TIL the medical history behind putting premature babies in protective glass incubators originated as a sideshow at coney island in the early 1900s. people would pay to see preemies all lined up (alive) in these glass incubators. medical history is awesome and weird.
Today I learned that wild pear tree's have these wicked thorns/spikes that can get nearly 3 inches long before they just give up and decide to grow leaves and make full the shift over to being branches. I also learned that those thorns hurt like hell when you kneel down and accidentally stab yourself in the knee with one.
My pinky toenails both have a little bit on the outside that looks kind of like a callous and kind of like the nail split, but it does not hurt and has always grown like that. Apparently this is called an "accessory nail of the fifth toe", and I should stop picking at it.
Hemipenes! They only use one of them at a time, and generally will favour one or the other overall, so a snake or lizard will be left- or right-dicked. Meanwhile, echidnas have a single penis with four heads. For more fun penis facts, see:
THIS IS THE BEST THING I'VE LEARNED TODAY. omg for some reason I just like weird animal junk facts SO MUCH.
The vlogbrothers used to do these trivia quiz videos, and a couple of them were christmas carol trivia, and animal penis trivia. I did terribly on the christmas carol video. I got 100% on the animal penis video.
Today I learned: don't try to learn social studies or humanities in Vietnam. Not only do you have a good chance of the Party officials breathing down your neck, but for some reason they've instated a 150 page limit on dissertations, ostensibly because people in math and science don't need more than 150 pages for their dissertations. Which is sad, because they've got some really interesting stuff going on in terms of local religions there.
I learned that culture clash is really hard to explain. D: And that some things that really should bother me by the mores and expectations of one culture...doesn't? So confused.
TIL that rereading a series makes everything better, because A) I actually recognize most of the characters now and B) I can scream about all the foreshadowing and tiny details I missed the first time through.
Performing equally poorly with either hand (not being left- or right-hand dominant) is called being "ambilevous" or "ambisinister" Some marsupials, including kangaroos, show a tendency to be left-handed Preferring one hand for some tasks and the other hand for other tasks is not true ambidexterity, but is called cross-dominance. Having dominant hands, feet, and/or eyes that do not all occur on the same side of the body (e.g. right-handedness and left-footedness in the same person) is also called being cross-dominant.
I have a request for knowledge and I don't know if there's a more appropriate thread for that sort of thing, so I'm going to hijack my own knowledge-centric thread for it I want to know about the second plague of Egypt, the frogs. Why was that a plague? Is there a historical context to frogs (specifically, lots of frogs) that I'm missing, because it seems like the plague of frogs would be a mild inconvenience more than anything else. All of the other plagues are definite problems, so I'm wondering what I'm missing with the frogs.
i've always understood it to be that they were just fucking everywhere? like, "hey honey let's go to bed - oh shit it's full of frogs" or "i think i'll make some soup or whatever it is we egyptians eat - damnit there's frogs in the oven" or " looks like my clothes could use a wash - fuck there's frogs in my clothes. no wonder it felt like something was crawling around in there"
See, that would be very inconvenient, but it's not exactly on the same level as "Oh no, all of our water is now blood and also all of our food has been eaten by locusts". So I thought maybe there could be some context I'm missing, like that frogs were a big problem when they clogged up the Nile or something [criticises God]
the actual verses pertaining to it: so yeah it wasn't just "that sure is a lot of frogs" and more like "OH FUCK WHERE ARE THEY COMING FROM GET IT OFF GET IT OFF THIS SHOULDN'T BE POSSIBLE"
