Bumble bees

For the longest time, no-one knew how it was possible for bumble bees to fly. In conventional wisdom, their wings are too small to create the upward force required to actually lift them into the air and keep them there.

It wasn't until camera technology had become sufficiently advanced for the flight of bees to be recorded and slowed down enough to actually see what was going on in the wings that the secret was unlocked: the wings don't just move up & down like a bird's. Instead they swing back & forth as well, causing vortices above some of the wings some of the time that serve to increase the lift.

Good old bumble bees! And they're cute, too.

Muscle pain

So I'm just back from a vigorous session of badminton, and I'm once again feeling achy all over. But I know it's going to feel a lot worse tomorrow, and even the day after. Why?

The body takes some time to repair the damage done by strenuous exercise. It isn't all over in one night. For the same reason, they say you should do weight training every OTHER day, to give your muscles time to actually heal & grow before making them work hard again.

Cleaning windows

In these days of super-easy cleaning products, it's no bother to get lovely windows. But in the old days, one good way to ensure a nice sheen was to use cheap newspaper scrunched up after you'd wiped the windows down with soap. This left a thin film of printer's ink on the windows, which made them look extra clean.

SAD syndrome

I became personally acutely aware again recently of the power of sunlight to change your mood - and, more specifically, of the mood change attributable to the ABSENCE of sunlight:

It's been really springlike here in Munich recently, and going outdoors has been a pleasure, not least because of the effect all this sudden sunlight has on me. I remember from my year in Spain that the world was always a happier place when the sun was out.

And now, just very recently the weather's been a bit iffy again. And I'm a lot sadder than I was. Seasonal Affective Disorder, or SAD syndrome, is the extreme version of this. It affects people especially in northern latitudes, where there really isn't much sun at all for whole chunks of the year.

Thankfully, it can be treated with very bright light. Hooray for that!

Caffeine

So, there might be more caffeine in your average shot of espresso coffee, but because it's so concentrated the body doesn't actually take much of it up. On the other hand, a coffee that's diluted with lots of milk delivers much more caffeine to your body, because it sticks to the fatty milky bits and doesn't just pass straight out of you again.

Which is why you won't have difficulty sleeping after an espresso after your dinner.

Belly button fluff

I reckon I could have filled a couple of duvets with the amount of fluff I've picked out of my belly button over the years. Who would have thought that such an innocent little feature of my body could be so voracious a muncher of my clothes?

Fact is, if you've got a bit of a paunch then you're going to get belly button fluff. I've yet to test whether skinny people with inny belly buttons also get fluff. Once I've done some more research, I'll get back to you.

Telepathy

It's out there. I myself have an uncanny ability to know, just before it happens, that my sister is going to call me. And she has the same ability with me.

Okay, it doesn't happen every single time we call each other, but it really does happen most times. Crazy, huh?

Printer toner

Gramme for gramme, printer toner is more expensive than gold. No, really!

And another thing: the cheeky monkeys that make printer cartridges have made sure that the printer says the cartridge is empty WAY before it actually is. Then, when you return your old cartridge & get a new one, they pour the leftover toner from your old cartridge into a new one. They're selling the stuff over & over again!

Repeated behaviours

Why is it that we do things we know are really not a great idea? Why is it we do them again and again?

For instance, the other night I was about to go out, but I quickly wanted to check my email. I switched on my PC, and then was told there was some Microsoft update that needed to be installed. Instead of NOT installing it, because I really only had ten minutes before I had to leave my flat, I went ahead and hit Install. Even though I knew, deep down, that there was a snowball's chance in hell of the install completing before I had to leave.

So, of course, it took ages & ages, and I ended up leaving my PC on while I was out, which I try not to do so as to save electricity and thereby - albeit indirectly - the planet.

Temperature effects on metal

We think of metal as being solid, almost immutable - especially in "normal" conditions (ie not in a furnace). But in fact even the usual variability of outside air temperature can have noticeable effects on metal.

For instance, in the recent bout of warmer weather here in Munich, I've noticed that my bicycle lock has become much more pliable than it was during the cold, cold winter we've been having.

