TIL my dad's car lets you drive anywhere even if the key is not in the car if the car is within range of the key when it is started. And yes, I learned this the hard way. On the plus side, I'm now imagining the awful Ace Attorney middle case where this is a plot point.
Agatha Christie worked in archaeological sites with her husband and did a whole bunch of cleaning of artifacts with some rather unorthodox (but successful) tools. The British Museum has a set of ivory carvings from Nimrud that she cleaned with face cream.
TIL that the scientific name for vitamin C, ascorbic acid, literally just means "anti-scurvy acid". Things that are obvious if you ever get around to thinking about them.
Sometimes. Thylacinus cynocephalus basically means "dog headed pouched animal" which kind of amuses me. Then again, Beutelwolf (German) and Fukuroookami (Japanese) basically mean "bag wolf" so idk. I'm fond of the indigenous name "coorinna" but for all I know that means "bag wolf" too...
Personally I'm fond of the part where the hedgehog genes are named something I forget hedgehog, indian hedgehog and sonic hedgehog.
I'm fond of the fact that the inhibitor for sonic hedgehog is called "robotnikin." ...And that people are petitioning to get sonic hedgehog renamed because mutations in it can be fatal, and doctors don't want to have to tell grieving parents that their baby will die because of a mutation in the sonic hedgehog gene.
The reason allergy seasons have been getting worse? Sexism and toxic masculinity! :D (But seriously: the reason they've been getting worse over the years is because the folks in charge of tree-planting for cities all got told "select male trees, they'll produce less litter to clean up!" And yep, male trees sure don't produce fruits or nuts that then get dropped and need to be cleaned up. But this got taken to the extent that most trees you see in a city are male, which means that there are no female trees around to capture all that pollen and keep it from irritating our lungs and sinuses.)
There's also an element of "no fruit trees in cities", which leads to guerilla gardeners grafting fruit branches to city trees. Now, this is a whole "nothing for free" kinda anti-capitalist thing? But on the other hand, lots of mess and also probably pests and things, so it's probably sensible to not have fruit trees in cities. Maybe in the parks would be sensible.
I'm not sure. On the one hand, there are people starving in our streets and they might eat the fruit. But, for years, in the community garden near my home, there was a blackberry bush that was allowed to poke outside the fence. It's gone now, because people had started picking it clean, and pulling on the branches. I saw a woman bring her tupperware and her small child with tiny arms and fingers and they filled it up, and they were talking about the pie they were going to make, and had obviously come from another neighbourhood to take all the free blackberries in ours; the local residents would usually grab one or two as they passed by. I don't think from the looks of them (I could be wrong, but I doubt it) that they couldn't afford to go to the grocery store and buy blackberries; they looked more like the people I see in Whole Foods (not a budget friendly grocery) than anyone I've ever seen on the street. I think fruit on the streets would be great but I'm more afraid that people will damage the trees than I am that there will be a mess, unless they put mulberry trees in. (There were mulberry trees around the parking lot of an apartment building that I lived in ages ago. WHY.)
TIL Terry Pratchett was involved in the Oblivion modding community, and there's a Skyrim version of one of the mods he helped write for. So there's a Skyrim mod with a writing credit to Terry Pratchett.
Yeah, that's part of it. And the other part is, usually the trees the guerilla gardeners are grafting fruit branches to are the ones along the boulevards. Where the fruit gets dropped on and near sidewalks, and gets exposed to car exhaust. And the fruit just gets left, since no one's sure whether it's legally allowed to eat it (and there's the potential stigma of being seen to get fruit off a tree that isn't in your yard). So usually, it ends up with the tree being a magnet for wasps and ants.
I thought they just picked up pollen on their fuzz or something, but honey bees have little pouches on their hind legs (pollen sacs) they intentionally store pollen in. And they look adorable. Spoiler: bees
TIL about #Cockygate and haven't stopped laughing. And on behalf of my boyfriend, who very recently learned that yellow dandelions and white dandelion fluffs are indeed the same flower, not two different flowers that for some reason have the same name. (Going by comments under dandelion transformation videos on YT, this thought is a lot more common that I imagined.)
