Ravens: Protectors of the Realm?

The Tower of London, on the north shore of the Thames.

The Tower of London holds a prominent place in the history of Great Britain. Founded in 1066, the historic castle has served many purposes over the years: as a prison, an armoury, a treasury, a menagerie, the home of the Royal Mint, a public records office, and the home of the Crown Jewels of the United Kingdom. However, it is some particularly surprising inhabitants of the Tower of London that are the subjects of today's FactRoulette.

If you watch The Game of Thrones or have read A Song of Ice and Fire, you know that ravens play a large role in the fictional land of Westeros. However, did you know that ravens supposedly play a role in the protection of the real-world British monarchy?

A flock of ravens are among the permanent residents of the Tower of London. It is not known precisely when captive ravens were placed in the tower, but they have played a role there through the reigns of many kings and queens, appearing in legends and stories over the centuries. In fact, one superstition holds that "if the Tower of London ravens are lost or fly away, the crown will fall and Britain with it."

London during "the Blitz."

That superstition was very nearly put to the test when most of the flock of ravens died due to stress during the "Blitz," the bombing of London during World War II. In fact, all but one of the Tower ravens died during due to the bombing. Winston Churchill, the prime minister during this period, ordered more ravens to be delivered to the tower in order to return the flock to the proper size.

The ravens continue to be a tourist attraction at the Tower of London to this day, drawing crowds when they are out and about around the tower.

Sources: 

"The guardians of the Tower". The Tower of London.

Jeffrey Vallance (November 2007). "Myths of the Raven. The myths and meanings of the Tower of London ravens". forteantimes.com.

Kennedy, Maev (15 November 2004). "Tower's raven mythology may be a Victorian flight of fantasy". The Guardian (London).



Images:

"Tower of London viewed from the River Thames" by Bob Collowân - Own work. Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons - http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Tower_of_London_viewed_from_the_River_Thames.jpg

"St Paul after the Blitz" by H.Mason - http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1342305/The-Blitzs-iconic-image-On-70th-anniversary-The-Mail-tells-story-picture-St-Pauls.html. Licensed under Public domain via Wikimedia Commons - http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:St_Paul_after_the_Blitz.jpg

"London tower ravens" by ingo zwank (iz) - Own work (own picture). Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons - http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:London_tower_ravens.jpg

Another Brick in the Ocean: Where Did it Come From?

Some odd artifacts have been washing up on a beach in Great Britain lately. Among these artifacts are cutlasses, life preservers, ship rigging, and scuba equipment. Now, these items don't seem like they would be out of place in an ocean. However, these aren't ordinary nautical relics; rather, they are Lego pieces!

It turns out that in 1997, a container ship, the Tokio Express, was hit by an incredibly large wave. In the incident, 62 containers were lost overboard. One of these containers was filled with over 4.7 million pieces of Lego, which is what is now washing up on British shores.

In a bizarre quirk of fate, many of the Lego pieces that spilled into the ocean have a nautical theme.

What is particularly amazing is how well-preserved these plastic pieces are. They are often described as looking like they just came out of the box. This just goes to show you how much of a problem plastic pollution in our oceans is and will be for years to come. Plastic in the ocean can last forever.



Source: http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-28367198

Photos by Tracey Williams

The Origin of Orange

In the English language, the word "orange" refers to one of two things. The first is a citrus fruit, while the second is the name we give to the color of that fruit. However, the origin of the word "orange" is quite interesting.

The word initially began with an "n" sound, as found in the Sanskrit word for orange, "nāraṅgaḥ," and the Persian word ("nārang") or the Arabic word ("nāranj"). Over time, words can undergo a process called "re-bracketing," when the boundaries between words shift. For example, in English, did you know that "an apron" was originally called "a napron"? Similarly, what we now call "a nickname" was originally called "an eke name." Something similar happened to the word "orange," but not in English; rather, we have the French to thank for our current pronunciation of the word.

When oranges were introduced to France, the French called it "une norange." Over time, this got re-bracketed to "une orange." When the word was adopted into English, it came pre-re-bracketed, and English has always known the fruit as "an orange."

Therefore, while many people believe this to be the case, it is a fact that "oranges" were never referred to as "noranges," at least not in English.

