Fictional Factoids

We’ve all been there- your wound is healing nicely, the scab is solid, but then- you take a shower and the wound reopens! But why does this happen? The platelets that compose scabs are designed to naturally flow through your blood, but in the air, turn to a solid so it can form a scab, but showers disrupt this process. If you live anywhere in the Southwestern United States or somewhere else with high calcium content in the water, the presence of calcium tricks the platelets into thinking they’re in blood (due to calcium’s presence from bones’ role in blood), causing them to revert to liquid, or more often, an annoying goop.

“Your plastic dinosaurs are made from real dinosaurs.” A common shower thought, this is usually countered with something akin to “Most petroleum is generated from decomposed plants and algae.” While this may be true for most cases, there can be another way your toy dinosaurs are more saurian than the next. If you’re like me, you’ve owned a red dinosaur at some point. If you got that dinosaur in the Northwestern United States during a brief period from mid-1982 to late-1983, that dinosaur is practically confirmed to be made of other dinosaurs. At the beginning of the decade, “The Otwell Company” was founded after Gregory Otwell inherited a small oil field in the area. This area had been desert during the age of the dinosaurs, practically guaranteeing its origins. Otwell was a major local environmentalist, and rather than sell his oil as fossil fuel, he took the far less lucrative option and chose to produce Red-439, a dye that paints easily on plastic, but it’s reliance on high quality oil to produce and its exorbitant price tags during manufacturing make it rare today. A series of false positives led “The Otwell Company” to grow too big too quickly, and the company collapsed soon after its own creation.

Orange Juice. Apple Juice. Cranberry Juice. Lemonade. Why is lemonade different? The answer is probably more straightforward than you might think. Due to scurvy’s disastrous effects and citrus’s high Vitamin C density, “Lemon Aid” was the official term by the British Navy to keep their sailor’s fit and healthy!

While the pocket watch is commonly considered the time piece of the esteemed gentleman today, it’s history shows this was not always the case. Oddly, it’s origins share similarity to its modern status, where following its introduction in 1524, the complex clockwork and mechanisms left it only affordable to the European elite. However, at the turn of the century, improved manufacturing processes and the sheer nature of their utility caused a boom, as every worker began to save up for pocket watches so as to better ensure fair pay. This need for money and the association with labor led to a die-off of the pocket watch among the luxurious wealthy. It wouldn’t be until the 1803 Napoleonic Wars, where the pocket-watch-using military generals of the day became national heroes that the pocket watch would return to its final state as the classic symbol of opulence and punctuality.

Fireworks are one of life’s joys, and while the past relating it to gunpowder in ancient China is common knowledge, what few stop to consider is its future. Where can fireworks go from here? In late 2013, a Silicon Valley startup known as Firebreak attempted to answer that very question. Promising integration of semi-disposable computer systems to create fireworks that moved in the air, the company prospered under venture capital. To the investors’ dismay, in early 2015 the company came to a halt as the apartment complex where the founders (being roommates) lived burned down. Thankfully, none of them were hurt, and while the trial found them innocent, legal procedures where they had been sued over suspected fault drained the company of wealth and prestige.

I’ve tried to avoid doing facts about the fact number, but I couldn’t help myself! Much like how eleven and twelve have an irregular title (rather than being oneteen and twoteen), 72 was almost subject to this same fate. While spellings vary, the number was consistently pronounced “afdedy” (rhyming with ‘rhapsody’). This is simpler once you break it down- it is simply a slang corruption of “half” and the “dedy” referring to a dozen dozen (d.d.). As 72 was half of a dozen dozen (144), afdedy almost joined the numerical lexicon. Fortunately, the number was used infrequently enough that the alternate name never caught on.

Now found in equal amounts in fan fiction and religion, the word “canon” has had an interesting history. No, it’s etymology is unrelated to the weapon of the high seas, but you may recognize it’s root. “Cani-” is used to things that provide information, not only as the word canon (spelling has changed), but with other common words, such as candle (providing light on dark things), cantos (a poem of literary information), and canine (providing tracking and hunting support).

Pink eye is one of the more common nuisances of the medical world, but it wasn’t always this way. The disease that we now know as Pink Eye originated in snails, affecting the entirety of their body, with high mortality rates. It is estimated that the disease crossed the species barrier in the 1880s in Western Europe, and is hypothesized to be the result of incorrect hygiene by workers at snail farms.

Toothpaste is one of the oldest hygienic products. Even predating the toothbrush, a waxy substance with blended in silver particulates was traced to the early Bronze Age. While this may not sound like toothpaste, silver is continued to be used to this day as an antimicrobial substance, most visible in WWI tongue scrapers, suggesting the silvered wax was used for oral hygiene.

The modern color system where red, yellow, and blue are three corners of a triangle is commonly used in art, and a similar one involving red, blue, and green is frequently used in computer graphics, but due to the rarity of pigments, these colors weren’t common in the past. The oldest known color palette trio is red, olive green, and amber gold, and was found in a cave system near northern Italy, though moisture has made attempts at dating the cave’s artwork impossible.

For Fact Number 25, the fact will be about the most relevant of American coins- the quarter! While George Washington is the modern face of the coin, it wasn’t introduced in his day. James Madison introduced coins to the American currency, and originally gave the honor of the one-cent coin to Washington, and made the quarter in his own image. These coins are valuable to collectors, as after James Madison’s presidency, his unpopularity resulted in widespread destruction of these rare treasures.

Bees are wonderful, and while many already know about Vulture Bees, it might be surprising to hear that the leading theories about bees suggest that all ancient bees were meat eaters like the modern Vulture Bee.

Persian Rugs are absolutely a gold standard in quality, but did you know that for many years, they were never called that? As a result of racial animosity during the colonial period, Persian Rugs were frequently sold as “Elizabethan Rugs” to better appeal to European markets.

Hairdryers have an interesting history most people don’t hear about. The closest ancient equivalent is an undated artifact made of metal that attaches to a torch, producing a metal cover over the flame that heats and can be used on the hair. It’s most similar to a modern iron, but it remains the closest thing to a hair dryer prior to the 20th century.

While “Chairman Meow” is an internet meme parodying the former Chinese leader, did you know Mao Zedong actually had a cat? He named it 毛柔軟的, roughly translating to “Mao Soft.”

A favorite song lyric rhyme of mine is “I think about the first guy who ever shaved / And how many times did he shave before the second guy caved?”  Well, we may have an answer to one of those questions, and it’s not the one you’re thinking of! The first art depicting two men shaving at the same time is present in a cave artwork in Northwestern Italy, with the whole painting set (in English) known as Mammoth’s Run, presumably due to the considerably more majestic iconography of local mammoths. Nonetheless, it is a fun fact to know some of he history of the sharing of shaving.

Glass has always had a special place in the human psyche- clear yet solid, it feels impossible. However, the magic might be a little wasted on us. First archaeologically dated to 1500 BC, the history of glass is rather short compared  to that of human history, meaning skulls are easily available from before that time period. What is genuinely fascinating though, is that around the year 1300 BC, just a scant 200 years following glass’s first creation, there is a marked change in the optical region of the skull cavity. While by no means a unanimous view, many anthroneuropsychologists believe that this change was to allow the eye to be better capable at focusing on translucent solids like glass.