November 07, 2016 at 03:54AM

Today I Learned: 1) Don't eat raw yucca. It leeches cyanide in the digestive tract unless you cook it properly, especially from the skin. 2) There are those who say that World War I was inevitable. Others claim that it could have easily been avoided if a few people had just gone to the table and talked. Well, today I learned that only a few days before the German invasion of Belgion that kicked off open hostilities in the war, Russia's Tsar Nicholas II and Germany's Kaiser Wilhelm II were telegramming each other promising that they were doing everything possible to keep their respective countries out of the war and urging each other to do the same. Alas, the military leadership in both countries managed to overrule their civilian leaders. So if the Kaiser and the Tsar couldn't stop the war, who could? 3) Also in World War I news, today I learned that there was widespread public support for war in France before the German invasion. There was widespread desire for revenge against the Germans for the last war the two had been in. One example of simmering public sentiment: less than two weeks after the assassination of Franz Ferdinand, the French Socialist leader Jean Juarès was publically assassinated in a restaurant. Juarès had been one of the most prominent anti-war voices in France, and his death may have actually been more widely-noted than Ferdinand's at the time. These last two facts courtesy of the "The Great War" channel on Youtube. I've just started watching their series on the Great War, produced weekly, going over the events of each week as they happened 100 years before. The series started in August of 2014, and is scheduled to end in late 2018. I intend to stay about two years behind, though I may try to catch up to keep the dates straight.

November 03, 2016 at 04:35AM

Today I Learned: 1) A vote in the US is arguably worth thousands of dollars, if not tens of thousands. How do you figure? Well, only something like half of the US votes. Say that's 150 million people. What are the odds that your vote is the swing vote that decides the election? Something like 1 in 150 million (it's been estimated at much, much bigger than that -- I've seen numbers as high as 1 in 10 million, but this will illustrate the point plenty well, I think). That's not very likely... but if it does happen, then you've just decided, to some degree, the fate of several trillion dollars. If only 10% of the budget is affected by the candidate, then that's still hundreds of billions of dollars allocated in accordance with your vote. It's not a very precise mechanism of spending money, but it's potentially an *extremely valuable* one. 2) GamS is apparently a rather difficult protein to purify. Not sure why. Slightly relatedly, having a (standard-difficulty) protein purified costs around $500 from a protein purificaiton center. 3) The US has teams of military personel called "Red Cells" that break into US facilities and do things like take over submarines, kidnap VIPs, and plant bombs, all in order to reveal security vulnerabilities.

November 02, 2016 at 05:12AM

Today I Learned: 1) The current best theory of the origin of life is neither "RNA world", "lipid world", nor "metabolism world" (or whatever you call the hydrothermal vent hypothesis). It's what you might call "everything world" -- the idea is that a complex but not altogether unlikely mix of organics all came together to produce RNA, amino acids, and micelle-forming lipids, all in a clay microenvironment that could definitely catalyze ribonucleotide production and might be able to support ATPase-like metabolism. See http://ift.tt/2ecU9m2 for details, including a bunch of brief but colorful biographies of some of the crazy scientists behind this field. 2) There are a lot of little tidbits about the Mona Lisa. Here are a couple: The Mona Lisa was originally a painting of someone else. It was painted over in multiple layers, with normal paints and with translucent varnishes. The blue sky in the background of the Mona Lisa was painted with lapis lazul, which at the time of the painting cost more than gold by weight. The Mona Lisa was owned by Napoleon, who hung it in his washroom. It was damaged by water stains while "installed" there. 3) There's a famous sketch of Leonardo da Vinci's of what appears to be a modern bycicle... which is probably a fake. It was done in graphite, which wasn't invented until after Leonardo's death.