What Did You Learn Today 2.0

[Vera]

Well, Descartes, thought (and therefore was... wrong) that it's “the place in which all our thoughts are formed” and that "that the pineal gland is full of animal spirits - "like a very fine wind, or rather a very lively and pure flame" - brought to it by many small arteries which surround it. But as Galen had already pointed out, the gland is surrounded by veins rather than arteries."

So much wrong (and ignorance of things that were already known at the time).

[leerob]

How to fix an issue with windows not finding a file path that clearly exists! Microsoft support chat taught me something new today.

[Vera]

About Penfield's sensory homunculus (I'd only seen the other one before*): "a distorted representation of the human body, based on a neurological "map" of the areas and proportions of the human brain dedicated to processing motor functions, or sensory functions, for different parts of the body."

It was in V.S. Ramachandran's Phantoms in the Brain: Probing the Mysteries of the Human Mind which I'm listening to it while I bike these days (and I'm really liking it, including the narration which is not always easy). Like he said, he hardly expected to go from talking about phantom limbs to explaining certain sexual fetishes (the foot fetish). Also, a friend of his jokingly suggest that he call his book, after Sack's Hat/Wife one, The Man Who Mistook His Foot for a Penis   (no, he didn't insert it anywhere, he was experiencing orgasms in his phantom leg).








*

[Vera]

That ginkgo trees lose their leaves all at once. There's a (still) small ginkgo in my town and I was biking past it yesterday and admiring the beautiful leaves. Today they were all gone. I'd never seen anything like this so did a bit of googling and voila:

"Among my favorite qualities of the gingko tree is its decisiveness.

With most fall foliage, a leaf drops here or there, leaving its friends on the branch for a while longer. Not so with the gingko, whose leaves turn a lovely goldenrod before all falling to the ground simultaneously in what The Atlantic once termed “The Great Ginkgo Leaf Dump.”

Ginkgos lose all their leaves at the same time because of the way their petioles—known as stems—work, according to the Chicago Tribune. As the weather gets colder, the petioles get what’s called scars to protect the tree from disease after the leaves fall. For most trees, that happens on a leaf-by-leaf basis. But in the case of the ginkgo, all the scars form at the same time. Then, it takes a particularly cold spate of weather, like, say, the kind we’ve just experienced, to cause all the ginkgo leaves to drop."

Here's a (no so good) picture of said ginkgo tree with some origami ginkgo leaves I made last year.

[Vera]

That there are pink grasshoppers...








... though they rarely reach adulthood, being so conspicuous  

Once again, "beauty" proves not just useless but pernicious.

[TonyAnkle]

I have learned a lot about puppy behaviour today.

1. Don't leave them alone for more than 2 hours.
2. Don't expect them to behave in a responsible manner when you have left them alone for more than 2 hours.
3. Don't expect them to be sorry for their behaviour.
4. Expect them to want a treat as soon as you walk in, even though they have eaten your front door.
5. Expect them to want an explanation about where you have been.

My word I love my pup.

[Dānu]

You can't tell how hot a pepper is just by looking at it.

[Fireball]

I have learned a lot about puppy behaviour today.

1. Don't leave them alone for more than 2 hours.
2. Don't expect them to behave in a responsible manner when you have left them alone for more than 2 hours.
3. Don't expect them to be sorry for their behaviour.
4. Expect them to want a treat as soon as you walk in, even though they have eaten your front door.
5. Expect them to want an explanation about where you have been.

My word I love my pup.

We sat my parent's in law's dog many years ago. It started to rain before I got home from work, and I couldn't out what the noise was when I got in the house. The dog was scared of thunder and had clawed nearly through the door, trying to get into the house. His name was "Hero".    Dead of natural causes years after this incident, btw. My PiL's insurance covered a replacement door.

[Gwaithmir]

A new $20 bill featuring Harriet Tubman's portrait is in the offing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harriet_Tu...ollar_bill

[TheGentlemanBastard]

A new $20 bill featuring Harriet Tubman's portrait is in the offing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harriet_Tu...ollar_bill

We'll see...

However, in 2017 U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said that he would not commit to putting Tubman on the twenty-dollar bill, saying, "People have been on the bills for a long period of time. This is something we'll consider; right now we have a lot more important issues to focus on."

Hopefully, this idea survives the current administration, if only to watch the bigots squirm every time they have to handle a twenty, but with all that's happened in the last four years...

[Fireball]

A new $20 bill featuring Harriet Tubman's portrait is in the offing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harriet_Tu...ollar_bill

We'll see...

However, in 2017 U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said that he would not commit to putting Tubman on the twenty-dollar bill, saying, "People have been on the bills for a long period of time. This is something we'll consider; right now we have a lot more important issues to focus on."

Hopefully, this idea survives the current administration, if only to watch the bigots squirm every time they have to handle a twenty, but with all that's happened in the last four years...

It would do my heart good to see the chump's supporter's around here bitching about how Tubman's picture makes it "not real money"! Who's the snowflake, now!? 

