“My music is best understood by animals and children,” Igor Stravinsky said in 1961. Over two millennia earlier, Aristotle had counseled in The Politics that young men ought to attain a musical sophistication with “a capacity for enjoying noble melodies and rhythms and not merely that general effect of music which is enjoyed by some of the lower animals, as well as by a number of slaves and children.”
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A longtime practice of European peasants was to bring cows and sheep inside for the night. If one could ignore “the nastiness of their excrements,” a late seventeenth-century visitor to Ireland opined, “the sweetness of their breath” and “the pleasing noise they made in ruminating or chewing the cud” might lull a person to sleep. A visitor to the Hebrides noted, however, that while urine was regularly collected and discarded, the dung was removed only once a year.
Before the entire palette of modern mathematical notation existed, Johannes Kepler relied on musical notation to describe the planets’ rotation around the sun in his Harmonies of the World, published in 1619. The plus and minus signs were introduced in print in 1489 by Johann Widman, and the equal sign in 1557 by Robert Recorde, but the multiplication sign (×) was not introduced until 1631, by William Oughtred; modern exponential notation in 1637, by René Descartes; and the obelus (÷) to indicate division in 1659, by Johann Rahn.
Ornithologists have found that hormones strongly determine aggression between sibling seabirds. Blue-footed boobies rarely attack a nest mate, while among Nazca boobies—born with androgen levels three times higher—the elder of two hatchlings unconditionally attacks and kills the younger one shortly after birth.
Originally known as Yellow Hook, after the color of soil found in the region, the Brooklyn neighborhood changed its name to Bay Ridge in 1853 to avoid popular association with yellow fever.
According to Dignitas, an end-of-life clinic located in Switzerland, 70 percent of people who begin the formal process of assisted suicide do not go through with it.
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.”
“You don’t need a brain to sleep” was a central takeaway for a team of biologists who found that Cassiopea, a genus of upside-down jellyfish, display signs of sleep deprivation when disturbed by water pulses at twenty-minute intervals throughout the night.
“Utter damned rot!” is what William Berryman Scott, a former president of the American Philosophical Society, said in response to Alfred Wegener’s theory of continental drift, first proposed in 1912. “Wegener is not seeking the truth,” said a doubtful geologist, “he is advocating a cause and is blind to every argument and fact that tells against it.”
Around 14,500 years ago, at the end of the last ice age, the collapse of a large chunk of ice, likely from the Laurentide Ice Sheet covering North America, initiated an event known as Meltwater Pulse 1A. Sea levels rose more than a foot—and more than a mile of coast disappeared—per decade, displacing those living near shorelines. The earth’s human population was then roughly three million, 0.04 percent of what it is today.
While manager of the Tampa Bay Rays, Joe Maddon put his batting lineup in order for a July 2014 game using the field position numbers 8-6-7-5-3-0-9 in honor of the Tommy Tutone hit. The designated hitter served as the 0; the catcher (2) and second baseman (4) batted eighth and ninth. The Rays lost the game to the Detroit Tigers by a score of 1–8.
“Where were you last night?” Yvonne asks Rick Blaine, played by Humphrey Bogart, in Casablanca. “That’s so long ago, I don’t remember.” Her follow-up: “Will I see you tonight?” To which he replies, “I never make plans that far ahead.”
First documented in the Divine Farmer’s Materia Medica Classic of the first or second century, the bark of the mimosa tree, known as he huan pi (“collective happiness bark”), is thought to harmonize the emotions and render a person worry-free. The manual advises that “protracted taking may make the body light, brighten the eyes,” and induce one to feel “as if one had acquired whatever one desired.” Modern practitioners sometimes call it “herbal Prozac.”
To rival the 1,063-foot-tall Eiffel Tower, nearly twice the height of the Washington Monument, planners of the Chicago Exposition of 1893 presented the Ferris Wheel, which was 264 feet tall. While the wheel was slowly spinning, Frederick Jackson Turner delivered a paper in which he proclaimed the end of the frontier phase of American history.
According to medieval Egyptian scholar al-Nuwayri, the ancient sages claimed that “when lovers breathe into each other’s faces, their breath mixes with the air,” is inhaled through their noses, and then “reaches the brain, into which it spreads like light in a crystal vessel.”