That's today! Americans, and especially those of us on the internet, never pass up a chance to celebrate a holiday. However, you might not know these 13 Surprising Facts about Cinco de Mayo. But now you can. For example:
5. Cinco de Mayo must be HUGE in Mexico! Not really. While the Batalla de Puebla helped to unify Mexico around one event, the major celebrations of Cinco de Mayo has largely been contained to the village of Puebla, about 100 miles east of Mexico City, where the original battle took place. In reality, Cinco de Mayo is much more popular in America, where citizens of Mexican descent (and those who just like a good margarita) hold festivals from sea to shining sea.
Happy Cinco de Mayo! http://blog.starcostumes.com/cinco-de-mayo.html -via the Presurfer
Castle restorer Michel Guyot (previously at Neatorama) is heading a project to build a medieval fortress in ... Arkansas!
Thirty masons, carpenters and stone carvers authentically dressed, will work all year round for twenty years, the time required to build a fortress in the Middle Ages. Imagine a place where you leave behind our technically advanced society to hear the clang of hammers on chisels as stones are being carved, and to hear snorting cart-horses pulling heavy stones on creaking wooden wagons. The blacksmith, the rope maker, the woodcutter will work right in front of you as they practise medieval techniques of construction.
The Ozark Medieval Fortress is now open for tours. Groups rates are available. Link -via Metafilter
Speech recognition technology reached 80% accuracy in 2001, then leveled off. The human ear has about 98% accuracy. Why haven't computers improved in this area? Robert Fortner looks at several reasons.
Many spoken words sound the same. Saying “recognize speech” makes a sound that can be indistinguishable from “wreck a nice beach.” Other laughers include “wreck an eyes peach” and “recondite speech.” But with a little knowledge of word meaning and grammar, it seems like a computer ought to be able to puzzle it out. Ironically, however, much of the progress in speech recognition came from a conscious rejection of the deeper dimensions of language. As an IBM researcher famously put it: “Every time I fire a linguist my system improves.” But pink-slipping all the linguistics PhDs only gets you 80% accuracy, at best.
We can take comfort in knowing that the human brain is still way ahead of machines. Link -via Metafilter
Randall Munroe of xkcd conducted an online color survey, the results from 222,500 user sessions are ready. The aim of the survey was to find what names people associate with colors. As you can see, no one knows how to spell fuchsia. I had to stop and roll in the floor at the "disproportionally popular" color names by gender section. Link -via reddit
Don't even think about shoplifting in a comic book store when Spider-Man, The Flash, and some Jedi Knights are present. The super heroes, dressed for International Free Comics Day, detained a man who tried to make off with $160 book at Comic Centre in Adelaide, Australia. Store owner Michael Baulderstone, who was attired as Spider-Man, explains what happened.
"We had about 40 people dressed up as their favourite superheroes to celebrate International Free Comic Day, so he didn't have much of a choice but to hand the X-Men Omnibus back after a little bit of a scuffle," he said.
"I've had a look at the security footage and it shows Spider-Man running down the corridor of the shop, grabbing this guy, hauling him off.
"Everyone in the store thought it was a play, that it was street theatre of some sort. It wasn't until I said `Call the police' that people started to realise."
Comic Centre and another bookstore encouraged patrons to dress as characters for the event.
"One of the funniest things about the incident was that I called for people to stand near the door and it just so happened we had people dressed as Jedi knights there blocking the exit, the Flash was there at some point too," Mr Baulderstone said.
Is it graduation time again already? Scholars, politicians, and celebrities will soon travel to various colleges and universities to address the class of 2010. Some will make more of an impression than others. In today's Lunchtime Quiz at mental_floss, see how well you can identify commencement speakers of the past by a quote from their speeches. I scored 70%, not because I recall the speeches, but because I recognized the style. http://www.mentalfloss.com/blogs/archives/54590
Xiao Qiang is a Beluga whale living at Qingdao Polar Ocean World in China. This whale has learned to paint pictures, and his paintings sell for big bucks!
"He showed a lot of interest in painting right from the start so now all we have to do is give him the brushes and hold the paper while he paints with his mouth," said trainer Zhang Yong.
"His favourite colour seems to be blue and he's best of all at seascapes. His people always look like seals."
The current wisdom on cousins marrying is that it's not all that genetically dangerous -unless it happens over several generations. That is exactly what happened in Charles Darwin's family, according to James Moore, professor of science history at the Open University, who studied Darwin's family tree. Charles Darwin married his first cousin Emma Wedgewood. Of their ten children, three died young and three more had no children. Some notes:
- Darwin's maternal grandfather, Josiah Wedgwood, the founder of the pottery dynasty, had married his own third cousin, Sarah, and had eight children.
- The couple's eldest daughter, Susannah Wedgwood, married Robert Darwin, her cousin. Charles was their child.
- Meanwhile, Josiah and Sarah's second eldest son, also Josiah, had nine children, of whom four, including Emma, married first cousins.
Moore, who is about to publish a research paper on Darwin, said: "The results of this unintended experiment in close-cousin breeding are striking — 26 children were born from these first-cousin marriages, yet 19 of the offspring did not reproduce. Five died prematurely, five were unmarried and considered deficient, and nine married without issue.
