The Origin of Everyday

Sunday

Rome was reputedly named for Romulus, the city’s mythological founder.

Monday

Kyiv was named for Kyi, the oldest of three leader brothers in the ancient Polyanian tribe.

Tuesday

Bucharest was named for Bucur, the joyful and musical shepherd of legend.

Wednesday

Athens was named for Athena, Greek goddess of wisdom, who also beat sea god Poseidon for city protector status and naming rights.

Thursday

Mumbai was named for the Mother Goddess Mumba Devi, the city’s patron deity.

Friday

Pamplona was named for General Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus, rival of Julius Cesar.

Saturday

Ho Chi Minh City was named for…you guessed it, the founder, first prime minister and first president of The Democratic Republic of Vietnam.

Sunday

Ancient Mesopotamians are believed to be the first culture to start pickling cucumbers over 4,000 years ago, soaking them in acidic brine. Other foods were also preserved in this way, since bacteria which would otherwise spoil the food cannot grow in this solution.

Monday

The term “in a pickle” is over 450 years old, but has several different meanings. It is most often used to convey that someone is in a tough spot, but Shakespeare used it to mean drunk, and in baseball, it means to be in a rundown, caught between bases.

Tuesday

Pickled foods played a big role in global exploration and conquests by reducing the frequency of scurvy, a weakening disease which often sickened sailors and soldiers without enough vitamin-C rich fruits and vegetables to eat during long voyages and campaigns.

Wednesday

Pickleball was born in 1965 by a Washington state congressman and a businessman who initially wanted to play badminton with their families, but could only find ping pong rackets and a perforated plastic ball. Fun was had, rules were written, and a new sport was born. The name is a reference to a “pickle boat” in crew, a boat filled with “leftover” rowers who weren’t chosen to start out. Today pickleball is the fastest-growing sport in the US.

Thursday

The two main solutions which actually make food pickle are either salt (brine) or vinegar, both of which have long histories. For cucumbers, the additives or soaking methods then define the pickle type, such as dill pickles, kosher (garlic) pickles, lower-salt pickles (barrel-soaked), bread and butter (sugar), just to name just a few.

Friday

You might get into a pickle if you travel globally and try to order one. In the US, most pickled cucumbers are either of the larger dill-pickle size or of the smaller size known as gherkins. However, Americans often call both sizes “pickles,” while both sizes are called “gherkins” in Australia, India, and the UK, and still other parts of the world distinguish by size. The Gherkin is also an aptly-named London skyscraper.

Saturday

Why yes, there is a National Pickle Day (in the US, anyway), and it is November 14. It started in 1949 with perfectly predictable promotion from the Pickle Packers Association.

Sunday

“The Bermuda Triangle,” also known as “The Devil’s Triangle,” is a vast swath of the Atlantic Ocean with points at Bermuda, Puerto Rico, and Miami. It is famous as an area of many unexplained disappearances of ships and aircraft over the years. However, several natural factors likely play a role in these disasters, including the many islands and shallow water, abundant waterspouts, methane gas bubbling from the sea floor, “white squalls,” which bring storms on seemingly clear days, and even some evidence that magnetic compass readings vary in that reigon.

Monday

Another tragic triangle in the Atlantic, however, was unmistakably man-made. The Middle Passage leg of the “Triangle Trade” which went from the 17th through 19th centuries and ran between Africa, the Americas, and Europe, brought captured Africans to the Americas in deplorable (and often deadly) conditions aboard slave ships, to then be sold into forced servitude.

Tuesday

Just as a triangle, by definition, has three sides and three points, there are also three ways to categorize them by sides (equilateral, isosceles, and Scalene) and also by angle (acute, obtuse, and right).

Wednesday

Triangulation is a process by which the location of a third point can be determined by knowing when some some sound or signal from that point reaches two other points. In the human world, this can be used for navigation, locating transmissions, and tracking of cell phone locations. Animals also use triangulation to locate prey or others of their kind.

Thursday

The classic “love triangle” is also known as “the eternal triangle.”

Friday

Structural engineers love triangles, and for good reason. More than any other shape, triangles distribute weight and force equally throughout their shape and without deforming, making triangles extremely popular in support and reinforcement structures like joists and bridges.

Saturday

Geometrically, plotting three non-linear points doesn’t just establish a triangle, the simplest polygon, but is the simplest way to establish a plane, as well.

