Primary school students in eastern Nigeria are encouraged to focus on their education with a song whose lyrics translate as “Education is sweet but hard to learn, but with patience, you can succeed if your parents have the white man’s money.”
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In 480 bc, with the Persian army on the cusp of defeating Greece, Athenian general Themistocles sent a trusted slave to convey a message to Persian king Xerxes; the note professed allegiance to Persia and reported many Greek ships prepared to defect. The Persians, acting hastily on this false intelligence, sailed into the Strait of Salamis, where the Greek fleet was waiting and gained a decisive victory.
One in four thousand people are said to suffer from photosensitive epilepsy, in which flashing computer screens can induce seizures. In 2008 the World Wide Web Consortium determined that online content should not flash more than three times in a one-second period. Federal government websites must design pages that avoid screen flickering within the range of 2 to 55 hertz.
While on his American lecture tour in 1882, Oscar Wilde drank elderberry wine with Walt Whitman; saw Niagara Falls, later noting, “Every American bride is taken there, and the sight of the stupendous waterfall must be one of the earliest, if not the keenest, disappointments in American married life”; read aloud passages from Benvenuto Cellini’s autobiography to miners in Colorado; and witnessed a lynching in Louisiana.
A 52-million-year-old fossilized tomatillo found in January 2017 revealed the fruit to be five times older than scientists had previously thought. “The initial discovery was a very big OMG moment,” said paleobotanist Peter Wilf. “I was like, ‘Wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute. Could it be? Could it be? Could it be? Really? Really? Really?’ Then I just went nuts.”
Researchers working with the Tsimané of the Amazon found that tribe members could tell the difference between consonance and dissonance but took them to be equally pleasant, giving credence to the idea that Western preference for consonance is not biological. “The Greeks were really into ratios,” speculated the lead researcher. “It’s possible they started making music that way and we’ve been stuck with it ever since.”
To send a confidential note to Cyrus the Great along heavily guarded roads, sixth-century-bc Median noble Harpagus inserted a paper message into a dead hare’s belly and ordered a servant to pose as a hunter to deliver the corpse.
A study of U.S. Supreme Court oral transcripts from 2004 to 2005 tabulated every instance the court reporter described a justice’s remarks provoking laughter. It found that Antonin Scalia had caused seventy-seven such episodes, while Clarence Thomas had caused zero.
Menstrual taboos persisted in nineteenth-century Europe. In the Rhine it was said that women on their periods turned fermenting wine to vinegar, in France that they were unable to whip up a successful batch of mayonnaise, in Britain that “women should not rub the legs of pork with the brine-pickle at the time they are menstruating, or the hams will go bad.”
Even before Jeremy Bentham wrote his own treatise on utilitarianism, Enlightenment scholars were attempting to quantify a happy life. In the eighteenth century, Glasgow professor Francis Hutcheson offered an equation for benevolence, defined as the desire to spread happiness to others, where b = benevolence, a = ability, s = self-love, i = interest, and m = moment of good. His formula: ba = m + sa = m + i, and therefore b = (m + i)/a.
Thomas Jefferson never wrote or said, “I’m a great believer in luck. The harder I work the more I seem to have.” The quip was crafted by San Francisco humorist Coleman Cox for a 1922 collection titled Listen to This.
Gustav Mahler set five poems from Friedrich Rückert’s Songs on the Death of Children to music between 1901 and 1904. In that time he and his wife, Alma, had two children, the eldest of whom died in 1907. About the compositions, Mahler later said, “I placed myself in the situation that a child of mine had died. When I really lost my daughter, I could not have written these songs anymore.” He died in 1911, Alma not until 1964—having twice remarried, to Bauhaus architect Walter Gropius and then to author Franz Werfel.
Engineers at the University of Illinois published a paper in 1960 predicting doomsday would occur November 13, 2026, based on calculations of human-population growth; they hoped “some time, somehow, something will happen that will stop this ever-faster race to self-destruction.” One idea was space travel. “It is only unfortunate,” they wrote, “that no reentry permit to earth can be given to these space trotters.”
About cilantro in a dish, Julia Child said, “I would pick it out if I saw it and throw it on the floor.”
Tomato, potato, corn, beans, zucchini, squash, avocado, bell pepper, chili, and pineapple are among the foods that Christopher Columbus brought back to the Old World. Onion, garlic, wheat, barley, olives, and lettuce are among the foods he introduced to the New.