Shiny Things

08:15 am - Questions: What's On That Wheel?

I saw a garbage truck yesterday that had these teardrop-shaped devices on its wheels. What are they?

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06:41 am - The Poop on Thomas Crapper

1. Did Thomas Crapper really invent the flush toilet?
2. Did his surname give rise to a new verb?

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07:13 am - Questions from Morgan's Recital

Morgan's choir had their school recital last week, and as I attended a couple of questions came to mind:

1. In the song "We Need a Little Christmas", as the choir sang "candles at the window, candles at the spinnet", I wondered, "What is a spinnet?"

2. As I've often wondered before, and was reminded by the instruments the children played in the opening song, why is a recorder both a musical instrument and the device that retains my verbal reminders to myself?

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09:17 am - eBay

1. What is the origin of the name of the auction website "eBay"?
2. What was the very first item sold on eBay?
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09:00 am - Starbucks Logo

What _is_ the Starbucks logo supposed to be? Is the female figure holding up coffee bags or what?

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09:19 am - Caissons

What are caissons, as in the song "As the Caissons Go Rolling Along"?

11:42 am - Penguin

What's the origin of the word "penguin"? Is it related to "pinguescence", an obscure English word meaning "the process of becoming fat" (featured in this week's World Wide Words)?

08:50 am - Coffee Makers

How does a coffee maker get the water from the reservoir up to the drip basket?

09:28 pm - Tusken Raiders, Hookahs

From conversations I've had with bushi7 recently:

1. Since she's building a house in Second Life on Tuscany Island, I suggested that she should include statue of a Tusken Raider. Then I wondered, what's the difference between a Tusken Raider and Sand People?

2. We've noticed that hookah bars are increasing in popularity, perhaps in response to municipal smoking bans. So how does a hookah work?

01:45 pm - Kaleidoscope, Pepitas, Three Sisters

1. Where does the word "kaleidoscope" come from?

2. What are pepitas, which I found in some snack mix a colleague brought in today?

3. What are the Native American agricultural "three sisters", which I read about while looking up "pepita"?

07:47 pm - Nautilus, Gewurtztraminer, XKCD, Big Mac

1. What is a nautilus, and are they extinct?

2. How do you pronounce Gewurtztraminer?

3. What does the name of the webcomic XKCD mean?

4. How is the middle slice of bread in a Big Mac created?

07:53 am - Indigo, Sand Dollars, Comedogenic

1.  Why is there a seventh color-indigo-in the rainbow, that isn't discussed in optics? What does indigo look like, anyway?

2. Where do sand dollars come from?

3. We have some skin lotion that says it is "non-comedogenic". Does that mean that it won't start something funny?

12:36 pm - Sail Sledges

In Around the World in Eighty Days, Jules Verne describes sail-powered sledges being driven across the snow-covered prairies of western America. I have to wonder if this was ever remotely commonplace, or just something Verne made up out of whole cloth. I know that people do land sailing now (looks like fun), but they are using wheels, on especially flat places such as dry lake beds and beaches. I especially doubt the part of his account that the sledge sailor had no concern over crossing creeks and rivers, because they were frozen over. That may be so, but they would still have banks, which often drop steeply.

Online research hasn't revealed much, except references to the novel itself. Anyone have any thoughts or information on the subject?

04:05 pm - The Eponymous Bearcat

The bearcat is the mascot of numerous colleges and high schools. A car was named for it. A plane was named for it. A line of police scanners was named for it. But what is it, and where does it live?

10:54 am - Downtown and Uptown

Where did the designations "downtown" and "uptown" come from?

04:27 pm - Guinea Pigs: Recovered

This is the post I lost earlier today: I was able to salvage it from my web browser's cache files.

1. I don't know that I've ever heard of any actual research being performed with guinea pigs, so why is the term "guinea pig" synonymous with "research subject"? 

2. Are they pigs? If not, what are they? 

3. Are they from Guinea? If not, where are they from? 

4. Where is Guinea, anyway? 

5. Why were British pounds sometimes referred to as guineas? 

09:35 am - Plutonium

Yesterday I was helping Brandon study for chemistry. The question came up, where does plutonium come from?

10:31 am - ?allow

1. What does callow mean?

2. What does sallow mean?

3. What does wallow mean?

4. What does mallow mean?

09:58 am - Bacon Numbers

Yesterday a requirements meeting at work had a sidebar in which one of the managers was calculating Bacon numbers for a few different actors (no, I don't recall what started it). Someone mentioned that there was an online tool for calculating the Bacon number of any actor in IMDB, so this morning I went looking for it, and I found it from a link on the Wikipedia page.

1. One actor that came up in the meeting was Luciano Pavarotti, which seemed like a real challenge. The manager came up with a Bacon number of 6, but I stumbled across a bit of information on the Wikipedia page that showed it was only 2. What single actor connects Pavarotti and Bacon?

2. Bacon is not actually the most-connected actor in IMDB. Who is?

05:28 am - Mobius Strip

Brandon was playing with my mom's adding machine on Saturday and it somehow got stuck, continuing to spew out tape for several seconds. After getting it stopped I demonstrated how you could use the tape to create a mobius strip by giving one end a half twist and then taping the ends together. Then I demonstrated what happens when you cut a mobius strip down its center line, only the result was not what I'd expected. What was it?