Category: –

Sunday

A “coin of the realm” means something valued within a given locale, but the term originally meant actual currency issued by the British monarch.

Monday

In the US, “two bits” means 25¢, though the US Mint has never produced a 12.5 cent coin. However, Brits have long called a low-value coin a “bit,” and in the US the term was applied to some early Mexican and Spanish coins in circulation which were valued at 1/8 peso, or about 12.5¢ at the time.

Tuesday

“A penny saved is a penny earned” is one of many wise maxims often credited to Benjamin Franklin, though he never actually said it. He came close with “A penny saved is two pence clear,” and “a penny saved is a penny got,” but these frugal notions weren’t original to Franklin; similar wisdom had been printed over a century before.

Wednesday

In both diameter and thickness, a dime is the smallest circulating American coin. Hence, people say that a very quick-maneuvering vehicle can “turn on a dime,” as can a person who changes their own position on a subject quickly.

Thursday

The coin toss at the beginning of every NFL game (and overtime, if any) uses a special coin made just for the purpose, with special coins made just for the Super Bowl.

Friday

Shortly after dimes were first minted in the US in 1796, “a dime a dozen” was often used as a sale price for everyday products and indicated a good bargain. By 1930, inflation had rendered a dime far less valuable, and this term was first used with a negative connotation of something so common it is nearly useless.

Saturday

Though now applied to many manufactured items, “mint condition” originally referred to a brand new coin fresh from the mint that made it.

Sunday

Pins and needles all start out as long spools of wire which are then cut to size and processed, largely by machine, into the finished product. The process can take several days.

Monday

Sewing needles are a very essential, and very old, human invention. A 50,000-year old needle made of bird bone was found in one Siberian cave, likely made by a now-extinct species of humans.

Tuesday

Tattoos, and the needles which produce them, also go pretty far back. Iceman Otzi, found under a melting European glacier in 1991, had 61 tattoos on his body and was carbon-14 dated at 5,300 years old.

Wednesday

The common pin has the distinction of being the item which Adam Smith uses as an example of the efficiency of division of labor in manufacture in the economics classic “The Wealth of Nations.”

Thursday

“Pins and needles” describes unrelated mental and physical sensations. It describes both nervous anticipation and the feeling of blood returning to a limb which had “fallen asleep.” The term has been in use since at least the 19th century.

Friday

The modern safety pin was invented by Walter Hunt as he toyed with some wire, pondering how he might pay off a debt of fifteen dollars to a friend. He sold the patent to that friend after receiving one in 1849.

Saturday

A “needler” is both one who makes or deals in needles and also one who annoys and antagonizes.

Sunday

Bats are the only mammal on Earth which can sustain flight (though others can glide).

Monday

With over 1,000 known bat species, bats are the second largest taxonomic order after rodents, comprising about 20% of all classified mammal species globally.

Tuesday

Bats find insects prey by echolocation, the emitting of high-pitched sounds and listening to the echoes to spot nearby bugs it bounced off of. With this tactic, some bats can consume about 20 mosquitoes per minute.

Wednesday

Bat poop (guano) contains saltpeter, which is used to make gunpowder, and a Confederate kiln at one Texas bat cave churned out 100 lbs / day during the American Civil War.

Thursday

Vampire bats are the only mammals which can live on blood alone, which they lick from tiny cuts they make on mostly unfazed livestock. Contrary to the Dracula myth, however, all known species live in Central and South America, far from Transylvania.

Friday

Eating the weight of 7 garbage trucks worth of insects might seem like a tall order, but it is done every night by the 15 million bats living in Texas’ Bracken Bat Cave, the world’s largest concentration of the animal.

Saturday

The range in size of bats remarkable. Members of the smallest species, Kitti’s Hog-Nosed Bat, have an adult weight of 2 grams and a length of about 1.2 inches, while the largest bat, the Giant Golden-Crowned Flying Fox, might be 11 inches long and weigh 3 lbs. This difference is comparable to adult humans in one region being about 6 feet tall and 200 lbs, and people elsewhere standing 55 feet tall and weighing 136,000 lbs.

Sunday

CAD = Computer Aided Drafting / Design

Monday

CGI = Computer Generated Imagery

Tuesday

TLD = Top Level Domain

Wednesday

ISP = Internet Service Provider

Thursday

DDoS = Distributed Denial of Service

Friday

MMORPG = Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game

Saturday

PVP = Player vs. Player

Sunday

The first eyeglasses are generally thought to have been created in 1285 and were made of quartz, since glass made at that time was too flawed to be good for glasses.

Monday

Eyeglasses work by taking on some of the light ray management that the eye would do in a person with perfect vision. If you’re nearsighted, your glasses focus incoming light rays onto the retina of your eye so that faraway objects you see aren’t blurry. If you’re farsighted, eyeglasses spread the light over a wider area of the eye’s retina, bringing nearby objects into focus.

Tuesday

Sunglasses in the form of slits cut into walrus ivory have been used to reduce snow glare by Inuit people for 2,000 years.

