Believe it or not, the distinctive dental office smell is made from cloves! Eugenol, the medicine used to numb toothache pain since Medieval times, is basically pure clove oil. The ancient Chinese used to chew cloves to freshen their breath before talking to the emperor.
Cloves are the dried buds of the myrtle tree. They are used as breath fresheners, pain relievers, perfume, and as a food seasoning. The leaf oil is what is used in Eugenol, applied directly to the gum for an analgesic. When mixed with zinc oxide, clove oil is also used for temporary fillings. No wonder cloves are listed as a calming food. I bet it numbs your insides, too! Euch!
Found in the British Museum, this citole, made around 1300 – 1330, is the earliest extant stringed instrument. It has been preserved because of its unusual quality of craftsmanship, its association with Elizabeth I (1558 – 1603), Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, and the interesting modifications of the instrument to keep pace with the changing musical fashions.
What makes this instrument so unique is that it is not really a citole – it is a hybrid of the lap harp (citole) and a violin, which would not be found in a more recognizable form for another hundred years or so. The citole was popular in the late 12th to mid 13th century when the “all-things-Islamic” fad swept across Europe. The instrument was plucked with a plectrum or strummed, and only had a range of a few notes. Melodies were played by plucking a base chord repeatedly, and playing a very simple tune over the drone. Later, this music style began to be replaced with an instrument of a larger range, more strings, and a bow used to create a smoother sound. For easier use, the instruments were placed on the shoulder. The citole shown above, which was a personal instrument of Queen Elizabeth I, is a perfect example of this change, since a hole was cut in the neck to allow a player’s hands to grasp it more easily. A soundboard with the characteristic “f” shape was then added. At about this time, Queen Elizabeth gave her citole to Robert Dudley to enjoy. Very shortly after, the citole would be completely out of fashion, and most of the instruments were destroyed.
That is a question that has puzzled scientists for years and years. I include this video because this scientist has a particularly interesting take on the unanswerable question.
How big is infinity? Infinite. But what is infinity? A never ending number of anything. In fact, if you really think about infinity, the question of how big it is is rather ridiculous, because infinity has no size of bigness as we consider big. It is the ultimate big – so big, it is incomprehensible. It is never ending! It isn’t just big; it’s infinity. Which is why I go crazy when astrophysicists state the “fact” (it’s really just a bunch of unproven theories, but that’s another rant) about having different universes of infinity stacked on top of each other in different dimensions, because it’s impossible! It contradicts the very definition of infinity. It’s infinity – you can’t have multiple infinities because infinity is never ending. How can you have a never ending infinity on top of a never ending infinity? It’s impossible because if infinity never really ends, there’s no room for any other infinity, even in another dimension.
Which also leads to the problem of our universe – which is just one infinity. If our universe really has no beginning and no end as “proven” by scientists, how can it expand and contract, which is also a “proven” fact? If there is no end to the universe, there can’t be space outside of it for anything to expand into! And how can infinity contract? It isn’t logical.
And going back further to the Big Bang, there was this inexplicable little ball of super charged matter floating in the middle of space. Halt right there! Ok, first of all, scientists haven’t decided how this tiny ball got there in the first place, since they are desperate to prove God doesn’t exist, and secondly, if the universe hadn’t been invented yet, there would have been no space for the ball to be floating in. There would have been nothing. When I say nothing, I am pretty sure you imagine nothing as a blank, dark space. But no, I’m not talking about darkness, or light, or even space, for that includes molecules which are still inside the ball at this point. I’m talking about nothing!! Incomprehensible nothing!!! This ball wouldn’t have even existed in the first place, for there wouldn’t be anything for it to exist in! And then this ball, however each scientist justifies in his mind how it got there, just explodes (pop!) and the universe is created. =) Then stars and planets and dark matter are created from this bedlam, then our planet, which just happens to be in the perfect location to support life, and our planet gets the nutrients, (never mind how they were created,) from passing asteroids, and then water pops up after, let’s say, a million years or two, and then bacteria grow, which turn into fish, which decide to grow legs, which turns into all the animals of the animal kingdom, (and maybe some plants thrown in there too for good measure,) and then monkeys, and then us.
Give. Me. A. Break.
And now us evil humans are killing our planet with cars and factories and by breeding too many cows (that’s desperate). Scientists ignore the fact that all that CO2 combined over centuries doesn’t even compare to the amount of CO2 volcanoes make every day. Actually not every day. Try an hour. And not even an hour. Try every five minutes. Yes, poor misled homo sapiens, every five minutes, one volcano, ignore the rest, spews more CO2 into our atmosphere than all our cars, factories, burping cows, and everything else combined. I’ve done the math for you. Just look it up on my blog.
But of course, that fact won’t get out because it isn’t us evil humans that are doing the damage. Oh, and another thing. We aren’t the cause of all those icebergs melting. In fact, if you ask the people who have lived up there for hundreds, if not thousands of years, they will just laugh. They have seen worse melting within their life times, and stories of when there was hardly any ice. And goodness me, Antarctica millions of years ago used to be lush and green, and even had palm trees! Don’t tell me we were the cause of that, unless our fishy ancestors who evolved from star dust did it. Ouch! Some people will say that it was lush and green back then because the land mass was all one blob so Antarctica was farther away from the poles. True, but that’s the magnetic poles. The poles back then were still right over Antarctica, meaning that it got just about the same sunlight as it does today.
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Side Note: Going back to infinity and the simple little video I meant to post for your guys, you may be a bit confused, since my rant may seem to contradict what the video says about stacking infinity on top of each other. To clarify, there are two kinds of infinity: mathematical infinity, and infinity. Mathematical infinity, as talked about in the video, is able to be stacked on top of each other as shown is subsets upon subsets, because its infinity goes in only one direction. 1, 2, 3, 4, ….. and so on into infinity.
