A most interesting island home.
50 Things we know now that we didn't know this time last year
If there was an award for best quote of the year, our money would be on Richard Fisher, the director of NASA’s Heliophysics Division.
Fisher was interviewed in October by National Public Radio after NASA scientists discovered a mysterious ribbon of hydrogen around our solar system.
The layer, a sort of protective barrier called the heliosphere, shields us from harmful cosmic radiation. Its existence defies all expectations about what the edge of the solar system might look like.
Fisher’s response: “We thought we knew everything about everything, and it turned out that there were unknown unknowns.”
In other words: We don’t know what we don’t know until we know that we don’t know it.
Life is funny that way. You think you’ve got the world wrapped up in string, only to watch some bit of news come along to unravel your comprehension of how things work.
One thing we did expect: that 2009 would be full of strange and wonderful revelations.
A prediction for 2010? Same thing as this year, only different.
…read on for a list of stuff we culled from 2009 that may have come as a surprise.
10 Things You Might Not Know About the New Year
New Year is a celebration we can all get behind. While it might not occur at the same time every year for all of us, the concept of starting a new year, and cultivating new beginnings, has been perpetuated among human beings for a very, very long time.
To add some food for thought as 2009 comes to a close, I present ten bits of New Year trivia for you.
- We have the Romans to thank for the Western New Year, January. While, technically, the Roman New Year began on the first of March, it was changed to reflect a very secular sign: when the senate came into session. While official dates changed through rulers and emperors, by 153 B.C. it was set to the date we now celebrate. Pope Gregory XIII, father of the Gregorian calendar, introduced the “official” New Year to Christendom in 1582.
- While Catholic nations accepted the Gregorian calendar, it took some time for it to catch on in Protestant nations. Great Britain, and its then Colonies, did not enact the Gregorian calendar until 1752. The last holdout was Sweden.
- In many cultures, the symbol of the New Year takes form in a cherubic, or often infant, Baby New Year. This tradition dates back to the ancient Greece and is related to the festival of Dionysus, the god of wine, song, and celebration. During celebrations to Dionysus, a newborn was often paraded about, symbolizing prosperity and fertility for the crops in the coming year.
- In Western culture, the New Year is the last of the celebrations in the holiday season, after Thanksgiving and Christmas. A marathon celebration of sorts. But in ancient Babylon, the New Year celebrations lasted for eleven days, commencing with the first New Moon after the Vernal Equinox.
Ducks suddenly aren't as cute and fluffy as they used to be o_O
While most male birds do not have “external genitalia”, some ducks have penises up to 14 inches long!!!! They commonly rape the females who have adapted by developing a vagina with three paths, two of which are “dead ends”. They have the ability to close off the true vaginal canal and send a rapist’s sperm into a dead end at will. If the rapists sperm does make it into the true vaginal canal, it is shaped like a coil and can be compressed to turn away unwanted insemination.
10 Forgotten Facts About Historical Events
Indian Ocean Tsunami
Immediately following the 2004 Tsunami, the world was so rocked with the staggering death toll of nearly 240,000 individuals that it is often forgotten that many of the more rural and traditional citizens were able to survive through an indigenous understanding of the signs of an incoming tsunami. For example, scientists in the area initially were convinced that the aboriginal population of the Andaman Islands would be significantly ravaged by the tsunami, however, all but one of the tribes in the islands (oddly enough, the one that had largely converted to Christianity and thus, a change of lifestyle,) suffered only minor casualties. When questioned, the tribesmen explained to the scientists that the land and ocean often fought over boundaries and when the earth shook they knew that the sea would soon enter the land until the two could realign their borders. Because of this, the villagers fled to the hills and suffered little or no casualties. Additionally of note is the story of Tilly Smith, a 10-year-old British student vacationing on Mikakhao Beach in Thailand. Tilly, had recently studied tsunamis in school and immediately recognized the frothing bubbles and receding ocean as a harbinger of a tsunami. Along with her parents, they warned the beach and it was entirely evacuated safely.
Fairy tales have ancient origin
They have been told as bedtime stories by generations of parents, but fairy tales such as Little Red Riding Hood may be even older than was previously thought.
A study by anthropologists has explored the origins of folk tales and traced the relationship between varients of the stories recounted by cultures around the world.
The researchers adopted techniques used by biologists to create the taxonomic tree of life, which shows how every species comes from a common ancestor.
Dr Jamie Tehrani, a cultural anthropologist at Durham University, studied 35 versions of Little Red Riding Hood from around the world.
![[DarkDippy on Bloggers.com]](http://bloggers.com/u/71301/p/img_01.png "DarkDippy on Bloggers.com")
