defeat my own ignorance by finding 43 things I know little or nothing about and learning three things about each

My friend is having a peacock themed wedding, so while I was looking up what colors they usually are, I learned some things.

1. The species is called ‘peafowl’ and the females ‘peahens’. Nobody cares about the peahens because they’re just brown and kind of boring looking.
2. Some European countries had the belief that they were protectors of the royal family and kept them as pets (they ate some pests as a bonus) and put images of them on the back of thrones.
3. There is more than one kind of peafowl. The Indian and green versions look a lot alike, but the Congo looks more like a flashy turkey to me.

He plays Ron Swanson, one of our favorite characters from Parks and Recreation. And we went to his show last week! Which was awesome!

1. He grew up in Minooka, Illinois. (Yay, Midwesterners!)
2. He’s married to Megan Mullally.
3. He has his own wood shop where he makes canoes and tables and other such things. (In his show he says it’s very important to have a hobby. He said to go home and make some kick ass cornbread. I didn’t have enough cornmeal, so I made cinnamon rolls instead…. but I think I got the spirit of it!)

1. There is wild yeast just about everywhere ready for the catching in sourdough starter. And yeast from different places will taste different.
2. The culture is fairly easy to maintain as long as you make sure that the yeast is stronger than the bacteria (also just about everywhere) also growing in your starter. Orange or pineapple juice provides a favorable acidity for this. The instructions I read had you start the starter this way and switch to water. I had a bit of a bacteria takeover and used some more OJ to perk the starter right back up. If you leave sourdough out for too long without feeding it, it’ll turn into a soupy bacteria laden mess.
3. You can dehydrate the starter into flakes which will stay viable indefinitely. (And I really need to follow up on my promises to send some to certain people. It’s on my todo list! If anyone else wants some, speak now while it’s on my mind!)

1. Has antioxidants and bio active compounds that aid memory (even just smelling it helps apparently) and may be anti carcinogenic and beneficial to Alzheimer’s patients. Is also antibacterial and its extract is used as a food preservative.
2. Ros marinus – dew of the sea. Named such because it’s very drought tolerant and can live off of the humidity supplied by the ocean.
3. Was used as a symbol of remembrance in many cultures. For example, it was tossed into graves to symbolize that the survivors would remember the dead.

I was baking rosemary bread this week for the second time. I don’t feel like I’m remembering things significantly better than usual, but it probably isn’t hurting, either!

What did you say? I live in Iowa, worked in cornfields the same summer I started visiting 43T, and now working for a corn seed company, so I should know everything about corn? I disagree. I know how to kill a rouge plant, detassel (squeak!) and shuck ears, what growing corn sounds like, how delicious corn bread is, and how well a layer of corn meal works for keeping bread and pizza non-stick, but how much do I really know?

1. Corn can grow up to 23 feet tall. (And I thought working in 8 ft corn was scary.)
2. People can be allergic to corn! More specifically the lipid transfer protein within it.
3. The combines don’t actually cut the corn stalks. (Look pretty sharp to me!) Instead they pull them down under the vehicle. The ears are too big to pass under, so they get pulled off the stalk and pushed into the storage part of the combine.
Bonus: over 80% of American corn is genetically modified.

Ok…I knew this before, but it still amazes me that people eat this stuff: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corn_smut
I went out of my way not to touch this stuff in the fields…it’s sticky and it looks like some sort of alien pod ready to burst with something vile. (MAAAYBE too much scifi lately.)

Strange mix, I know…

Ruby (The programming language)
1. There are no semi-colons at the end of a line! Talk about having to break habits;
2. It is portable from OS to OS, which is why it’s used so often on web platforms.
3. It is weakly typed

I’ve probably learned more, but a lot of this programming language feels pretty natural to me after all the others I’ve learned.

Immanuel Kant (from an ethics book by Micheal J. Sandel)
1. Kant sees a clear moral difference between outright lying and telling truths in such a manner as to be misleading. Sandel points to Bill Clinton’s carefully worded statements as an example.
2. Kant says that by following your interests and desires you are a slave, but by following a strict reasoned course of action you are free. (And apparently everyone will reason to the same course of action. I am suspicious.)
3. Kant sees murder and suicide as the same crime. Using a person (even if it is yourself) as a means to an end rather than respecting a human life as an end to itself.

I’m pretty sure I don’t like a lot of what Kant says. But the book has made me think about a lot of things I had never considered before, morally and politically, so I am enjoying the section of this book even though I have some major issues with this philosopher.

1. Do NOT put on the covering coat before the first coat dries. You destroy the paper. OOOPS! I tried to rush things and killed my first attempt. The effect might be interesting though…so we’ll see what it looks like when it dries.

2. The word Decoupage comes from the French word “découper”, which means “to cut out”, and it was originally called “The art of Japanning” because the middle class English could use paper to make furniture look similar to expensive imported Japanese painted furniture.

3. Matisse and Picasso did decoupage works.

So I found an abandoned copy of Fountainhead in a desk drawer at work and I got interested. Fascinating lady, even if I don’t agree completely with her.

1. Objectivism – her philosophy, which she sums up as follows:
a. Metaphysics Objective Reality, “Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed” or “Wishing won’t make it so.”
b. Epistemology Reason “You can’t eat your cake and have it, too.”
c. Ethics Self-interest “Man is an end in himself.”
d. Politics Capitalism “Give me liberty or give me death.”

2. She escaped from Soviet Russia by telling them she was going on a short visit to relatives in NYC. She then extended her visa and ran off for Hollywood, never to return to Russia. She became an American citizen six years later.

3. The Fountainhead was her first novel, which took her seven years to write and was rejected by 12 publishers before being accepted. It went on to be a best seller two years late on word of mouth.

My home grocery store is using this system now. What I got off of the shelves is that the higher the number, the better it is for you. I still doubt the comparison across food groups, but it was nice to be able to easily see which juices were “better” for me. It also led me to see the sale price on the healthier juice! So, I’m willing to give this system a fair shake. I don’t like how it neglects to tell consumers that you need to have a variety of healthy foods, not just one or two very healthy ones and nothing else. It’s a good start, or supplement to nutrition I suppose.

Things I learned from their website:
1. It takes into account 30 different nutrients in a numerator (good for you) and denominator (bad for you) fashion to come up with a base score. Then they adjust up or down for level of calories and the effect on known diseases.
2. They use their “Overall Nutritional Quality Index” and the University of Minnesota’s Nutrition Coordinating Center’s Food and Nutrient Database to rate the level of healthiness of each food. They do NOT take whether a food is organic into account of its nutrition. (They make a statement saying they may be better for you, but not in nutrition. Lack of chemicals and whatnot.)
3. The company was formed by a grocers’ organization and the Yale-Griffin hospital last year, and is led by their “team of recognized experts”. Their purpose is to make nutrition information more accessible to the masses.

Here’s the website: http://www.nuval.com

1. Your computer will do nothing but spit out meaningless babble.

It’s a denial-of-service attack. The forking processes pretty much fill up the computer and overwhelm the processor with doing nothing but making more processes.

2. It’s impossible, or nearly so, to stop a fork bomb once it has happened. You MUST reboot.

3. While the below is not what I wrote…it’s pretty darn close. THIS IS BAD!!!! Especially if your computer doesn’t have security against it.
int main(void)
{
while(1)
fork();
return 0;
}

4. You have to make very pretty apologies to the IT people, promise it was a mistake and you’ll never ever do it again before they will take the locks off of your user profile and let you back on the school computers.