Phonemes

It's important to start learning foreign languages as young as possible. This takes advantage of the child brain's built-in ability to learn to copy adults in the way they communicate verbally.

But if you want to talk like a native, then you have to have exposure to a language before you're 18 months old. It's true! They did tests with Eskimo children that they swapped with Chinese children (cruel, but hey) for the first few years of their lives. The ones who spent more than eighteen months away from their birthplace were no longer able to exactly reproduce the sounds of the language of their birthplace, but were fully able to pronounce their "adopted" language.

I'm not advocating baby-swapping, but I am advocating foreign language learning. Do it - and get your kids to do it too!

Global Warming

It's a fact.

Herbs

I'm on a bit of a food-fact roll here, but that's just the way the, er, cookie crumbles!

So I was making my nephew cook bolognese sauce today (compassion with a hard edge, I think they call it) and instead of throwing in loads of salt, as Germans have a habit of doing, I deliberately didn't use any salt at all. Instead, we used a whole load of herbs & spices. And the resulting sauce was, though I say so myself, quite delightful!

So my fact is, if you've got enough flavour going on, then you really don't need too much salt.

Melty chocolate

The secret of the appeal of chocolate is its melting point: it's a solid at room temperature, but turns to a gooey naughtiness at body temperature. And it's this change in state that excites our taste buds & whatnot in the mouth, and gives rise to the body's interest in the substance.

Coffee grounds

Coffee grounds make an excellent alternative to expensive - and chemically evil - sink deblocking products. Just rinse your used coffee grounds down the sink plughole. On a microscopic level, each individual bit of coffee bean is rough-edged and therefore abrasive, so as they're flushing through the pipes they scour all the gunk and nastiness off the walls. Fab!

Boiling water

There's a lot of fuss about food miles, carbon footprints and whatnot. But in fact the environmental impact of cooking some potatoes is much less dependent on where the potatoes came from, and much more dependent on whether you cook them in a pan with the lid on or off.

For the avoidance of doubt, cooking them with the lid on is much more environmentally friendly, as lots of energy is wasted in the form of steam if there's no lid to keep the heat in.

So there! Get boiling with the lid on, people!

Badminton

It's a shame they don't show more badminton on the telly, because people think it's quite a sissy sort of sport, but in fact it's like a cross between squash and chess: you've got the mad swinging of the racket, but also a very tactical side to the game.

This is made possible by the way the shuttlecock flies: it starts off super duper fast, enabling you to smash it past the opponent before they can react, but then it slows down really fast too, which means you can lob it to the back of the court, beyond the opponent's reach, but it will then fall straight downwards right into the corner of the court. Your point. Nice one!

Cosmic mantas

It's amazing, but manta rays have such an aura! When you dive with them, you can totally feel their presence. And I don't just mean the huge shadow they cast (with a wingspan of up to four metres).

The last time, at Koh Bon, west of Thailand, we were just swimming about underwater, minding our own business and generally looking at the coral, when suddenly this silence seemed to descend on the reef and its little inhabitants. And then, these two mantas slid gracefully into view. I was transfixed. Wow!

Perfect rice

My tip is as follows: one cup of rice, one-and-a-half cups of cold water, pinch of salt, bring the rice to the boil, put the lid on, turn the heat off, and leave it for at least 20 minutes. DON'T take the lid off during this time! It's the residual steam that is cooking the rice.

Whenever I do it this way, it's perfect: a slight al dente crunch but no nasty hardness, no soggy bits at the bottom of the pan, and it doesn't even stick together (but is still glutinous enough to be eaten with chopsticks).

Hangovers

The most effective way to avoid a huge hangover the day after you've been drinking a little too much tipple is to drink absolutely stacks of water all through the night, whenever you wake up because you're too drunk to really sleep deeply.

Well, it works for me anyway.

The equator

I was listening to my favourite podcast, www.timesonline.co.uk/thebugle and I have to take exception to something they said. It was (preposterously) claimed that water DOESN'T go down the plughole the other way in the southern hemisphere from the way it does in the northern hemisphere. But this is very much the case - and I know because I've seen it many a time myself.

It's all to do with the coriolis forces created by the rotation of the earth combined. I could get all sciency, but I'd probably get it wrong, so I'll leave it there.