But the other infinity is of a completely different nature, where this infinity spreads never endingly not in just one direction, but in all directions, and some even declare, in all dimensions, (which is another contradiction to the multiple universes in different dimensions.) This infinity can not be stacked because it goes on in all directions, leaving no space for anything else. I simply wished to clarify this to avoid confusion.
In 2007, the Royal Society of Chemistry offered a £500 prize to the first person outside of China to solve the mathematics test used in Chinese university entrance examinations.
As anyone can see, the difference is math levels is dramatic. The test above, taken from an average UK entrance test, shows how much the country’s math level has fallen compared not only to China, but to every other country. This is 8th or 9th grade work!
Since the UK math curriculums are getting easier, universities must compensate and lower their expectations just so they can fill places in school rooms. For the first year at universities, most of the work is simply getting the students up to the standards where they can actually manage college level work.
Of course, the Chinese are far beyond any other country in terms of mathematics and other sciences. All of the information shown in the problem above is learned by age 16. But looking at the problem above, I have a feeling the question is wrong. BD and A1C cannot possibly be perpendicular to each other. It is not possible. What do you all think?
A very unknown and interesting little tidbit about 14th century England is that fossils of sea urchins were so abundant and of such a regular size and mass (one pound exactly) that Oxfordshire milk-maids used them as a counterweight for butter scales up into the 18th century. These fossils, which were inexplicably found lying in thousands on open fields far from the sea, were known as “Chedworth Buns,” “Checkbury Buns,” or “Poundstones.” They became so popular that they started being used for weights in all other materials such as beads, wool, or flour. But since different numbers of stones were used for different sale items, trade with other countries was very hard, so a royal statute in 1389 decreed that the official poundstone, or “stone” for short, would be 1 stone for butter, 26 stones for a sack of wool, and 5 stones for glass. That is how today’s English measurement for people and animals, the stone, got its origins.
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(via Science Photo Library, The Map That Changed The World, TYWKIWDBI, Scribal Terror)
I just love macro-photography of all magnifications, and I just stumbled across some old ones when the uses of the electron microscope were still being explored. Here are a few of my favorite photos from the collection. Enjoy!
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You’ll never guess what this one is; that’s why I put it first. It’s a snowflake! Or rather, a cross between a snowflake and a snow crystal, due to the unique weather at the time. Those little spikes at the end are called rimes, and they are caused by the supercooled droplets in the air freezing onto the crystal/flake. This single crystal measures approx. 50 microns in length. (Agricultural Research Service, United States Department of Agriculture)
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I just did some math for you guys so you can get an idea of just how small a micron is since you will be coming across it many times in this post, and I calculated that there are 1,370 microns in the width of a dime. That may not seem like a lot, but just try dividing the thickness of a dime 1,370 times. Yeah.
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Cross-section of a leaf from a Black Walnut tree. It is a prime example of the epidermal layer, the mesophyll layer with palisade cells and vascular bundles, and the lower epidermal layer. It’s also about fifty microns tall. (Dartmouth Electron Microscope Facility/Dartmouth College)
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Pollen from a variety of common plants: sunflower, morning glory, hollyhock, lily, primrose and caster bean. The largest one at center is nearly 100 microns wide. (Dartmouth Electron Microscope Facility/Dartmouth College)
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Scanning electron microscope image of an ant. Its eye is approximately 300 microns wide. (Dartmouth Electron Microscope Facility/Dartmouth College)
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Compound eye of a noctuid moth. Each facet of the eye (ommatidium) is approximately 25 microns wide. (Dartmouth Electron Microscope Facility/Dartmouth College)
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A pyralidae moth, a side view of its head and curled proboscis. Its eye is about 800 microns wide. (Dartmouth Electron Microscope Facility/Dartmouth College)
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Under a magnification of 1438x, this picture reveals some of the ultrastructural details seen on the surface of a “crimson clover”, Trifolium incarnatum flower petal. (CDC/Janice Carr)
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The anterior spiracles (respiratory openings) of a fruit fly larvae magnified 1500x. (Albert Tousson and Tomek Szul; Department of Cell Biology The University of Alabama at Birmingham)
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At a magnification of 1504x, this image shows features of an Anopheles dirus mosquito’s antennae. In this particular view, only the first two (of three) segments of the left antenna are visible. Covered with sensorial “hairs”, which aren’t really hairs at all, but exoskeletal chitinous extensions, known as “setae”, they provide feedback to the mosquito as to chemical, thermal, and tactile changes in its environment. (CDC/Janice Carr)
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A polllen grain on perched on the anther of a Penta lanceolata flower. The grain is about 40 microns wide. (Dartmouth Electron Microscope Facility/Dartmouth College)
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Pictured is a breast cancer cell, photographed by a scanning electron microscope. This picture shows the overall shape of the cell’s surface at a very high magnification. Cancer cells are best identified by internal details, but research with a scanning electron microscope can show how cells respond in changing environments and can show mapping distribution of binding sites of hormones and other biological molecules. (National Cancer Institute)
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Under a low magnification of 23x, this 2007 photo depicts the fibrous configuration of a dry macrofoam sponge swab. (CDC/Janice Carr)
This is only one of two remaining piano-harps, a unique instrument ca. 1840 that plays a harp by plucking the strings with a piano mechanism. Basically, a vertical piano with a harp sound. Veeery neat.
MGM’s iconic moving logo focuses on a lion roaring into camera. How did they get that shot? As seen in this photo, very carefully. There is a rumor that when they were filming the lion, he killed his caretaker. Who knows if that’s true or not.
allhomosapienswelcome 