Little facts I have gathered from here and there.
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December 26, 2007 • 12:36 am
I’ve just been reading Wikipedia’s article on Bananas. To those who say it is not a fruit, but a herb, I say, “Do your research before correcting people.” Of course bananas are fruits, they are the bits that contain the seeds.
The banana plant is a herb, not a tree — but the bit we eat [...]
April 21, 2007 • 10:38 pm
Wikipedia is a blessed and holy site. I read its article on pepper and I was fascinated from start to finish. I pepper people’s food all day long. I am in no way exaggerating when I say that I must put grams and grams of the stuff on people’s dinners.
Grams, I tell you. Grams. And [...]
August 24, 2006 • 11:51 am
Apparently in Japan there is, or used to be, some controversy as to whether 12 am referred to noon or midnight. I found the following anecdote on a blog and I think it’s great.
Back in 1972, a K-12 student got confused and asked the teacher which is right. The inquiry was forwarded to the principal, [...]
June 17, 2006 • 7:37 pm
Sorry about the no posts, I have been in lovely Devon for the whole week, sunning myself and also being around my excellent friends from Sheffield and having a wonderful time. It was so wonderful, in fact, that it almost constituted a religious experience. At any rate, I can no longer look at milk without [...]
May 31, 2006 • 7:25 am
Parasites are, generally, hated creatures. They take resources but they never give back. That’s actually the biological definition of a parasite: an animal or plant which takes resources (food, energy, etc) without bringing any benefit to its host.
April 25, 2006 • 6:46 pm
I have long wondered whether the word “none” is plural (“None of us are”) or singular (“None of us is”).
Well, it suddenly occurred to me that the Internet might know, so I asked Oxford, and here is what it told me:
Some traditionalists maintain that none can only take a singular verb (as in “none of [...]
April 19, 2006 • 12:28 pm
We all know (or at least I hope we do) that RSVP stands for Répondez s’il vous plaît — meaning “Please respond” in French.
But did you know that it’s generally only English-speaking people that use this French phrase? Modern day French-speakers use “prière de répondre”.
I was just thinking about how you would tell a French [...]
April 18, 2006 • 12:06 pm
Try as I might I don’t really get it, but bascially there’s something about the electrical charge of fingers that makes it possible to distinguish between a finger and, say, a carrot. I have managed to make one work by touching a spoon and then moving the spoon about, but since the spoon was metal [...]