As Arctic ice fields retreat, more and more artifacts that were frozen and buried are coming to light. In 1997, hunters found a dart that turned out to be over 4,000 years old. Since then, scientists are searching for history that was preserved under ice for thousands of years. Biologists are finding specimens of well-preserved plants and animals. Archaeologists are collecting evidence of human habitation. Pictured is a bone arrow with a copper tip, believed to be about 1600 years old. TYWKIWDBI has a roundup of stories of newly-found glacial artifacts. Link
Something happened to make the baby cry, and the cat assumes the adult is at fault. This cat is a serious baby defender! Warning: heavy metal ahead. -via Unique Daily
The Bayeux Tapestry {wiki} illustrated the Battle of Hastings in 1066. The Historic Tale Construction Kit allows anyone to use pictures from the original tapestry to illustrate other things. Many panels have been made to illustrate pop culture and internet memes, and you can see in two collections. http://flabbergastedly.com/?p=1375 one and link two -via The Litter Box
You'd take up model flying if you had a starship Enterprise, wouldn't you? Don't look in your local hobby shop; this is a one-of-a-kind built by John Krietzer. Link (embedded YouTube video)
What fun! Animate the raptor on your shirt with your sleeves! These shirts come in frog, alligator, and other styles for both children and adults from Mouth Man. And here's some unexpected trivia: the Mouth Man shirt company was founded by bass player Ross Valory, founding and current member of the band Journey. Link (warning: autoplay music video) -via reddit
Burning question: Did you ever wonder how fire works? We did. Here's what we found out.
HOT TOPIC
The scientific definition of fire is "a rapid, persistent chemical reaction that releases heat and light, especially the exothermic combination of a combustible substance with oxygen." That chemical reaction is called oxidation, which happens when oxygen atoms in the atmosphere combine with atoms "borrowed" from other elements, in this case, from fuel. (Another form of oxidation: rust- it;s just a lot slower.) For fire to occur, three ingredients must be present:
*An oxidizing agent. Can come from a pure oxygen source (like a welding tank) or, more commonly, the air. All that's needed is an atmosphere of at least 16 percent oxygen; normal air is about 21 percent.
*Fuel. Can be anything from a solid (wood, plastic, or wax), to a liquid (gasoline or alcohol), or a gas (propane).
*A heat or ignition source. Could be lightning, friction (as when striking a match), focused light, or a chemical reaction.
YOU'RE FIRED
For oxidation to take place, the fuel must be heated to a certain temperature, known as the ignition temperature. It's different for different substances: paper's ignition temperature, for example, is 451°F. When a fuel reaches it's ignition temperature, a chemical reaction occurs that begins to decompose it into flammable gases known as volatiles. Some solids, like wood, go directly from solid to gas, while others, like wax, go from solid to liquid and then to gas. This depends on the chemical makeup of the fuel. In either case, the volatiles then violently interact with the oxygen in the atmosphere-that's called combustion.
Using a candle as an example, when you apply a burning match (the ignition source) to the wax on the wick (the fuel), the wax will heat to a certain temperature (the ignition temperature). It will begin to evaporate and release gases (the volatiles), which then react with the oxygen in the air (combustion). Result: fire.
The heat from the fire will then cause the wax to keep melting and moving back down the wick, evaporating, igniting, and burning away. Because the fire then produces its own heat-a necessary ingredient-it's called a persistent chemical reaction.
EXTINGUISHED
You already know how to put out a candle-but do you know why it goes out? When you blow out a candle, the wax has cooled below its ignition temperature. If it didn't go out, you didn't lower the temperature enough-or for long enough. Try pressing the wick between your thumb and finger. The fire will go out because you removed the fuel source by stopping the wax from climbing the wick. Or put a glass over the candle, taking away the oxygen.
With larger fires, it's usually difficult to take away the fuel, so fire extinguishers work by eliminating either the oxygen, the heat, or both. Water extinguishers work by cooling the fuel; dry powder extinguishers work by smothering the fire, thereby taking away the oxygen; foam extinguishers both smother and cool the fuel; and carbon dioxide extinguishers displace the oxygen in the air while simultaneously cooling it.
MORE FACTS
*Spontaneous combustion occurs when a fuel reaches its ignition temperature without the aid of an outside ignition source.This can happen because some substances naturally react with oxygen in the air, but most often it's from spontaneous heating, a slow buildup of heat. A cause of many house fires is the spontaneous heating of oily rags. If there is insufficient ventilation-like in the back of a garage-the heat can build up enough for fire to occur.
*Hot fact: You can't have fire without oxygen, right? Wrong. All that's necessary is an oxidizing agent, meaning an element that easily takes electrons from other atoms. Oxygen is the most common agent, which is why the reaction is called "oxidation". Fluorine, however, is the strongest known oxidizer-much stronger than oxygen. Used in the production of atomic bombs and rocket fuel, fluorine can cause substances like steel or glass to instantly burst into flame. And those flames are virtually impossible to put out.
Since 1988, the Bathroom Reader Institute had published a series of popular books containing irresistible bits of trivia and obscure yet fascinating facts.
Here's a blog that consists of newspaper headlines that appeared in comic books. The lack of context makes them funnier than they were ever intended to be! Link -via Metafilter
