Sunday, April 26, 2009

Seed Bombs, dried balls of wildflower or grass seeds, fertilizer, and clay designed to be thrown to unreachable locations and create unexpected plant growth, are one tool in a larger movement called guerrilla gardening, in which activists tend gardens or otherwise react against urban sprawl in neglected publicly or privately held areas.

Wednesday, April 22, 2009

Benjamin Harrison was the 23rd President of the United States of America, serving one term from 1889 to 1893.  I took two years of AP US History and I swear I was unaware of this man until a few minutes ago.

Tuesday, April 14, 2009

Sao Paulo, Brazil, calls itself the "Pizza Capital of the World" and boasts 6,000 pizzerias within its city limits.

Monday, April 13, 2009

A person who engages in bricolage is a bricoleur.

Sunday, April 12, 2009

The ordinal form of the number zero is "zeroth."

Thursday, April 9, 2009

We all know that semen consists of two parts: sperm and stuff, but what's up with the stuff?  That stuff, called seminal plasma, carries nutrients for the sperm and serves as protection from the acidic environment of a vagina.

Wednesday, April 8, 2009

Black Pepper was so valued and expensive in the days of the Roman Empire that it was sometimes used as collateral or currency.

Sunday, April 5, 2009

The Oregon Trail, an educational computer game popular in American elementary schools in the late 1980s and early 1990s which took players on a journey from Independence, Missouri, to an embarrassing death from dysentery in the middle of nowhere, was actually first developed in 1971 by three student-teachers. It was developed further in 1974 when one of those students, Don Rawitsch, took a job at the Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium, but it did not find wide release until 1985, by which time floppy disks had come into popular use.

Saturday, April 4, 2009

The oldest surviving motion picture is Roundhay Garden Scene, filmed by Louis Aimé Augustin Le Prince in 1888.  It's about 2 seconds long and features four people moving slightly.

Thursday, April 2, 2009

2D computer graphics come in two varieties: raster, made up of pixels, and vector, made up of simple geometric shapes called "primitives."  There may be other varieties, but I didn't learn about them.