This week covers just a few of the world’s lost and abandoned cities.

Sunday

Atlantis was invented by Plato as as a plot device in two of the philosopher’s morality tales written about 360 BC. It was not the peaceful utopia of the modern imagination, but a powerful and corrupt rival to Athens. With scant evidence, a 19th century Minnesota Congressman named Ignatius Donnelly promoted the idea that this Platonic invention was both a real island and the original source of all major advancements in civilization and technology, informing the modern conception of Atlantis. Despite Plato’s description of the alleged location, no evidence of the place has been found.

Monday

In ancient Greece, the volcanic ash of Mt. Vesuvius made the nearby soil fertile and local cities wealthy from excellent crops, but at a terrible price. When the volcano violently erupted in 79 AD, the cities of Pompeii, Herculaneum, and others were overwhelmed by with ash, gasses, lava and raining rocks, killing about 16,000. When the abandoned city was excavated beginning in 1748, it seemed that time had hardly touched it. Residents’ bodies, everyday items, and even meals were largely found in excellent condition under the preserving ash layers.

Tuesday

The city of Troy was prominent in classical literature, including as the main setting for Homer’s Illiad, but for centuries scholars debated its exact location or even if it existed outside of mythology. The city, located near modern day Hisarlik, Turkey, had in fact been a settlement for almost three millennia going back to the Bronze Age, including during the time of the Trojan War, but was abandoned about 1500 years ago, later to be discovered in the 19th century, and is still being excavated to this day.

Wednesday

An explosion and fire at Ukraine’s Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in 1986 led to the evacuation of about 200,000 people in and around the adjacent town of Pripyat. Since then, this city has remained abandoned and largely off limits on account of the radiation danger.

Thursday

At the city’s 12th century peak, Angkor in modern day Cambodia was home to over 750,000 people spread over a sprawling 400 square mile area, giving it “the largest footprint of any urban development in the pre-industrialized world.” But by the 15th century, the vast city was largely emptied, though a small number Buddhist monks remained over the years. Scholars continue to advance theories as to the economic, military, and environmental reasons for the dramatic population change.

Friday

Between 1959 and 1966, the US military operated a military base under the Greenland ice sheet known as “Camp Century,” since it was originally planned to be 100 miles from the edge of the ice sheet. This abandoned camp, designed to house 200, is still there, but some of the radioactive waste generated during its active years is now in increasing danger of spreading as the ice melts due to climate change.

Saturday

Pakistan’s Mohenjo-Daro was a thriving city of at least 40,000 people for 800 years or more until it was abandoned in about 1700 BC. Rediscovered in 1922, ongoing excavations have revealed that the town was elaborately planned and constructed, contained hundreds of wells, huge public baths, a complex flood control system, and even private residential toilets.

Some basic space terms you’ve probably come across:

Sunday

Redshift indicates the stretching of light waves emitted from an object as it seemingly flies away from an observer. When done by a star it indicates that is moving away from Earth or the observation point. This is the opposite of a blueshift, and both are related to the Doppler Effect.

Monday

Black holes, which are typically found at the center of galaxies (including ours), or seen after large stars burn all their fuel and collapse under their own weight, have gravitational pulls so strong that nothing can escape, even light itself.

Tuesday

A singularity, which theoretically lives inside every black hole, is a zero-volume point of infinite density and infinite curvature of spacetime, such that “all laws of physics break down.” So don’t feel too bad if you have a hard time imagining these.

Wednesday

Quasars are the result of supermassive black holes pulling in such enormous quantities of matter that the friction from material spiraling into the black hole causes it to glow more brightly than anything else in the universe, helped by bright-burning magnetized jets of matter emitted at nearly the speed of light.

Thursday

A supernova, the largest known explosion in the universe (sometimes brighter than entire galaxies), is often caused by the final stage of a supermassive star’s death. As the heavier elements at the star’s core collapse under gravity, lighter elements are thrown violently outward. The remaining hyper-compacted core, known as a neutron star or pulsar, exhibits the universe’s strongest known magnetic fields.

Friday

Dark matter’s existence must be inferred from the fact that without it, all known galaxies would have spun apart ages ago, since all their observable matter could not possibly generate enough gravity to hold them together. But although it does not interact with light or electromagnetic forces and is hence very tough to detect, dark matter is likely six times more prevalent in the universe than observed matter based on its apparent gravimetric influence.

