learn something new everyday

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.

Okay, it was pretty easy – I used dbPoweramp Batch converter, but this was after looking up stuff and having some files that I wasn’t really able to load onto the iPod for awhile.

Now I can. Yay me.

Although the program is snotty – it reminded me how sucky mp3 quality was about 30 times. Whatevs. It’s not like I’m DJing. It’s a freaking iPod.

What with the new job and all, but yesterday, I learned how to navigate a bit of the customer service system. They have this cute icon that they can press for customers that call in and like to share random facts – so if you like to talk about, say, model trains, they can note that you like that. This way, any rep that talks to you can know to ask you about model trains.

I thought that was rather spiffy – and certainly beats constantly asking about how the weather is in an area. :)

Is in the Netherlands…in Gronigen .

Due to the large student population (50,000 out of the 185,000 who live there), the average age of the entire population is just about 35.

I learned this on the Amazing Race last night.