twins” originated with conjoined twins Chang and Eng Bunker, born in 1811 in Thailand (then known as Siam). After traveling with the circus and becoming known worldwide, they settled in the US, married sisters and became farmers who fathered 21 children between them.

Saturday

Some types of “twins” really aren’t. The term “Irish twins” refers to children born within 12 months of each other, and is a 19th century American idiom referring to Irish immigrant families who often had many children born very close together. The similar “Dutch twins” refers to to children born between 12 and 18 months of each other.

Sunday

In modern use, “cutting corners” means to skip some work or complete a task in a less honest or thorough way. Initially, the term meant to hurriedly drive your horsecart very close to a corner while rounding it, rather than taking a slightly longer right angle, although this tiny shortcut often meant hitting the curb and flipping the cart.

Monday

The idea of “the four corners of the Earth” representing all of Earth’s domains, especially the most remote, seems to originate in several Bible verses, with the “four corners” idea likely based on the four cardinal directions or possibly corners of a flat plane.

Tuesday

In contract law, the “Four Corners Rule” dictates that all terms of an agreement should be found within the document itself, particularly if those terms are clear and unambiguous. As such, outside evidence such as verbal or implied agreements between the parties should not be considered when enforcing the contract.

Wednesday

The “corner store” usually means a small convenience store where you can quickly find snacks or household essentials, whether or not it is actually on a street corner, where the name derived. Such stores are found around the world with a great variety of names, among them bodega, party store, deli, spa, package store, sari-sari, dep, packie, milk bar, pulperia, and mama shop.

Thursday

The corporate status symbol of the corner office began with the skyscraper boom of the late 19th century, but really solidified in the post-WWII years, when perimeter offices offered more privacy and natural light than the open, cubicled central areas, and none had more privacy and light than a corner office. However, corner offices and the status they convey have been declining in the Zoom era as they’re increasingly replaced by conference rooms and communal areas.

Thursday

The western United States has several famous corners, for reasons geographical and cultural. At the Four Corners Monument, you can have some body part in the states of Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, and Utah simultaneously. In San Fransisco, the legendary corner of Haight and Ashbury Streets was the epicenter of 1967’s “Summer of Love” and much of the 1960s countercultural revolution, and Los Angeles’ intersection of Hollywood and Vine is home of the Hollywood Walk of Fame, the Capital Records Building (famously shaped like a stack of records) and many other buildings from the golden age of broadcast and film studios.

Friday

To “corner the market” means to control such a large amount of a commodity or stock that you can set the price for it and profit. While this illegal to do in stock trading, it is more loosely controlled (but regulated) in futures trading.

Saturday

To “turn the corner” means to be headed toward improvement. This idiom appears to have several possible origins, including medicine, when an ill patient passed a critical point and could start recovering, when a racehorse passed the final turn into the home stretch, and in the sense of an individual’s financial recovery.

Sunday

Tattoos are old. The oldest were found on Otzi the Iceman, who lived over 5,000 years ago. His well-preserved and well-tattooed body was found in a melting glacier in the Italian Alps in 1991.

Monday

Taken from the Tahitian word “tatau,” meaning to mark or strike the skin, Captain Cook introduced this word to English. Done over the course of days with a tapping hammer, the centuries-old art of traditional Polynesian tattoos he’d observed had earned respect, conveyed status, and showed genealogy on those who could afford and endure the ritual.

Tuesday

Modern electric tattoo needles can penetrate the skin up to 200 times per second while delivering ink, and the ideal depth is about 1.5 mm (about the thickness of an American nickel), where the skin’s dermis layer lives. Shallower, and the ink might fade or disappear in the ever-replacing epidermis layer. Deeper, and the ink will spread out in the subcutaneous fat layer, creating a pooled, blurred look known as a “blowout” in the trade.

Wednesday

Globally, women under age 50 are most likely to have at least one tattoo, and “honoring or remembering” something or someone is the most commonly cited reason for getting one. Tattoos are most common in Italy (47% of people) and least popular in India (3%).

Thursday

Early tattoos were overwhelmingly black because the “ink” was often just soot or charcoal mixed with water, so was readily available.

Friday

Historically, tattoos have also marked the prosecuted and persecuted. In ancient Greece and Rome, convicted criminals, slaves, and prisoners of war were tattooed, sometimes on their foreheads, and the Nazis infamously tattooed identifying numbers onto concentration camp prisoners.

Saturday

Laser tattoo removal is a very modern process that uses lasers to superheat tattoo ink, causing those ink molecules to break apart. The much smaller remaining molecules are naturally absorbed and flushed out by the body.

Sunday

Steam was the original motive power of the Industrial Revolution. Before that, industry was limited to the less controlable forces of wind and flowing water to drive machinery. Steam remained industry’s driving force until it was replaced by more efficient combustion and electric engines.

Monday

Unsurprisingly, the command “full steam ahead” came from the steam-powered era, and was an order to bring a ship’s boiler to maximum pressure and hence the boat’s maximum speed. It was first used in the US Civil War’s Battle of Mobile Bay.

Tuesday

“Blow off steam” and “let off steam” both mean to release strong emotions, and also come from the steam power era, when reducing steam pressure from an engine’s boiler reduced the risk of a rupture or explosion.

Wednesday

Though essential to early industry, steam-making boilers on land and sea were extremely dangerous, particularly before standardized practices for their manufacture, maintenance, and inspection. When 3 boilers exploded on the American riverboat Sultana in 1865, over 1,600 people died, more than on the Titanic. During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, a boiler was exploding nearly every day somewhere in the world, killing thousands of people each decade.

Thursday

Dietitians favor cooking food by steaming. Unlike many other cooking methods which cause some loss of the food’s vitamins – particularly vitamin C – steamed food retains most of those vitamins.

Friday

The “steampunk” literary genre is a form of retrofuturism, often involving modern technology powered by steam, thus existing in an era before it actually did, with Victorian fashions to match.

Saturday

Clean, well-maintained steam rooms have been found to have several health benefits, including improved circulation, cardiovascular health, and skin health, while reducing stress, inflammation, and congestion.

Sunday

Onions are old. Current evidence suggests they’ve been grown by humans for at least 7,000 years and are among the oldest known cultivated vegetables.

Monday

Onions make you cry because of a sulfur-based compound called syn-propanethial-S-oxide. That chemical is the final product of a chain reaction which starts when the bulb is cut or bitten into, and is thought to have evolved as a deterrent against hungry animals.

Tuesday

Ancient Egyptians worshipped onions, seeing eternal life within the continuous layers and circle-in-circle structure. Onions were placed on altars, pictured with pharaohs and priests, mentioned in funeral rites, and buried with mummies.

Wednesday

Onions come from an accomplished culinary family. Close relatives in the allium genus include chives, garlic, leeks, scallions, and shallots.

Thursday

Believed to be a source of courage and later a known antiseptic, onions have played a role in military campaigns. Alexander the Great fed them to his army in quantity, believing they brought vitality, and during the US Civil War, General Ulysses S. Grant told federal authorities: “I will not move my army without onions!” He was answered with 3 traincars full of onions.

Friday

Onion layers are actually modified leaves sometimes called “scale leaves.” During growth, these leaves surrounding the onion’s center bulb become more nutrient-dense and succulent. As the nutrients are used up in the outer layers, these become the papery onion skin. The number of layers can depend on water and nutrient availability.

Saturday

Among natural varieties, an onion’s tearjerking power generally ranks with yellow onions at the top, then red, then white, then sweet. However, varieties like the “sunion” have been meticulously bred to be tasty yet tearless.