Wednesday

The idea may seem obvious now, but eyeglasses went about 450 years before the development of frames with hooks that go behind the ears.

Thursday

In addition to accomplishments in science, writing, politics, diplomacy, and more, Benjamin Franklin was also the inventor of bifocals, which allow wearers to focus on objects both near and far.

Friday

Most modern “glasses” lenses are plastic, which tend not to shatter and hence are safer for the wearer.

Saturday

About 75% of adults need some form of vision correction.

Sunday

The regular use of pillows goes back about 9,000 years, but the notion that they should be soft only goes back about 2,000. Before that pillows were made of stone, wood, ceramic, metal, and other hard materials. Among the reasons for the rigid pillows was a fear that such softness would steal bodily energy or appear as weakness.

Monday

You might not think the purpose of your pillow is to keep your head off the ground so that insects don’t crawl into your ears, nose, or mouth, but this was indeed a reason for early pillow users.

Tuesday

Between the fall of the Roman Empire and the Industrial Revolution, pillow use and evolution was greatly slowed in the Middle Ages. Henry VIII even banned the use of pillows for all but pregnant women.

Wednesday

Memory foam, now a modern pillow and mattress staple material, was actually developed by NASA to keep test pilots better cushioned during flight.

Thursday

The oldest discovered burial in all of Africa is that of a young child with its head on a pillow. It was about 80,000 years old, and researchers named him “Mtoto.”

Friday

There are well over a dozen types of stuffing options for the modern pillow shopper, including many varieties of natural and synthetically-sourced material.

Saturday

Competitive pillow fighting is a real sport, involving two competitors trading blows with 2 lb. specialized pillows for 90 second rounds.

Sunday

Pencils don’t contain lead and never have, but write with graphite, a pure carbon isotope (diamonds being another form of pure carbon). Graphite deposits have been mistaken for lead, however, and pre-pencil writing styluses were made of lead, perhaps explaining the misnomer.

Monday

Pencils work because graphite’s carbon atoms are arranged in sheets. The carbon atoms in these sheets are bonded strongly to adjacent atoms, but only weakly to those sheets above and below. As a result, they “rub off” easily, such that pencil marks are sheets of carbon atoms.

Tuesday

Pencil-ready graphite is so delicate it must be encased in something to be usable, and before hollowed-out wooden tubes, early pencils were graphite wrapped in paper or string.

Wednesday

The pencil’s purpose informed its name. Pencil comes from “pencillum” or “fine brush” in Latin, and graphite comes from “graphien” or “to write” in Greek.

Thursday

The graphite pencil went about 200 years before it got that pink eraser attached. Before that, bread crumbs did the trick.

Friday

Famous natural philosopher and author Henry David Thoreau was also part of the very successful John Thoreau & Company family pencil business, and himself developed many major innovations to pencil quality and manufacture.

Saturday

The letters and numbers on pencils, including that testing favorite yellow “No. 2,” indicate the formulation of that pencil’s graphite for blackness, hardness, and ability to sharpen to a fine point.

Sunday

“Alias” means “otherwise called.”

Monday

“Cogito, ergo sum,” famously declared by Descartes, means “I think, therefore I am.”

Tuesday

“Antebellum” means “before the war.”

Wednesday

“Consensus” means “agreement / accord.”

Thursday

“Veto” means “I forbid.”

Friday

“Et al” means “and others.”

Saturday

“Innuendo” means “giving a nod to.”

Sunday

Globally, corn is among the most essential crops, with well over a billion tons grown annually. Corn currently supplies over 6% of human calories.

Monday

Baseball fans might have heard a routine fly ball hit to an outfielder called a “can of corn.” This refers to the old practice of grocery clerks pulling cans off high shelves with long hooks, then catching the falling item in their apron. This term applies to other simple routine actions as well.

Tuesday

The distribution of the US’s largest-acreage crop goes roughly 1/3 to people, beverage, and industrial markets, 1/3 to ethanol production, and 1/3 to livestock.

Wednesday

Corn’s ancestor is a plant called teosinte, which was methodically bred with other plants in southwestern Mexico to get modern corn. However, with just 5-10 kernels per ear and a taste like dried potato, you probably wouldn’t recognize this plant as a relative of modern corn.

Thursday

Corn, squash, and pole beans were often grown together and called the “three sisters” by native American tribes for centuries. These plants had a remarkably complimentary relationship: corn stalks supply the support for the beans to wrap around and grow up, the beans convert nitrogen in the air to a form usable to all plants, and squash’s big prickly leaves deter pests, keep the ground moist and provide mulch for the group.

Friday

As a global staple crop, corn grows on every continent except Antarctica.

Saturday

In the US, the vast majority of corn comes from the “Corn Belt,” which produces nearly 40% of the world’s supply. This region includes parts of the Midwest, Great Plains, and South. The states of Iowa and Illinois tend to lead production annually, with corn growing on nearly 1/3 of the land in those states.