learn something new everyday

I started listening to an audiobook on the way to work today – Blink by Malcolm Gladwell. The introduction centers around a Greek Statue that the Getty museum bought after months of careful examination but was later decided to be a fake by many who had an immediate and visceral reaction to the work. (The idea behind the book is tapping into our adaptive unconscious which he believes can make accurate snap decisions – an interesting argument for me – an analyst! – to hear.)

Anyway, I learned that, rather specifically, Greek sculptures depicting young, standing nude men with their left legs thrust slightly forward are referred to collectively as kouros. And that there are fewer than 200 of them surviving in various forms (most deeply fragmented).

The Getty, by the by, shows the kouros on their website – they’re sort of “maybe” on the forgery. Yet the anomalies of the Getty kouros may be due more to our limited knowledge of Greek sculpture in this period rather than to mistakes on the part of a forger. is their bottom line. There’s a Greek goes to Egypt and finds a river joke in that sentence…

;)

I want to keep this on – I haven’t been terribly observant lately, but I know there’s stuff there!

So the news has had all sorts of new information on annual exams for women – most of it in minute-long segments that I’ve sort of listened to while getting ready for work. I had a crazy thought today – ASK my doctor during my physical what’s what.

So here’s what I learned today:

PAPs – She agrees with the every-3 year assessment IF you’ve tested negative for the HPV virus. So if I’m good, I’m good. I mentioned my maternal grandmother’s cervical cancer and that’s when she explained that maternal genetics are not indicators. HPV is really the key to everything. Honestly, if I had a daughter, I couldn’t imagine NOT getting her the vaccine.

Mammograms – she doesn’t agree with the “every 5 years” assessment. Actually, she was pretty hot over the whole notion that telling a population that having a false positive being “stressful” as a major reason not to have a test was pretty insulting to women in general. Plus, there are a lot of issues in play – family history is a major one in this one. But so is not ever having children – that increases your risk.

Really, they should have my doctor on these TV shows. She’s really good about bullet-pointing things.

I’m reading another book right now to get it back to the library before the weekend is up and with a lot of other things, the girl is a bit of a math savant. So she discusses Fibnaccis – numbers that are in this math sequence:

0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89, 144, 233, 377, 610, 987

If you can’t see the pattern right off, this is the formula:

x_n+1 = x_n + x_n-1

And if that doesn’t help (it didn’t help me), this is what these numbers do (other than relax the character in the book by thinking about them):

The first two numbers are 0 and 1 – you add them together and get a sum of 1. You add that second number to the sum and you will then get 2. And you continue – so the chain at first looks like this:

0 + 1 = 1
1 + 1 = 2
1 + 2 = 3
2 + 3 = 5
3 + 5 = 8
5 + 8 = 13
8 + 13 = 21
13 + 21 = 34
21 + 34 = 55
34 + 55 = 89
55 + 89 = 144

I of course think this is an entertaining parlor trick, but now I’m wondering why this list is named after a guy – well, it turns out these numbers are described as the Golden Ratio. It was also the way to solve this problem:

Beginning with a single pair of rabbits, if every month each productive pair bears a new pair, which becomes productive when they are 1 month old, how many rabbits will there be after n months?

Apparently, algebra tournaments were very popular back in Fibonacci’s day. The formula also had to take into account that new rabbits couldn’t breed for a month – so this is where his sequence came into play. And then it turns out that it applied not only to rabbits, but to all sorts of things in nature – this is the golden ratio. Petals on flowers, pine cone rows, chambers in various fruits, all sorts of things – followed this sequence.

And as numbers get really large in math, there’s this sort of desire to know which of the bigger numbers you might run across is, in fact, one of these Fibonacci Numbers.

I didn’t take a lot of math – it ended after college algebra and statistics courses – but parts of it does fascinate me. If it had all been interesting trivia where I could scratch the surface, I might have been more drawn to it. :)

Specifically, Helvetica...

So it’s ubiquitous today, but did you know that the font was invented in 1957? It’s important to know this because if you do know this (and about the many other fonts and when they were invented), period films and television shows are apparently flooded with font errors.

