So true, isn’t it, that we learn something new every day? (Please see my delighted expression saying, “Wow. I didn’t know that.”) I’ve saved up a few notable learnings into a composite week:
On Sunday i learned:
Disciples of Jesus prepared his body with one hundred pounds of myrrh and aloes. I have read this passage, John 19:39-40, many times over the years but hadn’t noticed that amazing amount until recently. Wow, that seems a lot but is probably true to the customs of the times. It took a good-sized little red wagon to transport it, eh? In a perhaps corny statement of faith, i observe: All those burial spices were unnecessary–but they didn’t know so at that moment…
On Monday, i learned:
Parallel lines never meet, right? That’s a truism, a scientific, mathematical, geometric fact, right? So i was surprised when someone in a recent group conversation said that, under certain conditions, they could meet. Here’s what i found in my follow-up research: “In projective geometry, any pair of lines always intersects at some point, but parallel lines do not intersect in the real plane. The line at infinity is added to the real plane. This completes the plane, because now parallel lines intersect at a point which lies on the line at infinity.” I’m laughing so hard right now at my inability to comprehend that statement in any meaningful way. Hmm… i guess on this one, i haven’t really learned anything new because i don’t get it…
On Tuesday i learned:
My grandson Ben taught me the term gibbous moon referring to the shape of lunar waxing and waning. He learned this in 1st or 2nd grade and remembered it because of his classmate Gibson who they called Gibby. Did you learn about the gibbous moon in elementary school science? Maybe i was absent that day, but it’s fun learning it later in life.
On Wednesday i learned:
Rennet is an enzyme produced in the stomach of ruminant animals used to make many (most?) cheeses. No requirement to list rennet as an ingredient, though. Whew, glad i’m just a vegetarian and not a vegan–yet. I should probably take that plunge in the name of animal suffering, but right now i’m content to live with my own hypocrisy of letting them suffer so i can enjoy cheese and eggs and yogurt. Perfection continues to elude me (bad joke/status report of being human).
On Thursday i learned:
Chickens can die if they become egg bound and an over-sized or misshapen egg is caught in their oviduct. They can also die from an impacted crop, the crop being a sort of storage pouch for food before it passes into the gizzard. I learned about this from backyard chicken keepers in Lumpkin, Georgia.
On Friday i learned:
The racist practice of redlining began in 1934 with the National Housing Act establishing the Federal Housing Administration and was policy throughout the New Deal, institutionalizing housing and other discrimination that persists to this day. An FHA manual directed “incompatible racial groups should not be permitted to live in the same communities.” I first learned the term when working with community organizations in Chicago in the 1960s and thought it was a development of that decade, so i’ve been surprised to know the history and dismayed to learn that the New Deal largely left out African Americans.
On Saturday i learned:
My tea-drinking friend Brad told me that the taste of Earl Grey, favorite of mine and maybe yours–very popular–comes from the oil of the bergamot orange. Of course, there are many variations on this tea, and i further learned that when Twinings changed the flavoring in 2011 after 300 years of Brits drinking Earl Grey, there was something of a negative outcry.
I haven’t linked any of these pearls of knowledge to sources since you can quite easily and successfully Search for yourself.
How many of these seven pieces of information that have recently enlightened me did you already know?
Care to elaborate on any of them?
What’s the most surprising fact you have learned in the last week?
Very interesting! This morning I learned that 98% of Subarus are still on the road after 10 years! At least that’s what a commercial told me.🤔