The name for the color orange comes, of course, from the name of the fruit. However, this means that before the fruit was widely known, English had no word for the color orange. In fact, those literal-minded Old Englishers called the color as they saw it: "yellow-red."



Source:

"orange n.1 and adj.1". Oxford English Dictionary online. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2013.

Muhammad Ali... Comedian?

Most people reading this will at least know who Muhammad Ali is. Olympic gold medalist and heavyweight boxing champion of the world, Ali has become a household name. However, did you know that he once released a comedy album?

In 1963, Muhammad Ali (then known by the name Cassius Clay) released a comedy album titled I Am the Greatest. At the time, Cassius Clay was still an up and coming boxer who had not yet won the world heavyweight champion title. The album is a lot of fun to listen to, such as this, the title track: "I Am the Greatest."

The back cover "blurb" puts it thusly:

"Yep, it's no empty boast as the greatest sportsman of the last, this, or any century does his thang in this hilarious amazing collection of standup, poetry, and rapping, just prior to entering the history books by becoming THE GREATEST EVER Heavyweight champ of all time!"

And, if you're interested in picking up the album for yourself, it's available at Amazon.com!

Twin Speed Demons: Helios 1 and 2, the Fastest Human-made Objects Ever

In my last post, I talked about the fastest artificial object ever (within Earth's atmosphere): a 900 kilogram steel plate that, thanks to the kinetic energy provided by a nuclear blast, travelled at a speed of at least 66 kilometers per second. That's pretty darn fast.

However, there is one object that has travelled faster, and it is the subject of today's FactRoulette!

On January 15th, 1976, the second of two solar probes was launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida. Helios 2, along with the first probe, Helios 1, was designed to study solar processes (basically measuring output from our sun, monitoring sunspots, that sort of thing). They both were sent into heliocentric orbits (a heliocentric orbit being an orbit around the center of gravity of our solar system: basically, the sun), just inside the orbit of the innermost planet, Mercury. Helios 2 orbits about three million kilometers closer to the sun than Helios 1, and sits only 0.29 AU away from the sun (AU stands for "astronomical unit," and 1 AU is the average distance from Earth to the sun, or 149,597,871 kilometers).

One of the Helios probes undergoes testing before its launch into a heliocentric orbit.

In its slightly-closer orbit around our sun, Helios 2 became the fastest artificial object ever, orbiting at an incredible speed of 70.22 kilometers per second.

Interestingly enough, the missions of both probes ended in the early 1980s, but they sent back data to ground computers here on Earth until 1985. They are both currently non-functional, but they still orbit the sun, maintaining their break-neck speed as they circle our star over and over again.



Sources:

Wilkinson, John (2012), New Eyes on the Sun: A Guide to Satellite Images and Amateur Observation, Astronomers' Universe Series, Springer, p. 37
Solar System Exploration: Missions: By Target: Our Solar System: Past: Helios 2


Image:

"Helios - testing" by NASA/Max Planck - http://solarsystem.nasa.gov/multimedia/display.cfm?IM_ID=10624. Licensed under Public domain via Wikimedia Commons - http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Helios_-_testing.png

"Like a Bat Out of Hell!" – The Fastest Artificial Object Ever (Inside Earth's Atmosphere)

If I were to ask you to imagine the fastest human-made object within Earth's atmosphere ever, what would you picture?

Perhaps something like this?

The ThrustSSC, with a land speed record of 1228 kph (763 mph). Yeah, that's pretty fast.

Or maybe something like this?

The Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird, holder of several manned-aircraft speed records.

Or perhaps this looks more like what you had in mind:

The launch of the space shuttle Atlantis, fast enough escape Earth's gravity; known as "escape velocity."

Whatever it is you imagined, I'm willing to bet that you didn't think the fastest human-made object looked like this:

Well, sort of like this. But much, much larger.

It's true! The fastest artificial object ever (inside Earth's atmosphere) is a large steel plate cover, weighing 900 kilograms (or 2000 lbs, if you prefer). Basically a huge manhole cover. How did this large hunk of metal become the fastest human-made object within Earth's atmosphere ever? This is where it gets quite interesting!