Or so the New York Times article I read today explained. And I found the article they referenced earlier about how Helvetica distracted in Good Night, and Good Luck (you can see the CBS News Logo in Helvetica) and in Titanic, where the dials on the pressure gauges were done in Helvetica.

If that weren’t enough, they point to a blog that goes even further in their investigation:

http://www.ms-studio.com/typecasting.html

And I thought we just had to worry about the occasional digital watch on a cowboy!

It’s 17,462 square miles. This came up thanks to the Amazing Race (see, it’s not just a Reality Show, it’s educational!) when I had to admit that not only was I iffy on the location of tonight’s destination (exact quote: “Eastern Europe-ish”) and the size of the country.

So, to the Wikipeida. It’s Eastern Europe! But much further north than I imagined. And to get a sense of size – West Virginia is 24,231 square miles, while Maryland is 10,455 square miles – so either lob of a bit of WV or add to MD and that’s the size of Estonia.

As a bonus, the trivia at the end of the Amazing Race claimed Estonia had more meteor hits per square mile than any other country on the planet. Interesting.

This may be gross, but now I’m all (o)~(O) about this information.

So I’ve always known blood in your pee is a bad thing…what I didn’t know is that there’s a whole disorder involving invisible blood. What the heck?

It’s called Microscopic Hematuria and it does involve visible blood, but most of the time, it’s invisible. It’s not me, but someone else that has it – and it sounds terrible.

But here’s my thought process on medical conditions like this.

- Who discovers this stuff?
- Honestly, one day, someone had to think, blood cold be invisible you know and go from there…
- And convince other doctors that he wasn’t high on this whole invisible blood theory.
- And then they had to convince patients that invisible blood wasn’t a scam to charge people extra money for testing.
- Seriously, would you pay good money to be treated for a disorder that involved invisible blood?

It is a painful thing from what I was told, but now I know. And I’m kind of freaked out by this thing. And a little amazed. And wondering why our bodies do this sort of thing.

I didn’t know what this was – and that’s a good thing!

I knew that bounced checks could show up on your credit report (I’ve seen it), but ChexSystems is the reporting tool banks use to report bad checking accounts (bounced checks, fraud, etc.). Once you’re in, you’re in for 5 years and you can’t really open a checking account with anyone until you’re out. Each bank has their own guidelines for reporting you – but most banks have 2nd chance accounts for their customers that were in it if it wasn’t straight-up fraud (they want to recoup money they lost from you).

I didn’t know about it and that was a good thing. I only know about it for professional reasons now. I plan on keeping it that way.

So I’ve been watching Food Channel’s search for the next Iron Chef and on last night’s episode featuring Umami (my trivia – that was the Japanese name for MSG’s impact on taste which is now being rebranded – but when they mention soy sauce and Parmesan cheese in the same sentence as containing this “ingredient,” they’re talking MSG!).

Anyway, I guess I always assumed that soy sauce was some sort of boiled down soy bean in a vinegar. Not so much. Alton Brown (who doesn’t love him?) explained it. I had the envisioned beans that were boiled down part sort of down – but those ferment with a wheat and another mixture (koji) and water to make another mess called moromi. They’ll also add Aspergillus – a mold to move along the fermentation process.

Since it was partly a Kikkoman spot, Alton was sure to mention that Kikkoman Soy Sauce apparently uses their original Aspergillus which is nearly 400 years old. Who knew?

Anyway, so it ferments. For a while. Yes, it gets moldy. And then it ages – anywhere from a few months to years. It’s practically wine.

And I love soy sauce. Because it’s an awesome marinade, dipping sauce, seasoning and dressing base. And now I appreciate it a bit more for how it’s made.

Guess what I just got to do at work?

That’s right, I’m doing some real work and even though it wasn’t expressly told to me, I ended up doing a little extra research on some Due on Sale things for Mortgages and found some Garn Act Exceptions.

Yeah, Compliance will come back with these things (and more), but I wanted to make the flow chart look a little better. Of course, I even managed to find a lot of mis-information out there as well – some folks have a rather broad interpretation of what constitutes an Inter Vitos Trust out there…apparently anything that’s a Trust is an Inter Vitos Trust – you know, the same way that every car is a Rolls Royce.

But at least I got a running start and I understand a few things.