Do you ever want to infodump about something or tell a story but it's totally irrelevant to anything and you feel like no one would care? Post it here!
A random infodump to start the thread off: when I first read the Discworld novel The Truth, I was eleven and a lot of it went over my head. For instance, approximately 50% of the main character's personality. But the other most important thing that I missed completely was the tons of Watergate references, so I'm going to Explain those. All I knew about Watergate when I first read the book was that it was a big scandal that got Richard Nixon kicked out of the White House. In more detail, what happened was that Nixon's campaign committee, going by the name "Committee for the Re-Election of the President" (officially abbreviated "CRP," unofficially pronounced "creep" :::PPP ) was doing a HUGE amount of illegal crap (because Nixon was doing a huge amount of illegal crap in general). The start of the scandal was when, in the leadup to the election for Nixon's second term, a team of people were caught breaking into the Watergate complex, where the Democratic National Committee headquarters was located. The "burglars" turned out to have cashed big checks from the CRP recently, and a couple of them had contact details for an ex-FBI agent in their address books. Investigative journalists kept digging deeper and deeper, most famously Woodward and Bernstein at the Washington Post, who got a lot of information from an anonymous source they called Deep Throat (who turned out to be the deputy director of the FBI at the time, but that didn't come out until after the book was written). He told them the mess went all the way up to the President... and it did. The thing that finally put a lid on it was when it was found out that Nixon had been recording all of his conversations in the White House- the transcripts eventually got released, and they made him look baaad, particularly one conversation where he discussed hush money to be paid to people involved in the break-in. Nixon resigned before he could be impeached, and his successor, Gerald Ford, immediately pardoned him, stopping the investigation, but Nixon is remembered as a huge crook and was politically irrelevant afterward. The entire plot of the book is about this, and I felt very silly when I realized it. First off, general plot: protagonist William is a newspaper journalist trying to get to the bottom of, and publish about, a crime the leader of the city is involved in. A seemingly simple and straightforward crime ends up leading into a much more complicated web of plots. The big difference in the plot being that in The Truth, the Big Boss is the victim of the conspiracy, and also there's a talking dog. Specifics: The big evil conspiracy is called the "Committee to Un-elect the Patrician." As with CRP's activities, they work with their henchman at several removes to try to prevent it being traced to them. As with CRP, this doesn't end up working, and it's traced up the line via something belonging to a henchman. CUP's plan is that the guy they have lined up as a successor will immediately pardon Vetinari so the investigation stops with him looking bad, rendering him politically irrelevant. William gets information from an anonymous source going by "Deep Bone" (actually Gaspode the Wonder Dog), who he meets at a large livery stable. Woodward and Bernstein met Deep Throat at a large parking garage. Partway through, the people doing the CUP's dirty work, Pin and Tulip, go back to the guy who hired them to demand hush money. An audio recording of this conversation is extremely incriminating. And, last but not least: At the start of the book, Pin and Tulip enter the city on a boat where the river flows in. Via the Water Gate.
I was looking up tea-related recipes the other day and accidentally found out more about the history of masala chai and feel a sudden urge to Explain The Thing, so: chai is an excellent example of that one Discworld quote about how Cuisine happens when people get creative because their resources are limited. Tea was developed as a cash crop in India by the British occupiers (it was native, but most people had previously just thought of it as a medicinal herb rather than something you drink all the time), but because it was mostly being grown for export because imperialism is icky, it was pretty expensive for the people actually living there. But what people did have that was cheap was spices, because these were things everyone had been growing for hundreds of years and putting in all their food. So, when a big promotional campaign by a British company to get people in India drinking tea so they could squeeze even more money out of an already exploited populace started to make tea catch on, people got a little bit of the cheapest tea leaves they could find, and drowned them in cardamom and ginger and whatever combination of spices people in the area liked best, with a lot of milk and sugar. The British tea companies were actually pretty annoyed about this, because this recipe meant people were buying slightly less of their expensive tea leaves than they were hoping to sell them. Masala chai ended up becoming a national institution anyway, and the dire forces of capitalism have now recovered enough from this setback to embrace it and start selling crappy overpriced chai tea bags to people like me at American grocery stores.
