Mongols, Japanese, and Unix

Today I Learned:
 1) Probably the only reason the Mongols didn't completely conquer Europe in the 13th century under Ogadai Khan's rule was because Ogadai died. The Empire had a rather massive army in Hungary at the time, which had just finished easily wiping out the largest army in all of Europe, when news of Ogadai's death reached them. They promptly marched back home to participate in the selection of the next Khan, probably saving the lives of millions of Europeans.

 2) Japanese has *at least* two forms of "I" -- 'watashi' and 'atashi'. I will not attempt to write those properly here. 'Watashi' is the general form of "I", useable more or less anytime (again, as far as I know). "Atashi" is an interesting one -- it's an optional feminine form of "I", whose use emphasizes femininity. I think there's a lot of subtlety to it, but basically using "watashi" draws attention to one's female-ness, or makes it explicitly clear.

 ...and just now I learned that Python's quotation convention (interchangeable "'"s and '"'s) is creeping into my everyday writing. What do you know.

 3) Unix (or just Linux?) has a system for leaving mail for users -- by convention, mail goes into files somewhere like /etc/var/spool/<username>. There is much to learn about this breed of OS....