Dishwashers

On the face of it, you'd think a machine that takes over an hour to do your dishes would be horrendously more energy-intensive and wasteful of resources than doing them by hand. (Not that you give a toss about that when faced with the choice of standing in the kitchen and tackling that mountain of crockery, or popping it all in a machine and going off to have a sit down.)

But in fact modern dishwashers use only about as much water as you would to fill the sink. And it really doesn't take much power to make the spinny thing with the nozzles on go round. Yay for dishwashers!!

Colour perception

The human eye can distinguish between thousands of shades of colour. Just think of all those little rectangles of different colours we choose from when we go and buy paint to freshen up the living room.

But of all the colours, the one that humans can see the greatest number of shades of is green. Perhaps it's because so many things in nature are green that we have this sensitivity to it.

Flavour and flavourings

It's a popular bit of marketing guff when they say on the side of your yoghurt pot or fruit juice bottle or microwave dinner "no artificial flavours". Because when it comes to flavourings for the food industry, the technical distinction between 'natural' and 'artificial' concerns only the very first step in the production process.

An artificial flavour, as the name suggests, has been cobbled together by scientists. A natural flavour, though, is taken from a naturally occurring object (be it animal, vegetable or mineral).

But from there on in, they're pretty much the same: a microscopic amount of flavour chemicals is then scaled up by industrial means and mass produced in factories. About as natural as the screen you're reading this on.

Zero point energy

No, it's not just the dastardly energy ray of the fiendish Syndrome in The Incredibles, it's a real thing! And there are plenty of cranks out there who think that it is an inexhaustible source of free energy - but damn those governments and oil companies who are suppressing the truth!

In fact, zero point energy can never be harnessed. It exists, yes, but only as a concept of quantum mechanics, in which it is the lowest possible energy state of a given system.

By implication, getting this zero point energy to do work for humans would mean it would have to drop from its current energy state to an even lower energy state, just like a battery slowly runs out as it powers your PC or car or whatever.

But this is impossible, as it is already at the lowest state possible. So I'm afraid there won't be any perpetual motion machines any time soon...

Early readers

Back in the days when books were rare, expensive, hand-written things, and most people couldn't read anyway, it was common for people (ie monks) to not be able to read in their heads. Instead they would actually quietly vocalise each word, following the text with their finger and mumbling to themselves.

Aren't we clever these days, we who can read without moving our lips!

Barcodes

The sight of barcodes on everyday household purchases has become ubiquitous. I can hardly remember a time when supermarkets weren't kitted out with barcode readers at the checkout till. But I can still just about remember it...

In fact barcodes go back much further than my lifetime, to 1948, when their American inventor had a flash of inspiration on a beach and stretched out the dots & dashes of Morse code with his toe in the sand. But it took a long time for them to be adopted as a standard way of identifying products on supermarket shelves.

Stamps

Great Britain was the first country to issue postage stamps. But everyone knows that! (The Penny Black, a stamp worth one penny that had a picture of the young Queen Victoria on a black background, was the world's first stamp.)

However, not a lot of people know that Britain was the first country to issue stamps that don't have a specific monetary value on them. (Instead, they are marked "1st" or "2nd", in reference to the different classes of postal service available.) And it was only a few decades ago at that!

Ooh, a double dose of factoids today. Aren't you lucky?

Folding paper

Did you know it's impossible to fold a sheet of paper over on itself more than seven times?

Go on, try it!

Football

The game of football as we know it today was invented in England at least 150 years ago. But the first "official" (i.e. written down) set of football rules does not govern the main English variety - what other nations call "soccer". In fact it is Australian rules football that has the longest pedigree. Well I never!

Dry elbows

A handy way to remove unwanted dry skin on your elbows is to rub a squeezed-out half a lemon on them. The citric acid in the remaining lemon flesh gently etches the outer skin layers away, leaving you with elbows like a baby's bottom.

Cat's eyes

In Britain, roads have a row of studs down the middle with little reflective patches on them. At night, the headlamps of cars pick the studs out and so the driver can tell where the middle of the road is. They look a bit like cat's eyes when they are caught in a beam of light.

This is a fact that Europeans who chortle at British road chaos when it snows are generally not aware of. Especially since it means you can't just scrape all the snow & ice off the road surface with a snowplough without ripping up all the studs as well.

Vitamin C

Did you know there's more vitamin C in a packet of crisps than there is in an apple?

Badminton popularity

Studies have shown that badminton is the most popular racket sport in the UK, by which I mean it is the sport played by the most people.

So why don't they show badminton on telly? It's a really gripping sport to watch!

And no, I don't mean people should watch a three-year-old and their granddad knocking a shuttlecock backwards and forwards over a fence in the back garden. I'm talking Olympic or national games.

Credit cards with chips on

These were invented in Germany in 1968, but first came into use in 1983 in French phone cards. Crazy isn't it!

Crazy cocktails (2)

I've just had an angry riposte from a (possibly now ex-) friend who followed my advice about mixing vodka citron and galliano to get a drink that tastes of chocolate fudge cake. Apparently, no it doesn't.

Well, I am serenely going to take this complaint as proof of today's fact: that tastes differ. One man's delicious beverage is another man's curdled donkey piss.

Or maybe it was just that I was very, VERY drunk at the time...

Sneezing in the sun

So I've always had this thing where if I suddenly see direct sunlight I get an urge to sneeze. And I LOVE a good sneeze! So I'll often seek out a direct shaft of sunlight, just to get a sneeze.

But people used to tell me that it was an imagined response, just because they didn't get the same urge.

I've recently learned, however, that this sneezing in sunlight thing is actually very widespread, affecting about a third of people globally. It's even got a posh name: photic sneeze reflex. It seems that the cranial nerve responsible for sneezes is affected by the nerve that carries optical signals to the brain when there's a sudden burst of light.

