double elephants and birds

A double elephant folio is a book printed on double elephant paper, which measures 40 inches by 26.75 inches. The paper can be up to 50 inches long.

Based on five minutes of intensive internet research, the most famous double elephant folio appears to be Birds of America by John James Audubon, who wanted the birds in his book to appear life-sized. This blogger wonders what the book would have looked like if Audubon had been into insects instead.

I learned this from:
1. The Order of Things: Hierarchies, Structures, and Pecking Orders
2. What is a Double Elephant?
3. Book Sizes

P.S. The largest book on record is Bhutan: A Visual Odyssey Across the Last Himalayan Kingdom, which is five by seven feet and weighs 150 pounds. It costs $15,000 to get your own copy, but you can see photos of it at this link.

The Dickin Medal is given to animals who show "conspicuous gallantry or devotion to duty" during wartime.  Most of the winners have been pigeons (they carried messages during World War II) or dogs, but there have also been a few horses and one cat.

Able Seacat Simon* of the HMS Amethyst was posthumously awarded the Dickin Medal in 1949 for removing a rat infestation and raising the sailors' morale, even after he was injured by a shell blast.

* not to be confused with Simon's Cat

I learned this by following this convoluted path on Wikipedia: Berber cuisine --> Pastilla --> Columbidae --> War pigeon --> Commando (pigeon) --> Dickin Medal --> Simon (cat)

Jesus Christ, let's try the kanji.

You know that thing that happens when your browser uses the wrong character encoding, resulting in a page of unintelligible symbols where there should be Japanese or Arabic or whatever?  There's a word for that: mojibake.

I learned this from the comment thread of a post about egregious errors in a Dan Brown book.

weedy seadragons

There are probably some weird things about weedy seadragons (Phyllopteryx taeniolatus), but the fact that they exist is weird enough for me. They look like someone crossed a seahorse, a kangaroo, a sandpiper, and a pomegranate, painted the offspring, then decided to grow kelp on them. And they dance.

I learned this from Pharyngula. See also: Leafy sea dragon.

head lice

In North America, head lice are adapted to round strands of hair.  African Americans, who tend to have curly hair, are therefore less susceptible to head lice.  (But African head lice are adapted to oval strands of hair, so there are still infestations of head lice there.)

I learned this from UC IPM: Head Lice Management Guidelines.  And now I'm itchy.

Blaschko's lines

This picture shows Blaschko's lines, which result from the migration of cells in an embryo.

Although they are normally invisible, they become visible in some people with skin disorders, as in this photo:

I learned this from Blaschko's Lines on Pharyngula, which has some more pictures and a very clear explanation of how this phenomenon works. The top image is from Dynamics of Cancer by Steven A. Frank; the bottom image is from Wikimedia Commons.

1.1 billion dollars

Even though one-dollar coins aren't very popular in the US, the law requires the US Mint to keep producing them. Because of this, there are 1.1 billion one-dollar coins in the US Federal Reserve vaults. A stack of all of those coins would be 1,367 miles long, or long enough to stretch from New Mexico to Chicago.

I learned this from "Why the US keeps minting coins people hate and won't use" on the BBC. (Sometimes I read things other than Wikipedia!)

Able Seacat Simon

The Dickin Medal is given to animals who show "conspicuous gallantry or devotion to duty" during wartime. Most of the winners have been pigeons (they carried messages during World War II) or dogs, but there have also been a few horses and one cat.

Able Seacat Simon* of the HMS Amethyst was posthumously awarded the Dickin Medal in 1949 for removing a rat infestation and raising the sailors' morale, even after he was injured by a shell blast.

* not to be confused with Simon's Cat

I learned this by following this convoluted path on Wikipedia: Berber cuisine --> Pastilla --> Columbidae --> War pigeon --> Commando (pigeon) --> Dickin Medal --> Simon (cat), which linked to Ilford Animal Cemetery.

ema datsi

Ema datsi is the national dish of Bhutan. It's made of melted yak cheese and chilies, kind of like Tex-Mex chile con queso or maybe Welsh rarebit, and it's served over rice.

In the capital, Thimphu, you can also get yak pizza and yak burgers.

I learned this from Cheese and Bhutanese cuisine on Wikipedia, Datsi in the Druk Highlands on mid-day.com, and For Folk Fest, Red-Hot Chilies, Hold the Yak from the Washington Post.  Flickr has some photos of ema datsi.

for SCIENCE!

In the 1800s, a surgeon named Edward Jukes came up with the technique of gastric lavage (stomach pumping). He demonstrated the efficacy of the technique by intentionally overdosing on laudanum, which contains morphine and codeine, then having his stomach washed out. He survived to write a somewhat strange book (for example, he recommended gastric lavage as a treatment for women who were prone to miscarriage).

I learned this from The Courageous - and Weird - Tradition of Self-Experimentation.

squid light, squid bright

Some species of squid, such as the Hawaiian bobtail squid, have a symbiotic relationship with luminescent bacteria. The bacteria colonize the light organ on the underside of the squid, which hides the squid's silhouette from predators that live on the ocean floor.

I learned this from The Cephalopoda and National Geographic.

glacier anatomy

The lowest end of a glacier is called a glacier terminus, glacier snout, or glacier toe.

I learned the "glacier toe" part from some Wikipedia article, but the other two terms are from the National Snow and Ice Data Center glossary, where I also learned that small icebergs can be classified as growlers or bergy bits.

hamsters and snails

Snail racing and hamster racing are both sports in the UK.

I learned this from Wikipedia. Where else?

See also: The World Snail Racing Championships, where the winner gets a cup of lettuce.

Venn diagrams

When I learned about Venn diagrams as a kid, they usually had only two or three rings, or sets. But here's one with six sets by John Venn himself:

Here's another one, by A. W. F. Edwards:

I learned this from Venn diagram on Wikipedia.

See also: A Survey of Venn Diagrams, which has a lot of math that is way, way over my head, but also some cool images.

Image credits:
1. top image: Wikimedia commons, originally by Kopophex
2. bottom image: Wikimedia commons

swallowing sound

Scientists used to believe that sound waves travel through a whale's lower jaw to its ear.  In 2008, computer modeling showed that sound actually enters the whale's throat, then passes into a fatty channel that transfers the vibrations to the whale's ear.

I learned this from How is that whale listening? via Whale. The computer model was based on Cuvier's beaked whale, which holds the record for the deepest dive (6230 feet) by an air-breathing animal.

eyeballs and brains

Tarsiers and ostriches have eyeballs that are the same size as their respective brains. 

I learned this from: 
1. Two Texting Tarsiers 
2. Freaks of Nature: Tarsier (Tarsius), South-East Asian islands 
3. Ostrich Fact or Fiction - American Ostrich Association 

image credit: Wikimedia Commons, where you can also find many other pictures of tarsiers going ( O.O)