If anyone's ever wondered about that one weird divisibility rule you learned in third grade, here's the proof that a number is divisible by 9 if its digits add up to a multiple of 9: Let's assume a number with digits DCBA. It can be rewritten as "A + 10B + 100 C + 1000D." So, for example, 9621 = 1 + 10*2 + 100*6 + 1000*9. Any given whole number can be written as a series of terms like this, even if it's considerably longer than four digits. The sum of the digits of a number like that is the series A + B + C + D +... If you subtract the sum of the digits from A + 10B + 100C + 1000D +... you get 9B + 99C + 999D..., which is obviously divisible by 9. Therefore, any given whole number can be stated as a multiple of 9 + the sum of the digits. Therefore, any number where the sum of the digits is a multiple of 9 is going to be divisible by 9. This is also where the "if the digits sum to a multiple of 3 it's divisible by 3" rule comes from, since 9B + 99C + 999D+... is divisible by 3, too. And you can generalize it to other base systems, where the magic number that acts like 9 is [base number]-1, and anything [base number]-1 is divisible by acts like 3. So for example, in base 7, anything with digits adding to a multiple of 6, 2, 0r 3 would be divisible by those numbers.
I love a good infodump and would love to hear about acid mine drainage. And also need to watch this thread because infodumping, even about things everyone I know already knows, is a thing I do when I'm having a Bad Brain Day. It makes me feel better because explaining shit makes me happy and having to sort all the info in my head and remember things helps me actually make my brain work. And also feel like it's not broken because yes I can do things, watch me explain weird video game lore for two hours
EXCELLENT. I live in West Virginia, and most of the creeks in my area look like this: That orange color isn't natural; it's a sign that the creek flows past somewhere that drains water from an abandoned coal mine. (This isn't exclusive to coal mines, but they're what I'm familiar with because, well, I live in West Virginia.) If you looked close at that creek, you'd see the bottom coated in a layer of scuzz. This is called yellowboy, and it's actually iron hydroxide (Fe(OH)3). Iron pyrite, a.k.a. fool's gold, a.k.a. FeS2, is very commonly found alongside coal. When exposed to air and water, it reacts to form sulfate and iron(II) in a reaction I just realized I'm going to have to screenshot because I don't know if I can do superscripts in this text editor. Oxygen loves to steal everyone's electrons, and this is an A+ example. It yoinks electrons off everything in sight to settle down in an electron time-share with three other oxygens and a sulfur in a nice, stable sulfate ion. Despite all those H+ ions, though, this isn't actually the reason for the acidity. Because there's another reaction that happens to iron(II) in oxygen, especially because there's a kind of bacteria that speeds it up: ...Oxygen stealing even more electrons off the iron to make water. The problem? Once you've got iron(III) running around, this starts happening: That Fe(OH)3 is a solid, and it doesn't like to dissolve very well unless stuff is really, really acidic. Which this is rapidly getting to be, because that is a lot of H+s. And the acidity means it also starts dissolving all sorts of other stuff as it goes; by the time this stuff drains out of the mine, it's often full of all sorts of heavy metals it's leeched out of the rock and ridiculously acidic. I did a project on this in fourth grade where I pH tested a local creek at various points, and the mine drainage into it hit a pH of zero. (I was wearing rubber gloves. I was very grateful for this when I saw the litmus paper.) So what you have when it hits the creek is basically concentrated sulfuric acid solution with a variety of weirdass metals in it, and especially iron(III). Which, as soon as it hits water that isn't concentrated sulfuric acid, does the thing up there in that third reaction where it plunders water for OH-s and immediately drops down to the creek bed to make the ubiquitous gross orange goop (which means that the acid also gets watered down a lot less than it ordinarily would too, because the reaction produces more H+). Other stuff drops out of solution as well- the creek I investigated turned solid white for about 10 feet after the mine drained in before it settled down into orange, and I don't know what that was, but you could only pay me to touch it if you also promised to pay for my medical care. Now, in fairness, coal mines operating in the US today are under regulations to... well, not just drop this stuff in creeks, and instead they run their water runoff through tanks with a ton of lime, which makes it not terrifyingly acidic and gets most of the metals out. Most of the worst of it in WV is because of abandoned coal mines: if the place dumping god knows what into your water closed in 1910 and no one knows where it even goes anymore, whose job is it to clean it up? And that is why our creeks are orange.