In 1957, a series of nuclear tests were carried out by the US government in Nevada. Named Operation Plumbbob, these tests were some of the most comprehensive nuclear tests ever undertaken. Most of the tests were to further the aim of weapons development, but some of them were designed as safety experiments. In one such test, code-named "Pascal-B," a nuclear weapon was detonated inside an underground shaft. Capping this shaft was the aforementioned steel plate. Dr. Robert Brownlee, the designer of the experiment, thought that a nuclear explosion would accelerate the plate to six times escape velocity–that is, the speed required for an object to escape the pull of Earth's gravity. Although a high speed camera was trained on the cap, it was only visible in a single frame following detonation. Regardless, the lower bound value for the plate's speed yielded by the video evidence was incredibly high. In the words of Dr. Brownlee, the video revealed the plate to be "going like a bat out of hell!"

It's possible that future space vehicles could be accelerated by detonating nuclear explosions against a "pusher plate," using the kinetic energy generated by successive blasts to bring the spacecraft up to speed.

You may have noticed that I qualified the record set by this unassuming steel plate with the phrase "within Earth's atmosphere." When I first posted this as a "today I learned" on my Facebook page, I mistakenly claimed that it held the record of being the fastest artificial object ever. However, after further reading, I discovered that there is one other man-made object that beats the record of our plucky little steel plate. These particular speed demons will be the subject of the next FactRoulette!



Sources:

Brownlee, Robert R. (June 2002). "Learning to Contain Underground Nuclear Explosions"
Pascal B test at the Nuclear Weapon Archive

What is FactRoulette?

What is FactRoulette? Before I get into what this blog is all about, let me first tell you a bit about myself. Well, one very important thing about me, anyway:

I love learning.

That is possibly the most important thing you could ever know about me. When I first meet someone, chances are at some point I will ask them the following question: "What are you passionate about?" Now, I'm not overly concerned with exactly what they are passionate about; the most important thing is that they are passionate about something. Me? I'm passionate about learning. I want to learn something new every day.

Learning something new every day isn't that difficult. We're learning new things all the time! But sometimes we neglect to take a moment and reflect on what it is we've learned. Think for a minute: what did you learn today? Maybe you're in high school and you've just learned the chemical formula for table salt. Or you're an art history student in university and just learned about the origins of pointillism. Or you've discovered a keyboard shortcut for trimming that piece of video you're editing to upload to YouTube. Whatever it is, you've learned something.

That's what this blog is all about. The little somethings that we learn every day.

A friend of mine started doing something interesting with her Facebook page some time ago. Every single day, she would post "Favorite thing today:" followed by something great that had happened that day. Big things, small things, just one thing every day that made her happy. I was impressed and moved. Here was someone using their social media presence in a unique and fascinating way. I decided that I wanted to do something similar, but with knowledge. On my Facebook page, I started doing this thing where I'd write "Today I learned" followed by some interesting fact I'd picked up that day. I got the inspiration from a number of places, most obviously reddit.com/r/TodayILearned, but also a favorite television program of mine: QI, a BBC panel show in which the fantastic Stephen Fry hosts a number of players, usually comedians, in a game that reveals interesting facts and knowledge. (QI, by the way, stands for "quite interesting.")

This blog is that idea, writ large, and with a title that isn't quite as derivative (read: blatantly stolen) as "Today I Learned." Three times a week, I will take that basic "today I learned" idea and go a little more in-depth, exploring topics ranging from the profound to the trivial; from mind-blowing and awe-inspiring to interesting and helpful. I will not be sticking to one topic; rather, you will find facts from a variety of fields: science, history, art and literature, geography, entertainment, sports, and everything in between. That's where the "roulette" comes in.

Sometimes I will post about something that you already knew. "Duh!" you might be tempted to say. "Everyone knows that!" Well, I didn't. It's today I learned! This blog will try to adhere to the lesson put forth in this, possibly my favorite XKCD comic:

Courtesy of XKCD

So, dear reader, join me as I post about things I've learned today! And if you have any interest in teaching me something new, please get in contact with me! I'm always happy to hear what you have to say.

Email: TodayILearned47@gmail.com
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