Posts tagged #things-i-learned

(Not) Things I learned this week #38 This week seems to have really flown by. I've decided to take purposeful and intentional time for rest and personal recuperation this week. I'm not feeling burned out, but I could certainly smell some distant smoke on the wind. So here's to taking...

This week I've been focusing on perspective and gratitude. It's harder than it sounds if you feel things are unfair and not in your favour. But, to quote about a million throw cushions on Pinterest: you can't control life, only how you react to it. So this week I am...

The cold snap in London is teasing us. Is it over? hopefully. But it will still be ~1C at night so don't get too complacent. Still, the days already feel long. I can hardly remember it being dark at 4pm but I'm sure I'll remember as soon as October comes....

The slightly cold-snap here in London continues. The optimistic sewing and sprouting that took place in my garden (such as it is in urban West London) have largely had to retreat to the comfort of the indoors. Covid-related deaths continue to fall in the UK, as we begin optimistically opening...

Things I Learned #34 We've made it to the Easter weekend. Spring has arrived here in London, which is to say it was 20 degrees C earlier this week and this morning it was 0, windy, and overcast. This time a year ago, my mental state was dominated by COVID-19...

This cassette revival: Last year's (2020's) sale of tape cassettes, the 90's mainstay of car sound systems and OG Walkmans (Walkmen?) were the highest they have been since 2003. An increase of 94% on 2019. Despite having inferior sound quality to CDs and vinyl, the medium is a lot cheaper...

Following on from International Women's Day last week, news of Sarah Everard's body being discovered broke on the 10th of March, a week after she went missing from Clapham, London. There have been subsequent vigils (and protests) to remind us all that violent and sexual crimes against women are under-reported...

This week we celebrated International Women's Day. My love and support goes out to anyone who identifies with that label. Let's keep pushing for fair representation and pay, acknowledgement of domestic labour as work, and maybe some systemic government-backed support for domestic abuse victims and sex workers that doesn't involve...

These no longer fictional bridges: You know the bridges on the Euro notes? There are seven of them total (notes and bridges) which represent seven different architectural styles. They were originally designed in 2002 and were (at the time) fictitious bridges which didn't exist anywhere - so that no country...

This lineage of cats: Chartwell House, in Kent, England, was the home of Winston Churchill. It's now owned and operated by the National Trust, a British institution, allowing visitors to see the gardens and houses. During Churchill's life, he had a marmalade (white and ginger) cat, called Jock. A few...

This collective noun: If I was to make a list of small-talk and first date conversation topics it would go something like this: food, the tube, podcasts or books, and then collective nouns for animals. How many times have I been told the words "a parliament of owls" in my...

This seventeenth century petition: In 1674 in England, a pamphlet was made and published, titled The Women's Petition Against Coffee. The women (or alleged women, we don't actually know who wrote this) were fighting against the new trend of coffee houses in London, which had arrived some time in the...

This heartening fact: Altruism, more specifically altruistic behaviour, is an action done (at cost) by an individual for the benefit of another individual. Why do humans, and other social animals, engage in altruistic behaviour? How does it makes sense on the evolutionary balance sheets? There is increasing evidence that altruism...

This etymology: The word "peculiar" has come to mean odd or unique, so obviously its Latin root word (‌peculium) means somebody's cattle. Cows were pretty valuable assets back in the day: you can eat them, milk them, use them as work animals, so they became a symbol of wealth. Later,...

This fitness research: I've long been a fan of interval training to help improve my running and cycling speed. High intensity interval training (HIIT) is a method of training where you mix short bursts of intense activity (e.g. a 30 second sprint) between longer periods of low-intensity exercise (e.g. 90...

These underwater drawings: Go back to 1860s and ask someone what coral reefs, or fish, or literally any marine life looked like. Go on. I bet they'd tell you they had no idea. How would they? Sure, we'd been sending people down there since the 1500s in these giant metal...

This week the UK Government has brought us Lockdown The Third, a threequel in the franchise after the straight-to-TV movie that was the November lockdown. Cases, deaths, and hospital admissions are at an all-time high in our country at the moment, with London in particular looking pretty scary. It might...

Happy New Year 🎊🥳🍾 It's been one hell of a ride, 2020, and I hope that I never know another year like you. This has been quite enough. We're at least six months from being slightly out of the woods, but we've made it through nine-to-twelve (depending on where you...

This week's post comes a little lighter, on account of it being Christmas and all. I didn't want to break a streak, but also I want to get back to eating far too much and doing far too little. So let's get on with it: This etymology: The word apocalypse...