Saturday

Wormholes are theoretical shortcuts between two distant points in space. While possible under Einstein’s general theory of relativity, no natural wormholes have ever been detected.

Sunday

Many religious traditions have monks, including the Buddhist, Christian, Hindu, Sikh, and Jain faiths, while nuns can be found in the Buddhist, Catholic and several other Christian traditions.

Monday

Catholic nuns wear veils to symbolize they are “brides of Christ.” This tradition began in early Christian communities by women who chose to dedicate their lives to emulating Jesus.

Tuesday

Monks of many religions also have a head-related tradition: shaving it. “Tonsure” means hair removal symbolic of a religious life beyond worldly pursuits. It is practiced by modern-day Buddhist, Hindu, and Jaina monks as it was by earlier Christian monks, except for that ring left around the edges of the head, known as the “monk’s fringe.”

Wednesday

Catholic nuns and sisters are not exactly the same, although both are called “sister.” Nuns stay in convents and wear habits, while sisters perform “ministries” in the community, often with the poor. Initially, all nuns remained in convents, but starting with Dublin’s Sisters of Mercy in 1830s, the tradition of “walking nuns,” who became known as sisters, grew worldwide.

Thursday

In the US, the number of nuns is in steep decline, down a whopping 76% from a peak in 1965, and fewer than 1% of American nuns are now under age 40. Among nations, India currently has the most nuns, with nearly 100,000.

Friday

Certain monasteries are now associated with martial arts, such as the ancient Shaolin Temple in Henan, China. Some of these centuries-old physical arts are now intertwined with spirituality, but began as monks’ practical self defense against bandits, warlords and wild animals, as well as being great exercise.

Saturday

Spending much of your day in meditation may profit you spiritually, but not financially. Most nuns and monks renounce personal ownership of things, and so are supported by charity or the sale of small items for the benefit of their convent or monastery.

Sunday

Soup is old, but just how old is tough to say. Earthen cookware from about 20,000 years ago was found in a Chinese cave with evidence that it was used for soup. However, more direct evidence of 8,000 year-old soup itself was found in modern-day Iraq and had a unique main ingredient: hippopotamus meat.

Tuesday

The term “souped up” for performance-enhanced vehicles apparently came from an ugly practice in early horse racing, wherein the animals were injected with often-dangerous chemicals to make them run faster. A horse treated in this fashion was called “souped up.”

Wednesday

Generally speaking, broth, stock, or consommé is usually a thin liquid base, flavored with vegetables or meat. Soup is the general term for solid ingredients in a liquid base, stew has longer-simmered “stewed” chunky ingredients, chowder is typically a milk-based soup with chunky ingredients, especially potatoes, and bisque is a cream-based or otherwise finely pureed soup.

Thursday

Fashion, vanity, and history are connected by soup. As thin soups became popular at the same time as the fashion of huge neck ruffles in in 14th century Europe, soup spoons were developed to keep soup-eaters’ ruffles clean. Later, French king Louis XIV wanted to see his own royal face when he ate his soup, so ordered his chefs to develop a clear and reflective soup, hence the creation of consommé.

Friday

Europe is the most soup-loving continent, led by the UK and Russia.

Saturday

Condensed soup was developed in 1897 by Dr. John T. Dorrance, a chemist with the Campbell Soup Company. Most soups are primarily water anyway, so condensing means more soup could be shipped economically and reconstituted by the consumer who adds a can of water to the concentrate.

Sunday

Snakes and other reptiles are called “cold blooded,” but that doesn’t mean their blood is always low temperature. They are “ectotherms,” which just means they get heat from outside their bodies via the sun, as opposed to animals which can produce their own body heat internally. Their metabolism works best in warmer temperatures, though there is great variety in preferred temperatures among reptile species.

Monday

Despite huge mouths, snakes can’t chew, so must swallow their food whole, however large it may be. However, it is a myth that snakes dislocate their jaws to fit the feast. In fact, their jawbones are connected by cartilage instead of fused bone, and so allow for great stretching. After that, the powerful stomach does the digesting, though the venom of poisonous snakes can also help dissolve food.

Tuesday

In religion and mythology, snakes get mixed respect. In some, they represent sin, temptation, death or the devil, while in others they represent rebirth, fertility, immortality, or healing. In several myths, snakes play a central role in the world’s creation or destruction.

