Well. i was reading the other day and references were made to 'pikelets' as a breakfast food. Researching this a little, it turns out that these are what they call a sort of fat pancake/crumpet dating to Victorian times, and still currently prepared in New Zealand and Australia. Also, wikipedia has a remarkably complex page for pancakes, possibly due to that be a food found in some form in pretty much every culture. Other bits of interest from that page are Pancake Syndrome (Simultaneous oral mite anaphylaxis), which occurs after people have eaten pancakes made from flour infested
with particular mites which have survived cooking at the lower temps
necessary for pancakes. Also, there is a Pancake day, frequently occurring on Fat Tuesday/Mardi Gras, right before the Catholic season of Lent, to use up all of fat or lard in a household before Lenten fasting, though some places celebrate with a race; "in a "pancake race" each participant carries a pancake in a frying pan.
All runners must toss their pancakes as they run and catch them in the
frying pan. This event is said to have originated in Olney, England in 1445 when a housewife was still busy frying pancakes to eat before the Lenten fast when she heard the bells of St Peter and St Paul's Church calling her to the Shriving
Service. Eager to get to church, she ran out of her house still holding
the frying pan complete with pancake, tossing it to prevent it from
burning, and still wearing her apron and headscarf"(further referenced here). Huh.
As the Holiday season is upon us, i was skimming BBC News last week and came across and article with the intriguing title "Fairy lights could 'slow' wi-fi speeds warns Ofcom". Apparently, strings of twinkling lights (which we call 'Christmas lights' or 'Holiday lights' in the US) are referred to as 'Fairy lights' in the UK, and apparently, they might slow down wi-fi, though a reason was not specified outside of simply being a electrical device.
Something i was reading the other day referenced the 1920s slogan 'banana oil'. My training predicated me to think of isoamyl acetate, an ester that we made in undergrad o. chem lab, which is a source of the common artificial banana flavoring. That definition didn't make sense in the context. Urban dictionary to the (somewhat accurate) rescue, "insincere or ridiculous talk. Like “horse feathers,” there's no such substance as banana oil. Also like “horse feathers,” the phrase Described something utterly preposterous. It has been attributed to Milt Gross, a cartoonist who first used the expression in his comic strips during the 1920s". To correct that definition, isoamyl-acetate-as-banana-oil is used as a flavoring, as well as a solvent for paint varnishes and as a honey bee pheromone/attractant.
One of my favorite Andrew Bird songs (full disclose, i have quite a few favorites by him, but this one is very clever) is "Fake Palindromes". It ends with a reference to trepanation, specifically as a result of a date, and as noted in the Paste Magazine series "Secretly Horrifying Song Lyrics", might strike someone as somewhat creepy while listening to the lyrics. The song happens to be the result the evolution/culmination of two of Mr. Bird's earlier songs, one of which specifically written about dating, called 'Trepanation'. Unfortunately, i cannot find a copy of the song itself, but here are the lyrics, which include "If you're a clean living like-minded soul
Wanna meet nice people with cranial holes
And touch upon the truth that lies inside" Delightfully disturbing, and this is another illustration as to why i'm single - dating is scary.
Sidetanget, i seem to have an affinity for songs with secretly horrifying lyrics (reference DCFC here); a labmate noted a few years ago that it might be seen as a bit weird that i love howling Regina Spektor's brilliant Genius Next Door while late in lab at night by myself - it didn't seem weird until she pointed out, though.
i was looking up lab equipment the other day online and getting annoyed by the buzzwords "multiplex" and "high throughput", mentally assigning bonus annoyance points to products featuring both. These terms are only slightly redundant. Multiplex is one of those words for which one never sees the singular, and indicates that a machine can handle multiple analyses during a single assay/run. "High Throughput" seems to indicate that the processes are automated to facilitate handling a lot of samples at once. Bonus round, there is a DC comics Supervillian with the name Multiplex,"he gains the ability to split himself into identical duplicates, though
those duplicates are smaller than the original, and get smaller the more
he splits." This seems to be a reverse of the experimental process outlined above.
Jack linked this really interesting imgur video of snakes moving between boards with gaps of various widths, and, as noted in the comments, it seems like there are better widths than others for snake locomotion.
Finally, James ET was kind enough to mention the 'monkey balls' seedpods produced by Sweet Gum trees (liquidambar styraciflua) in response to the rambutans i mentioned last post. While similar looking, these do not contain soft fruits, and instead produce seeds that are enjoyed by birds and a variety of small mammals. The name refers to the sweet smelling sap, which produces a pleasant scent upon burning it. That turned into a research arc that turned up ambergris, also something that smells sweet upon aging and was formerly used as a fixative in perfume manufacture, but is actually the product of the bilious tract of Sperm whales; " scientists have theorised that the substance is produced by the whale's
gastrointestinal tract to ease the passage of hard, sharp objects that
the whale might have eaten. The sperm whale usually vomits these, but if
one travels further down the gut, it will be covered in ambergris", according to the wiki article. That article also notes that ambergris was used as a flavoring in the past, "A serving of eggs and ambergris was reportedly King Charles II of England's favorite dish ". No offense, but eww.
