learn something new every day

Alcohol is from an Arabic word for eyeshadow. etymonline.com says:

1540s, “fine powder produced by sublimination,” from M.L. alcohol “powdered ore of antimony,” from Arabic al-kuhul “kohl,” the fine metallic powder used to darken the eyelids, from kahala “to stain, paint.” The al- is the Arabic definite article, “the.” “Powdered cosmetic” was the earliest sense in Eng.; definition broadened 1670s to “any subliminated substance, the pure spirit of anything.” Modern sense of “intoxicating ingredient in strong liquor” is first recorded 1753, short for alcohol of wine, which was extended to “the intoxicating element in fermented liquors.” In organic chemistry, the word was extended 1850 to the class of compounds of the same type as this.

Saint Winifred was going to be raped by some prince’s son. She ran off, but he caught up with her on horseback and chopped off her head. Her uncle Saint Bueno ran out of his church and, on seeing what had taken place, cursed the prince’s son dude so vehemently that the dude was dragged away by demons. Saint Bueno then grabbed his niece’s head from the ground, placed it on her bleeding neck, and told everyone standing around in shock to pray. Finally Winifred’s head reattached, leaving only a thin red line. What had been blood turned to water and a well was built, to which people still pilgramize today, and Winifred lived to a ripe old age and was never beheaded again.

She was just a little Welsh local saint until someone found her relics and went “oh man, this chick was UNDEAD”.

I didn’t have to look up any of this to type this up, because I’ve been reading up on her voraciously to do a silly little silent comic about her. I’ve already done two out of perhaps ten pages.

Red-winged Blackbirds are very polygynous. One of the (very territorial) males may have as many as 15 females making nests in his territory, but ironically, often the young in “his” nests were sired by other males.

... ownage.

The Pear Garden or Liyuan (Chinese: 梨园), the first known royal acting and musical academy in China. It was founded during the Tang Dynasty by Emperor Xuanzong (712–755). It may be the first institutional Academy of Music in the world.

In later dynasties the phrase “Pear Garden” was used to allude to the world of Chinese opera in general.

- Wikipedia

The Kiswahili word for “right” is kulia, which means “to eat with.”

- http://www.foodbycountry.com/, which is a pretty great site.

The 2009 Lexus can apparently parallel park itself.

Venus has very little water in it’s atmosphere, possibly because the planet has no magnetic field – meaning that, with no magnetic field to act sort of like a net to trap the oncoming particles from solar winds, the particles slam directly into the atmosphere of Venus, dehydrating it.

One more:

In Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, after the narrator (Chaucer himself) has finished contributing an incredibly bad poem, The Tale of Sir Thopas, Harry Bailey says “Thy drasty rymyng is nat worth a toord,” which basically translates to “Your crappy rhyming is not worth a turd,” ‘drasty’ being a new word by Chaucer himself.

Yeah. I’ve been listening to a series of lectures on cassette about Chaucer. :3

Quick one:

The universe was actually already around 290,000 years old by the time it had matter in the form of particles, rather than just energy.

Sorry for so few postingz: I’ve been too busy with NaNoWriMo and school to really post a lot (in other words, I’ve been too busy learning new things to learn new things!) But I’ve got something pretty great for you guys today that I hope makes up for it. It’s a website my astronomy teacher sent us too:
http://chandra.harvard.edu , the website for the Chandra X-ray Observatory.

If you don’t want to look around the whole site, here are some particularly neat things I found:
Scotch tape generates X-raysImage of the Sirius binary star systemHottest known white dwarfOldest Known Objects May Be Surprisingly Immature

Okay, that’s enough link spam for now.
Oh, if you guys want: I have some pretty good notes from my class on binary stars, black holes, dark matter, and white dwarfs. If anyone is interested, I could transcribe them and post them here. What do you think? If any of you would be interested, comment and let me know which ones I should post. :]

- Lysine, who will probably never consider this goal complete because she has too much fun posting these entries. a loser is me