But I visited a hydroelectric power station once in Chile and the station manager told me they'd had special turbines built that turned the other way from ones in the northern hemisphere, to capture the ever-so-slight improvement in efficiency from having the water spin through the turbine the way it "ought" to in Chile. They wouldn't have bothered if there weren't some discernible difference.

Blaring music on trains

Isn't it funny how, about 20 years ago, people were getting totally stressed about people having Walkmans playing through headphones that were pretty crappy and sent most of the sound not into the wearer's ears but seemingly into everyone else's. But now kids are playing music on their mobile phones and not even bothering with the pretence of headphones, but no-one seems to be getting outraged by all this noise.

Avoiding hangovers

I like the fact that the words for "wine" and "beer" sound very similar in English and German, where the corresponding words are "wein" and "bier".

Which means that the little rhyme you use to decide what order to drink your various alcoholic drinks in to avoid a monster hangover also sound pretty similar:

"Wine then beer, feeling queer. Beer then wine, feeling fine."
"Wein nach Bier, das rat' ich dir. Bier nach Wein - dagegen sein!"

And, handily, they both suggest the same ideal order: beer before wine.

SMSs

It can't be a coincidence: pretty much whenever I write someone a text message, my text manages to be exactly 160 characters long - which is of course the maximum number of characters allowed in a single SMS. Maybe I'm like a texting god or something.

Concrete

Did you know that it takes up to 100 years for concrete to completely dry? At first that seems absurd, but if you think about it it makes sense: as soon as the outer bits have hardened and dried, it's going to be tricky for any moisture still on the inside of the mix to find its way out into the atmosphere.

Wine bottles

Not that I ever have any wine in the house - oh no! - but it's interesting to think about the different ways to seal a bottle of wine. Traditionally, of course, winemakers have used cork, which is the spongy bark of the cork tree. But in more recent times people have used plastic, or even screw tops.

In fact, screw tops are the best at not letting in any air: wine starts to turn to vinegar when it comes into contact with oxygen. But some people claim that wine needs to be ever-so-slightly exposed to air in order to mature. Just how much of that particular argument is financed by the global cork producing lobby I don't know...

Recycling

Strange but true: in the UK, you're supposed to put Tetrapak containers - you know, those sort-of cardboard packs that are used to package milk, juice, soups, that sort of thing - with paper in your recycling. But in Germany, you put them in with the plastics.

This will be because Tetrapak is made of thin layers of paper and plastic sandwiched together. It's neither one nor the other, but indeed both.

Pasta

Never pour oil on your pasta after you've cooked it! It won't be able to absorb any of the sauce you put on top, and the whole mouthfeel of the dish is altered.

PCs

Why is my PC suddenly so slow? Do they build in obsolescence in some secret way, like they do with cars (where they deliberately use bits that rust or snap or in some other way will definitely need replacing)? It's a couple of years old now, admittedly, but it was quite a zippy one to start with. Now it seems to struggle just to refresh the bloody screen!

Or is it just the case that software becomes increasingly complex over time, such that all those ever-so-necessary security updates etc. just add massive amounts of difficulty to your standard programmes, on the assumption that, as some sort of capitalist corollary to Moore's Law (which is basically that computers double in amazingness every 18 months), people are buying themselves newer, faster, better computers all the time anyway and it doesn't matter if the ones from three years ago seem to be made out of balsawood for all their computing punch?

Okay, this blog was more of a moan than a fact - but I mentioned Moore's Law, so that counts...

Food colours

Isn't it funny how some foods are always one colour - in your mind at least. And then, when they're served to you with another colour, they just don't look at all appetising. Even if it's a colour that a different food (which is normally that colour) would look very appetising in.

This happened to me recently with a plate of scrambled eggs that had been made with delicious pumpkin seed oil from the Austrian region of Styria (where that oil is a particular speciality). Now, I was all ready for a yellow dish, and then when it was served it was the colour of guacamole. Now, guacamole I love, among other things precisely BECAUSE of its delicate shade of green.

But with the eggs I couldn't help myself: I had to mime emptying the contents of my right nostril onto the plate. Because that's what it looked like. But it was yum.