[TonyAnkle]

I've learned that year 8 maths is too complicated for my little pea brain.

[TonyAnkle]

I learned that the Pope is a dirty old man with a bad temper.    The clip at the end of the article is hilarious.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-55011152

[Finite Monkeys]

I learned that the Pope is a dirty old man with a bad temper.    The clip at the end of the article is hilarious.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-55011152

He so wanted to punch her. You can see it in his eyes

[Astreja]

I'm making a new lunch bag,and have been watching YouTube videos on how to sew around corners, and other Sewing Mysteries.

[Gawdzilla Sama]

Florida man likes dogs. https://www.cnn.com/2020/11/21/us/puppy-...index.html

[jerry mcmasters]

Florida man likes dogs. https://www.cnn.com/2020/11/21/us/puppy-...index.html

Without clicking on the link, can we just make predictions on what it is?  I say it's going to be a story about a boy who raised money for a dog shelter by selling lemonade in his driveway and now the shelter has just had its 1,000th dog adopted into a loving family.








Ha ha, just kidding, I predict it's some guy fucking a dog.

[Dānu]

I ain't clicking that thing. You click it.

[Fireball]

Crazy guy. Walking his dog and a gator zips out of the water and grabs it. The guy dives in, drags the gator out with dog in it's mouth, pulls the gator's mouth open and gets the dog out. Easy-peasy. He's walking it on a leash, from now on.   OK, the gator was probably only 6 feet long, but still, that was pretty crazy. Of course, I keep my dog on a leash when I'm walking it. Dogs running around off the leash making a nuisance of themselves just shows what an irresponsible shit the owner is. I was laying pavers at my house beside the driveway, and the neighbor across the street let her dog off the leash, and there it was, running through our freshly laid and compacted sand. I'm not one for saying what I think.   When the guy with her scolded the dog for running through the sand, I pointed out that if the dog was on the leash, the dog wouldn't be up in my yard trashing what I had just done. I like to keep it low-key with the neighbors, but when they are butt heads, the gets turned in the ignition.

[Bucky Ball]

A new $20 bill featuring Harriet Tubman's portrait is in the offing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harriet_Tu...ollar_bill

We'll see...

However, in 2017 U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said that he would not commit to putting Tubman on the twenty-dollar bill, saying, "People have been on the bills for a long period of time. This is something we'll consider; right now we have a lot more important issues to focus on."

Hopefully, this idea survives the current administration, if only to watch the bigots squirm every time they have to handle a twenty, but with all that's happened in the last four years...

They have a few weeks in office ... I hope they're cleaning out their desks. Tubman will survive a no-name. Mnuchin proved to be a better Treas Sec than we would have expected ... but not much. Bye bye Trumpiteers. We know you're "all the best people'', but I wonder who will be proud to hire those who supported such an idiot loser criminal.

[Fireball]

A new $20 bill featuring Harriet Tubman's portrait is in the offing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harriet_Tu...ollar_bill

We'll see...

However, in 2017 U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said that he would not commit to putting Tubman on the twenty-dollar bill, saying, "People have been on the bills for a long period of time. This is something we'll consider; right now we have a lot more important issues to focus on."

Hopefully, this idea survives the current administration, if only to watch the bigots squirm every time they have to handle a twenty, but with all that's happened in the last four years...

They have a few weeks in office ... I hope they're cleaning out their desks. Tubman will survive a no-name. Mnuchin proved to be a better Treas Sec than we would have expected ... but not much. Bye bye Trumpiteers. We know you're "all the best people'', but I wonder who will be proud to hire those who supported such an idiot loser criminal.

I'd like to think that anyone who "put in time"- I wouldn't consider what most of them did as "service" to our country (unless one looks at it the way a bull "services" a cow)- in the chump's administration would be hard-core unemployable. But then I look at what goes on in this country, and I realize, yeah, there's a scraggly bush for those scraggly horses to tie to. 

[Vera]

I learned that the Pope is a dirty old man with a bad temper.    The clip at the end of the article is hilarious.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-55011152

A picture's worth something or other. Holy "see" indeed  



(And dear lord, nobody does vulgar quite like brazilians do. Yeah, I'm blatantly prejudiced, I'm aware of it. Familiarity truly does breed... well, disgust.)

[Vera]

About golden eggs/eggs scrambled in the shell





Seeing as (on the extremely rare occasions when I do eat eggs) only really like the yolk, it'd be wasted on me but still, rather cool!

[Astreja]

Finally figured out the difference between a bevel and a micro-bevel when reading a sharpening guide that came in the mail the other day. I now have a very happy (and freshly sharpened) chisel in the basement workshop.

[Cavebear]

About golden eggs/eggs scrambled in the shell





Seeing as (on the extremely rare occasions when I do eat eggs) only really like the yolk, it'd be wasted on me but still, rather cool!

Technology and imagination never fails to amaze me! I wonder what caused anyone to even think about scrambling an egg in its shell?