All of these species named after David Attenborough: The man's a living legend (he's also like 94 - he was a teenager in the 1930s which was before the second world war - this isn't the fact by the way, this is just some incredible side-facts). The collective scientific community...

I took a four day week last week, so managed to spend this week with all the energy that only a 3-day weekend can give you. That said, I've found myself incredibly busy this week. This is the first evening (Thursday) where I've managed to find some time to myself...

It's time of year again: Spotify have released their Rewind - showing you what you listened to throughout this year. After the year (or decade, or complete non-year, whatever helps you) that 2020 has been, I think a lot of people have looked to music for a bit of refuge,...

These Tattoos: In the late 1880s, a man called Sutherland Macdonald became the UK's first professioanl tattoo artist. Although he was already an artist, he started the tattoo craft after a trip to the South Pacific. Macdonald is the reason we have the word 'tattooist' (a portmanteau of tattoo and...

"Isn't it getting dark early ?" - how I've started at least half of the conversations I've had this week. This thing that spreads like a disease: Look, I was a germaphobe before it was cool. I was very aware of how one thing can spread from person to person....

Happy Friday 13th. I hope it's spooky and magical. This Roman Beverage: I'd imagine the Romans were pretty thirsty. The Mediterranean is warm, and you'd work up quite the thirst inventing a whole number system, apartments, a calendar, and like a million kinds of war machinery. Not that I'd know....

WHAT. A. WEEK. It feels the entire western world has had their eyes on the US presidential election, and it's been exhausting. Not exhausting in the way that the last 12 months have been for the US, but exhausting in the way that nothing in 2020 has lead us to...

This high fat diet: Whales, like dolphins but also humans, are mammals. This means they feed their young with milk. As you would expect, the blue whale has the largest mammary glands on Earth – each is about 1.5m long and weighs as much as a baby elephant. Blue whale...

This thing about how we sleep: In Western Europe, about 35% of young adults sleep with a soft toy every night, and about 44% of people keep hold of their childhood soft toy. It can be especially helpful for people with low self-esteem, or higher anxiety to sleep with a...

This Tiny City: St. David's is a city with a population of about 1,000 people. In 1886 it was stripped of its status as a city, being described as "lonely, and the neighbouring district wild and unimproved". In 1994 Queen Elizabeth II requested it be restored as a city, and...

In honour of the announcement of (some of) the 2020 Nobel Prizes, this week's edition contains entirely things I learned when reading about the people and work announced so far. Note that this doesn't include anything about the Peace or Economics prizes, which had not been announced at the time...

This week's Things I learned is a little shorter than usual because I've been moving house. I hate every part of moving house. Anyway, enough excuses, here are some of the things I learned this week: This thing about reading: I've been thinking about how much we read recently. I...

This unknown origin: No one is quite certain where the term "rule of thumb" came from. It has been mistakenly attributed to a British Judge's rule that a man can beat his wife if the stick so long as it is less wide than his thumb, however there's no evidence...

These ways of thinking: When we hand over a new problem to our brain there's a lot of things we need to do to solve it. We need to understand the problem and the surrounding/causal concepts as well as the constraints on a solution. For example the challenge might be...

This missed opportunity to name something: Ping Pong is a weird name for a sport, right? Ping Pong is actually a trademarked name, but it's not uncommon to call a thing by a brand name: it's like Hoover vs. Vacuum Cleaner, or Kleenex vs. Tissue. The real-fun fact here is...

This world: The Word Kipple is a word invented by SciFi writer Phillip K. Dick, to mean the kind of rubbish/trash that accumulates if humans don't intervene. source This part of our brain: You know when you suddenly remember that you need to reply to that e-mail, drop off that...

This medieval lingo: Have you ever wondered how to refer to the area where a good-old-fashioned joust took place? You know, jousts? Two men, two horses, two giant poles, and one film where Heath Ledger is irresponsibly handsome? Sorry, I got distracted there - did you know the area where...

This useful thinking tool: good writing starts with observations, and moves to analysis. Making the transition is difficult. One way to spot a mental crutch is to see where you reach for words like "interestingly", "surprisingly", or "notably". These all hint at a significance or meaningfulness, but don't actually clarify...

This tidbit about a literary villa: Over three days in June of 1816 at a villa in Geneva, Mary Shelley started writing Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus and John William Polidori started The Vampyre (which preceded the modern romantic image of vampires). The latter inspired Lord Byron (who was also...