Kettle

Kettles use an extraordinary amount of electricity. I saw a review of one of those machines you can buy which measures in real time your electricity consumption in your house, and the reviewer said when he boiled his kettle the machine showed such a massive spike in energy usage, it made him totally conscious of only putting into the kettle as much water as he actually needed for his cup of tea.

Which ties in neatly with the UK's National Grid having up-to-the-second information on what was on telly, so that for instance during the commercial break in an episode of Coronation Street they could quickly switch on a whole extra nuclear power station, to cover the nation's kettles being switched on. Mad but true!

Carrots

It's worth splashing out and buying organic carrots, because they really DO taste so much better. With other vegetables, the improvement in taste you get from going organic seems more subtle, but with carrots it just slaps you in the face.

Grip

Here's one that occurred to me as I looked down at my bike tyres today, thinking that they needed pumping up:

If you're driving across sand dunes, it's important to deflate your car tyres by quite a bit, in order to increase the grip on the slippery surface.

Then I thought it's probably just as well my bike tyres aren't full, given how much grit is lying on the roads at this snowy time of year...

Guest fact: moles

My dear friend Ali wants me to share this little factoid with you:

Moles tie knots in worms. It's true.

So watch out down there under the soil, folks!

Europe's largest monument

I've been there, and it's impressive: the Monument to the Battle of the Nations, which stands on a hill just outside the centre of Leipzig. It commemmorates the victory over Napoleon in 1813 by a coalition of Prussians, Russians and Austrians, which was the beginning of the end for old Bonaparte.

And there's a great view from the top!

Alcohol in beers

If you drink a 330ml bottle of beer that's 5% alcohol, you consume less alcohol than if you drink a 355ml bottle of beer that's only 4.9% alcohol. In fact, the beer would have to be under 4.6% alcohol for there to be less alcohol in it than in the other, smaller but stronger bottle.

Rubber bands

They're great for opening jars. Just put a rubber band or two right around the lid, and then open the jar as per normal with your hand. The rubber gives you extra grip, and this is almost always enough to get the lid off. Hooray!

Truite au bleu

If you poach a trout in not just water but 2/3 water and 1/3 tarragon vinegar, its scales will turn blue. But you have to make sure you don't wash the fish too thoroughly before putting it in the water, otherwise it won't work.

Yum!

Romanian

Romanian is a language that has evolved from Latin, but because it is surrounded by Slavic languages it's no surprise to learn that it has lots of loan words from Slavic.

It's easy for Romanians to learn Italian because lots of pairs of synonyms in Romanian have one Slavic root and one Latin root. So even if the Latin-derived word isn't very common, chances are a Romanian will have heard it somewhere along the way, and will recognise the corresponding word in an Italian text.

There you go.

Beanbags

Here's something banal but yet strangely comfortable that I learned whilst in Milan: the beanbag was invented there! I shall in future slouch on them with the satisfaction of knowing that I am, figuratively speaking, a hair's breadth away from a fashion catwalk...

Bananas

Bananas can't reproduce sexually. They're all clones.

Body hair

Blonde people have less hair than brunettes, and redheads have even less hair than blondes. Not just on their head either: body hair is also more widely spaced on people with lighter coloured hair. Crazy isn't it!

Tadpoles

Tadpoles are supposed to turn into frogs in like a few months at most. But there are some tadpoles that don't become frogs that year at all! Or at least, we had a couple of tadpoles that were MUCH bigger than their brethren in our pond a few years in a row. And that's a fact.

Cars

I overheard some people talking about electric cars the other day, and how it will take time for people to become used to not using their ears so much when on the road. This was based on the theory that electric vehicles are much much quieter than petrol- or diesel-driven cars.

But in fact, in recent years car technology has come on so far that the biggest source of noise from a passing car is in fact the sound of the air escaping from between the tyres and the road! So it shouldn't be as much of a big adjustment after all.

Revolutionary fact

Here's another one from Lorna:

Che Guevara was very severely asthmatic, and in fact a lot of the time he was being a guerrilla he was being carried by other guerrillas. He was a stubborn chappie who, having been trained as a medical doctor, also knew how to inject himself with steroids. He'd have made a fine Olympic athlete, methinks...

From the deep

Did you know that more people die each year through being hit on the head by a coconut than get eaten by sharks?

And I KNOW it's true: I counted them myself!

(Well, maybe not, but hey...)

Entry from Milan

Here's a guest factoid from my friend Lorna, who I'm visiting in Milan this week:

If you yawn, chances are someone who is watching you yawn will also have to yawn.

So, there you go folks!

Lorna has been kind enough to furnish me with a supposition to go with her fact, namely that if you see someone YOU LIKE yawning you'll yawn, but if you DON'T like them you won't.

So there!!

Public transport?

They did tests to compare the energy efficiency of a big electric train versus each of the passengers driving their own car to their destination. The train turned out to be LESS efficient - but only because of all the stops. If it had just gone from London to Edinburgh without stops, it would have been much more efficient than doing the same trip in 600 cars. But each time it had to slow down, stop, and speed up again it used loads of energy. What a pity!

Oops! One for yesterday

Erm, err, um, oh, I know:

Banana skins make an excellent alternative to shoe polish. I know this for a fact because I've been feeding my lovely leather satchel with nothing but banana for the last couple of years. The only drawback is that, in summer months, if I leave my bag lying on the grass it's covered in ants after about ten minutes...

One from my childhood

Did you know that if you put the planet Jupiter in a bowl of water, it would float? Okay, so you'd need a freaky big bowl, and I'm not sure how the whole gravity thang would work out with that much extra sloshing about, but IT'S TRUE! So there!

Snowy inspiration

It became clear to me whilst sitting on a skilift with my nephews today that snowflakes are like velcro: how else could so much snow sit on a tiny little twig, unless it's that the snowflakes are linking into each other with their little pointy endy bits, in much the same way the hooky side of a velcro fastening hooks onto the fluffly side? That, and not weighing much of course.

One for my nephew

So, did you know that if you're sitting on the loo and you're straining too hard to lose a log, you run the risk of rupturing the artieries that bring blood to your brain, causing intense bleeding, exploding eyeballs and finally, er, death?

So don't do it!

The First Factoid

Welcome to Rrikipedia, which is going to be a (mostly) daily little taste of the mounds of "knowledge" arrayed landscape-like in my brain.

And here's one to get the ball rolling:

During pregnancy, women's hair doesn't fall out. So after they squeeze one out, they lose handfuls of hair and think they've been zapped by aliens. But in fact it's just the hair they would have lost over those nine months, all in one hit. Blame those pesky hormones, girls!

There, don't you feel just a little bit wiser now?