I thought it might be a glockenspiel, but apparently it’s a celesta, which seems to be a lot like a piano but instead of hitting strings it hits metal plates (so a celesta is to a glockenspiel kind of what a piano is to a harp, sort of – apparently there is also a keyboard version of a glockenspiel, which is different but I’m not sure how).
This question came from a conversation some of my friends were having – someone mentioned one and someone else thought it was a mistake, etc. It turns out masseuse is for a female and masseur is for a male (in fact, if you google the definition of masseuse it says “a female masseur”; if you google the definition of a masseur it only says “esp. a man”, which is a little bit sexist). Apparently a lot of people prefer to be known as a massage therapist rather than either of these.
It seems both words are borrowed directly from French, if you hadn’t guessed from the spelling and/or pronunciation.
Firstly I was just wondering what the F actually stands for, but my first guess – and probably most peoples’ first guess – turned out to be correct (“function”), which wouldn’t have made a very interesting post. So what do they do?
Well, a variety of things. I’m just going to give one example for each key, but for a more complete listing see here or here.
F1: opens the help file of whatever program you are in
F2: allows you to rename a file you have selected
F3: opens the search window
F4: combined with alt, quits the program you are in
F5: refreshes the webpage in most browsers
F6: moves the cursor to the address bar in Internet Explorer and Firefox
F7: runs spellcheck in various Microsoft programs
F8: helps you enter Safe Mode when booting a PC
F9: updates selected fields in Word
F10: combined with shift, is the equivalent of right-clicking a selected file
F11: enters fullscreen mode in most web browsers
F12: opens the Save As window in Word
I think the answer is yes. I heard somewhere once (on a documentary I think) that the human genome looks domesticated, which throws up amusing and interesting images of humans having accidentally domesticated ourselves. However, I think it was probably just that we seem to have gone through a bottleneck process some time in the past (which is basically where the population drops down to a small number of individuals, and then grows again from that small pool). This results in a large group of people having fairly little genetic diversity, which is one of the main features of domesticated species (presumably because they went through a kind of artificial bottleneck, in that we bred all the individuals we wanted from a small pool of desirable individuals).
We know that non-African humans went through a bottleneck because there is more genetic diversity within Africa than there is outside of it, indicating that a fairly small group of individuals (perhaps more than once) migrated out of Africa and then populated the rest of the planet. Interestingly, bottlenecking may be why we have 2 fewer chromosomes than other apes (46 vs 48) – basically two chromosomes fused together in our ancestors, and the chances of that spreading throughout the population is pretty tiny unless the population is small. (This would have happened before the migration bottlenecking, because African humans have the same number of chromosomes as non-African humans.)
Apparently: raw sugar is basically the sugar extracted from sugar cane, with a fairly minimal amount of processing (basically just getting sugar to crystallise out of a liquid you make with it). It appears slightly brown because it contains molasses. White sugar is basically raw sugar without the molasses – you do some fancy processing involving bleaching and removal of impurities and repeated crystallisation. Brown sugar is made when you take the white sugar and add back in the molasses you just removed.
Yes. Various (Internet) sources seem to disagree on whether it is abrasive enough to damage your tooth enamel though, so maybe don’t do it too often just in case (though I am inclined to think it can’t be much more abrasive than regular toothpaste). Also make sure to rinse. It probably doesn’t taste very good.
Carpals are the bones in each wrist/hand that separate the bones in your arm from the metacarpals (which you can feel inside the palm of your hand and are the five bones that lead into your fingers). Humans have eight carpals in each wrist. I had been wondering whether non-humans, since they don’t have “hands” (but rather, forefeet) have carpals or just four sets of tarsals (which are the foot equivalents). It turns out that all tetrapods have carpals, which means reptiles, birds, mammals and amphibians (presumably excluding those which now do not have limbs, e.g., snakes). I suppose even for those creatures whose forelimbs and hindlimbs are basically the same (which is probably rare), it is still useful to distinguish between carpals and tarsals.
Secondarily, is the word “carpal” related to grasping/seizing (as in “carpe diem”)? The Latin word “carpus” (which is the word for the carpal bones as a single unit) relates to plucking, and apparently the “carpe” in “carpe diem” actually means “to pluck” (rather than “to seize”, which was poetic usage). So, technically no, but the etymological link I was looking for is there.
All the talk of eclipses in The Sun Kings made me think how lucky we were that the Moon and the Sun make similarly sized circles in the sky when viewed from Earth. (Lucky because scientists used eclipses to examine the atmosphere of the Sun without the glare making everything invisible.) David Morrison implies that this is a very convenient coincidence, because total solar eclipses would not be possible if the Moon were smaller or more distant, or the Sun were larger or closer.
The angular diameter of an object is basically how large it appears to be, measured in angles. Both the Sun and the Moon have angular diameters of approximately half a degree, the Sun varying from 31.6 and 32.7 arc-minutes (of which there are 60 in a degree), and the Moon varying from 29.3 and 34.1 arc-minutes. (The reason for this variation is slight changes in distance during orbit.) Thus, sometimes the Moon would appear slightly larger than the Sun, and at other times slightly smaller, but this difference would be pretty unnoticeable without an eclipse (especially since you should not look directly at the Sun!).
I was reading Stuart Clark’s book The Sun Kings, and towards the end he mentioned Voyager 2 being affected by a solar flare in 2004 (though the flare left the sun in 2003). Surprised that it was still operational, I wondered what Voyager 2 was doing since it left the Neptunian system in 1989.
Well, basically it is just continuing on its path into space, weakly sending back radio signals. It is currently doing about the only useful thing it can, which is finding and looking at the boundaries of the solar system. Around 2025 it is expected that the craft will no longer be able to power any of its instruments, and in about 296 000 years it will pass by the star Sirius.
Voyager 1 is also still functioning and is expected to shut down at a similar time as its sister. Travelling faster than Voyager 2, it is expected to reach the heliopause (basically the place where the solar wind isn’t strong enough to continue pushing against that from other stars) in a few years.
You often hear references to people sending no-longer-useful horses to a glue factory, and it occurred to me to wonder how exactly a horse is turned into glue. Animal glue is apparently made from boiling connective tissue, found in such body parts as skin, bones, hooves and tendons. In terms of usage, it has largely been replaced by synthetic glues except in special fields, like restoration.
Digressive Explanations 