One of the program tasks is very specific: Read The Know-It-All by A.J. Jacobs. I first started it a few years ago, and shared my favorite factoids through ‘D’. Now here are my favorites in E through O!
Ecstasy was originally patented by Merck as an appetite suppressant in the 1920s (wonder what their Covid vaccine will look like!) Ancient Etruscans were known to write in alternating directs on each line (left-to-right, right-to-left).
The ‘F’s are full of fun. Ever wonder why on Earth the Fahrenheit system seems so random? Well for one, Daniel Fahrenheit was inaccurate – and estimated the human body temperature at 90 degrees (when we now know it as 98.6), but more importantly he used the freezing point of a mixture of equal parts salt and water as his basis for ‘0’. WT….?! Why not just make it a frozen margarita?! Farnsworth, Philo successfully broadcast the first television image on American T.V. – a dollar sign $.
Did you know that a gal is a unit of measurement? It’s a measurement of acceleration equal to one centimeter per second per second, named after Galileo. And where might you find some of this acceleration? Perhaps in a gymnasium, for which the literal translation from Greek was “school for naked exercise”, and indeed is how it used to be. And you though getting changed in front of your classmates during gym class was embarassing!
Heroine was originally developed by Bayer as a pain killer. Another case of now illegal drugs coming from your major legal drug companies. Speaking of drugs, Hollywood was founded by a man named Horace Wilcox, “a prohibitionist who envisioned it a community based on his sober religious principles.” Bet he’s turning in his grave now!
That’s just one of the many cases of irony in the Britannica. Jacobs gives us a whole list in the ‘i’s‘ section. Also of interesting note, it was an old Balinese Indonesian custom to force boy-girl twins to marry, as it was assumed they had intercourse in the womb. Huh.
Jonson, Ben was an actor who got away with murder, literally. He invoked an immunity clause known as the “benefit of the clergy”, “clergy” at the time being legally defined as anyone who could read the Fifty-first Psalm in Latin. Guess I should have been studying Latin all these years! This is just one of many legal loopholes Jacobs also lists for us (though not in the ‘Ls“).
A kappa is not just the tenth letter of the Greek alphabet. It is also a “vampire-like lecherous creature” from Japanese folklore that is obsessed with cucumbers, looks like a scaley green monkey in old drawings, and a cute turtle in modern cartoons, and refuses to bow its head for fear of spilling the water it keeps on top. Maybe they were using some of the LSD from the “Ls”…..
In learning, the Britannica says that a high IQ is “strongly associated with the 35-yard dash and balancing on one foot”. Huh?!?!?! I have a high IQ, but zero balance and I got kicked out of gym class for “running like a girl”. It’s a paradox alright, but not as bad as the liar paradox, which states, “If the sentence, ‘This sentence is not true’ is true, then it is not true, and if it is not true, then it is true.” It is seen in one of my favorite movies, Labyrinth, which, coincidentally, also begins with an L. Rounding out the Ls is good old Louis XIV, who was known for many things. But one thing you may not have known is that he tried to ban biological warfare by paying off an Italian scientist who had invented a biological weapon to keep quiet and never use or share it.
Looking for some more useful information? Then this tidbit of mechanics, fluid is for you. You should buy gasoline on cold days, because the colder the gas is, the lower its volume, making it less expensive. So even cool gas is better than warm gas. Cool and warm, by the way, could be considered a meronymn, the word between two opposites. Opposite of the aforementioned whacky Fahrenheit scale, is the much more sensical metric system.
“I’m a convert to the metric system. I feel un-American even typing those words.”
– Jacobs, A.J.
The ‘Ms’ leave us with these fascinating tidbits: a mule is the sterile offspring of a male donkey and a female horse. This is not to be confused with a hinny, the offspring of a female donkey and a male horse. And, Mussolini, Benito started his career as a journalist. No wonder he was good at getting people to believe him! Christmas just passed and Three King’s Day is approaching, and most people have an idea what frankincense and gold are, but in case you are wondering, myrrh is a substance obtained from small trees and was used to relieve sore gums. Perhaps the Three Kings, or La Bufana, will bring me some myrrh next week!
Napoleon was known for being a rascal. So much so, that he purposely made sure there was no priest at his wedding to Josephine, so that he could leave her later without the need for divorce. Apparently the decision to give countries nautical jurisdiction over three nautical miles from their coast is because that was the distance a cannon could fire. The nursery rhyme “Jack and Jill” is actually an allegory about British taxes. I wonder if children 200 years from now will sing a nursery rhyme about Brexit?
Under occupational diseases, along with carpel tunnel syndrome, we learn that in the past, hatters used mercury salts to make felt for their hats, often leading to mercury poisoning and the term “mad as a hatter”. The ancient Egyptians used olive oil as lube to move large building materials. This does not mean it should be used to lubricate other things… and on that note, I leave you with one more practical piece of encylopaedia advice – cutting onions under running water will keep you from crying.
The Alternative Graduate 