Wednesday

Oil produced by boiling Chinese water snakes was used by 19th century Chinese railroad workers in the US as an effective cure for joint inflammation after a hard day’s work. News of this soothing oil spread, but since there were no omega-3 acid-rich Chinese water snakes in the US, hucksters initially boiled rattlesnakes for the oil to cure “all pain,” despite their far less therapeutic oil composition. What’s more, shipments of this “snake oil” were later found to contain zero snake oil, but red pepper, turpentine, beef fat, and mineral oil, among other things. Thus, “snake oil” became a metaphor for grossly misrepresented products.

Thursday

Traditional Indian snake charmers appear to have the swaying serpent mesmerized with haunting reed music, but things are not as they seem. Snakes are largely deaf, so are responding to the movements of the instrument itself, called a pungi. These snakes are often harmless anyway, having been de-fanged and with their venom sacs removed. Sometimes the mouth is sewn shut, causing the snake to starve and get replaced when it dies. Because of these controversial practices and more enforcement of laws forbidding snake ownership, snake charming in India is on the decline.

Friday

You might think of the familiar S-shaped slither as snakes’ main movement, but it is one of four which have been known for decades, known as concertina, rectilinear, lateral undulation, and sidewinding. However, scientists recently discovered an amazing new motion, in which Guam’s brown tree snake climbs up smooth poles and gets around barriers by wrapping its body around the cylinders like a lasso, hooking on with its own tail, and inching up that way.

Saturday

Speaking of unexpected snake movement, snakes of the Chrysopelea family can “fly” in the same way flying squirrels glide through the air. These snakes can glide for several seconds at a time at about 25mph by flattening their body to catch the air.

General government types (or lack thereof) around today:

Sunday

Anarchy – Lawlessness, the absence of government.

Monday

Democracy / republic – When citizens vote directly for leaders and laws, but more often for intermediaries who do (representatives, electors, etc.)

Tuesday

Monarchy – Government where ultimate authority rests with a monarch, typically a member of a ruling family.

Wednesday

Military Regime / Stratocracy – Government authority in the hands of a military hierarchy.

Thursday

Theocracy / Ecclesiastical – A government claiming to be led by a deity/scripture with administration by human religious authorities.

Friday

Oligarchy – Government run by a small group of individuals.

Saturday

Dictatorship – When all state power ultimately rests with one individual who is sometimes the head of the only real political party.

Sunday

The oldest bridge still in use is the Arkadiko Bridge in Argolis, Greece. Built with heavy stones (but no mortar), this 22-meter long bridge has carried loads since constructed by the Mycenaeans over 3,000 years ago.

Monday

If you’ve been swindled, you might hear someone say you’ve been “sold the Brooklyn Bridge.” This term goes back to legendary American con artist George C. Parker, whose scams included “selling” public and private New York City properties which he did not own, often to naive new immigrants. Among his other profitable “sales” were the Statue of Liberty, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Madison Square Garden. He eventually got a life sentence and died in Sing Sing Prison in 1937.

Tuesday

There are many bridges to nowhere at all, often because they were damaged, abandoned, or were part of larger, unfinished projects. Bridges to nowhere can be found in the US, France, China, Malaysia, New Zealand, Germany, Poland, Latvia, Nepal, the Falkland Islands, and other places.

Wednesday

Six of the world’s longest bridges are in China, including the #1 Danyang-Kunshan Grand Bridge at a whopping 102 miles long. France’s Millau Viaduct claims the #1 spot for height at 343 meters, taller than the Eiffel Tower.

Thursday

An unrealistic plan or deduction is sometimes called “a bridge too far.” This term comes from a doomed WWII operation described in a book-turned-movie of that title. “Operation Market Garden” planned to capture five Nazi-controlled bridges over the Rhine River before a final Allied advance into Berlin. When one skeptical officer saw that the plan included seizing of the Arnhem Bridge, 64 miles behind enemy lines, he said the plan might be going “a bridge too far.”

Friday

There are many ways to build a sturdy bridge, whether it is held up from below, above, at one end or both, and whether it moves or not. Among the major bridge types are beam bridges, suspension bridges, truss bridges, arch bridges, tied arch bridges, cantilevered bridges, and cable-stayed bridges.

Saturday

The world’s largest known natural arch bridge was created by erosion from below by the Buliu River and was largely unknown to non-locals because of its remote location in southern China before a natural arch and bridge enthusiast spotted the otherworldly Xianren or “Fairy Bridge” on Google Earth.