So there!

Male aim

Ladies, you may not be aware of this, but in recent years the fiendishly difficult task of peeing INTO a urinal, instead of all over the floor AROUND it, has been made more manageable - and in an ingenious way:

If boys have something to pee on - say a cigarette butt, a coin or a dead fly - their aim becomes much better. Urinal manufacturers have taken advantage of this by printing a small picture near the drain of the urinal. Usually it's a fly, but I recently saw a cute one with a little candle picture instead.

It all started in Amsterdam's Schiphol airport, when an enterprising PhD student studied the efficiency improvement (and associated reduction in cleaning costs) of putting a picture of a fly in the urinals there. I remember my joy at first seeing this little bit of useful art in - ooh, it must have been 1997.

Dates

And here's another guest factoid, this one from my friend Bernhard who's in Oman right now:

Dates are not only delicious and sweet, but they are also packed full of vitamins & minerals. In fact, the poor people up in the mountains of Oman eat little else.

Fat

Here's a guest factoid from a 12-year-old girl who I am helping out with her German:

Did you know that women float better than men? It's because they have more body fat.

And it's true: when I was younger & flabbier I used to float really easily, but these days my legs keep sinking & dragging the rest of me down.

The grass IS greener on the other side

No, really! Because if you're standing in a patch of grass and you look down onto it, then you're looking at the tips of each blade and the chances are you can see some of the brownish soil at the base of the plant.

Whereas, when you look across at the neighbouring bit of grass, you're looking side-on at the blades, and so you see much more greenery.

Youth versus experience

It is often said that youth, with its exuberant energy but its lack of practice, is a fair match for experience, which may lack the vim of earlier years but has been there and knows a thing or two.

Pity those who have neither youth nor experience on their side - those who fall into the "you can't teach an old dog new tricks" category, but don't even have any old tricks to show off with!

The Doppler effect (2)

Just like with sound waves, the Doppler effect also applies to light waves. Now, everyone knows that the speed of light is a constant (ie it cannot change), but nevertheless the appearance of light waves does change slightly depending on the relative speeds of the light source and the "eye".

This is how astronomers can tell that the universe is expanding: light from galaxies that are very far away is slightly "decompressed", like the sound of the fire engine as it races away from you. Light from the same kind of source but closer to us appears to have a slightly higher wavelength, like the fire engine as it passes right in front of you.

If the universe were contracting, the light from far-away galaxies would have a higher wavelength than nearby light, like the fire engine as it heads towards you.

The Doppler effect (1)

Nee-nah, nee-nah! The sirens wail as the police car/ambulance/fire engine whizzes past you on the street. But the pitch of the siren changes: it's higher as the siren approaches you, and lower when it's heading away from you again.

That, my friends, is the Doppler effect in action. Sound is composed of waves of compressed air. Because the siren is moving towards you at speed, the sound waves are compressed slightly more when they hit your ear drum. And, similarly, when the siren is moving away, the sound waves are slightly decompressed by the movement away.

A little bit of physics to keep you on your toes!

Plastic bags

They're terrible! There's an island of plastic crap floating in the middle of the Pacific Ocean that's made up largely of plastic bags and other non-biodegradable packaging that is the size of Switzerland. That is NOT good for the seas, or the animals that choke on the little bits of plastic, thinking they're food.

So use a cloth bag again & again, or at the very least recycle your placcie bags, people! I use mine as bin bags around the house, for instance.

The upright gait

Man has evolved, so the latest thinking goes, in such a way as to be able to follow herds of gazelles and such over long distances.

Man is not the fastest animal - cheetahs and pretty much every other animal can run faster. But the bipedal gait that we have is very efficient when it comes to endurance running.

The apes who were to become man were successful not because they were able to ambush their prey with a sudden dash, like a lion, but because they were able to keep up with the herd and wear them down.

It's a pity I hate running, really. I feel like a traitor to my species...

Hungry washing machines

They say that washing machines have an uncanny ability to eat one - ONE - sock from time to time, leaving you with a single solitary sock that is only really good for turning into a glove puppet.

But this has never happened to me. It's a fact that, as inanimate objects, it's not possible for washing machines to feel hunger. So they wouldn't eat a sock, would they? Silly idea.

I have, however, dropped a single sock from a washing line hanging out of the window of a flat on the twelfth floor (of a block of flats in Spain), which was rather annoying. Does that count?

Number memory

The average person can remember a string of six or seven numbers (i.e. 3, 6, 1, 4, 7, 7, 2).

This is a handy skill when it comes to knowing people's phone numbers. Like anyone does THAT any more! That's what your mobile phone's memory is for, right kids?

Crazy cocktails

If you mix Galliano with Absolut Citron, you get a drink that tastes remarkably like chocolate fudge cake. Just a bit more alcoholic.

Body clock

Our bodies think there are 25 hours in a day, not 24. It's only by means of chemical changes in our bloodstream that our internal clock is reset each day. When daylight hits the eyes, hormones are released that end the sleep cycle and start the waking cycle.

They did tests with volunteers who lived in a cave for a month with no watches. After a month, they were fully a day behind in their reckoning of how much time had passed. Crazy, isn't it!

Carbon

The first geodesic dome to be built was designed by architect Richard Buckminster-Fuller back in the '50s. And then, half a century later, people managed to create a third stable form of carbon (the other two, naturally occurring ones being graphite and diamond).

These carbon chunks have bonds between atoms that exactly resemble Mr Buckminster-Fuller's domes. So it was natural that the new carbon form should be called buckinster-fullerine.

Like little footballs, they are. Dinky.