Cashews, parakeets, and naval battles

Today I learned:

1) Cashew butter oil is difficult to remove from plastic surfaces.

2) All of the little petal-like things I’ve seen under trees around campus aren’t, in fact, petals. They’re the shelled husks of little berry-like seeds that have been cracked open (rather noisily) by parakeets.

3) Ok, I know I’ve been talking a lot about world war I stuff, but this one actually made me laugh out loud at the absurdity of it (something you don’t get to do often when learning about world wars). I speak of the Battle of Jutland, the war’s biggest and probably most famous naval battle. It was also the only time in history, to my knowledge, that two large fleets of modern cruisers, battlecruisers, and battleships slugged it out using more-or-less 18th century naval tactics. Up until then (and again afterward), no naval power was really willing to test its fleet against another industrialized fleet in an open battle. That kind of warfare was highly risky, and nobody really knew how it would play out, so naval commanders were exceptionally cautious about putting their ships into pitched combat. The Battle of Jutland only happened at all because… well, it’s a pretty special battle.

Here’s how Dan Carlin describes the setup (I haven’t verified this against other sources — again, I encourage reading more before taking my word 100%). The German fleet had been more or less penned into German ports up until that point by the numerically superior British fleet, and the two sides had played maneuvering games for a few years trying to get a good edge. A German Admiral (who’s name I don’t recall) set everything in motion by planning a trap for the British fleet. He was somehow going to lure some of the big British battleships through German submarine traps into an area covered by a big portion of the German fleet — I’m kind of fuzzy on the details. The important thing is that the British had cryptographers who were able to decode communications about this plan and let the Admiralty know that it was a trap. So the British fleet left harbor *early*, throwing the German trap-plans all askew, and set metaphorical sail for where they knew the Germans would be, so as to trap the trappers...

...Except that while the British fleet maneuvered, the cryptographers phoned in and told them that it had all been a mistake, and that there was no trap. Except there was. But now the British “didn’t know about it”… and the trap wouldn’t work because the British were out of position. So now both fleets were out in the North Sea, totally ignorant of each others’ positions, both thinking they were trapping the other side, sort of.

And that might have been the end of it, except that a civilian ship happened to pass between the two fleets, just where it could be spotted by both (but they were far enough apart that they couldn’t see each other directly). Both fleets sent small ships to investigate, which discovered each other and called in the *big* fleets. And then the battle happened.

To summarize: The Germans planned a trap, which the British turned into a counter-trap, but it instead ended up being two giant fleets running into each other more or less blind. And the reason no battle like that has occurred before or since is that it takes scenarios like *that* for two big fleets to both decide to fight.