Feeling a bit braindead this week. I was feeling so braindead, in fact, I totally spaced on writing a blog last night!. Going forward I’ll just be planning to post new blogs every Saturday morning. This week, though, I thought I’d throw out some fun facts that like to rattle around in my brain, rent free as it were.
So, lucky you, dear reader, will now be the victims of these mental squatters.
- The binary code used in computers (1s and 0s) is actually just voltage present or absent (usually 5v or 3.3v) and isn’t what we’d think of as a 1 or 0. A 1 just means that for that particular clock cycle there was a 5v current present.
- The hard end of a shoelace is called an aglet. (Thanks, Phineas and Ferb.)
- DVD doesn’t stand for digital video disc, but instead stands for digital versatile disc because it can be used for video, audio, or data storage. Remember when DVDs used to be a thing?
- The reason modern touch screens can read your touch is because your skin somewhat conductive and completes small circuits on the screen of the device. It’s kinda, sorta electrocuting you to do that. Just a little. Neat, huh?
- Potatoes are nightshades, along with tomatoes and eggplants. Some people think nightshades can have negative health effects. You’ll take my potatoes out of my cold, dead hands, though.
- The song “My Favorite Things” from The Sound of Music is often thought of as a Christmas song but has no actual ties to Christmas in origin.
- Bananas are going extinct and it’s not the first time it’s happened in the last century.
- The name of the evil stepmother from the animated movie Disney’s Cinderella is Lady Tremaine. The name of the evil stepmother from Ever After is Baroness Rodmilla de Ghent. Also a fact, there is never a bad time to watch either version. Same goes for Rodgers & Hammerstein’s Cinderella with Brandy and Whitney Houston. “Ten minutes ago I met you, and we said our ‘how do you do’s….”
- Though there’s much debate, some people say the difference between a drawing and a painting is pretty easy in digital art. If the original sketch is painted over, it becomes a painting. If the sketch is preserved as line art, that makes it a drawing. I’d never thought of it that way before and it makes a ton of sense, if you think about it.
- Pockets used to be separate garments worn underneath pants/skirts and accessed through slits in the outer garment or worn on the outside of pants or skirt. Pockets on the outside were basically asking to be stolen, if you ask me.
There we go! Ten random factoids from my brain to yours! Expect something more hard-hitting and introspective next week.
Photo by Jan Antonin Kolar on Unsplash
