Genuinely interesting stuff you learned at school/university/work

[MrsHathaway]

At a tangent from an otherwise rather tedious thread, some of us started talking about the history of the English language.

I did a paper called something like History and Structure of the English Language at university and honestly it didn't feel at all like work. The complicated bits have faded into the dusty corners of my brain, but some interesting snippets have remained within easy grasp.

For example, you can see a lot of the geopolitical history of the British Isles in what we now call English. Very basic words like low numbers (two, three) and natural features (sun, land, water) have their roots in our very earliest history and have scarcely changed since the Stone Age. They're also very similar to their equivalents in languages local at the time - northern European languages like Swedish, German, etc.

Place names come in odd clumps too - there are areas in eg Yorkshire and the Highlands which have very Norse names, and often there will be a geographical boundary between Norse place names and Anglo Saxon place names, such as a wide river or mountain ridge.

French came next, with the Normans in the eleventh century. A lot of our food words come from that period, including beef, pork, salmon, etc.

As English eyes looked further and further overseas we started adding more exotic ingredients to our kitchens and words to our vocabularies. Tomatoes, chocolate!

ANYWAY

We're often told that we won't use 90% of what we learn at school or even university, although we don't know which 90%. But I think it's almost always worth learning stuff for its own sake, if only because it's mildly interesting for one day or breaks the ice at one party where you happen to meet your soul mate.

So go on, what snippets have you retained from your years of formal education that are genuinely interesting in their own right? Can be a tiny thing or a major complicated theory, but it must be interesting - at least interesting enough for us to say "well, fancy that".

I'll leave you with this: in Japanese there was no word for "thank you". There were lots of ways of expressing gratitude, but no single expression in the European way. Then the Portuguese came, and suddenly the Japanese were trading with them. They used lots of hand gestures and gradually a kind of pidgin developed to allow them to communicate until there were enough on each side speaking the other's language. But one legacy from that time and that pidgin is a single-word "thank you" in Japanese: arigato. Which you'll notice is remarkably similar to the Portuguese obrigado.

Right after a long conversation and lots of diagrams and post it notes I've got the monty hall thing and it only works if you have three doors...

Polka dots...one?

But isn't that the same in most games of cricket? Regardless of how many runs any one person scored?

If you are having a blood transfusion and you have a feeling of impending doom it can be a sign that you are being transfused with the wrong blood type.

Yep, #8. You get 1,3,4,5,6,7 out in the first over (2's not facing) then in the second you bowl out 2,9,10,11.

in school we learnt about fetal circulation which is really interesting and I've never forgotten it even after 20 years. From my degree that I'm currently studying, the electron transfer chain always makes me marvel at how amazing we are.

But here's a funny one:
Whether asparagus makes your wee smell funny is genetically determined and there are naturally geographical patterns. Also genetically determined is whether you can smell that your wee smells when you eat asparagus. So in some countries (China for example) it was initially thought that asparagus didn't impact the smell of the wee whilst in fact it was just that they couldn't actually smell that their wee smelled funny.

"If you are having a blood transfusion and you have a feeling of impending doom it can be a sign that you are being transfused with the wrong blood type."

Which school/university/work did you learn that?

RJnomore - actually, MH can be shown to work on a larger number of doors and doing that actually helps to show why it works.

If there were 100 doors, you picked one, then MH opened 98 of the other doors to reveal goats, it's obvious that there is a very high chance that the remaining door has the car and you should switch.

In DOND, if there were 100 boxes, they are opened at random and the best prize may be revealed at any point along the way. Once you are down to the last two boxes, it is entirely down to chance which has got the better of the last remaining prizes, so it is just as likely that the box you started with has the better prize.

Bobbib I passed A level Chemistry and Physics and quite a lot of my Physics degree using variations of my "Wave-particle Duality of Light" essay!

Our school had a visit from someone who worked for a Space Laboratory. To explain the mind blowing numbers that studying space involves he showed the chn the toilet paper test. He used a water melon as the sun and, although I can't remember the exact numbers, it was something like Mercury was the equivalent of three sheets of toilet paper from sun, the Earth about 10 and Jupiter about 160 sheets (was about 25 yards from Sun). He then pointed the the 'Sun' and said " If Jupiter is this far from the Sun, where do you think the next Sun will be?" Well the chn said things like the library, hall, playground and when told further they said local High St etc. The answer was New York! And to think there are billions of stars out there. Mind blowing,

"If you put a detector by the slits, you will count particles. Freaky!... How does the system 'know' what state to be in? Have you spoiled it by making a measurement?"

That is the Copenhagen Interpretation that was turned into the Standard Model, which Einstein loudly objected to.

There is another model that is gaining traction that does not involve the universe knowing when it's observed and changing its rules accordingly.

Cote, I know. Those were examples of questions that are inspiring....

The many-worlds interpretation is my favourite, but the de Broglie-Bohm model you link to has nice tie-ins to the uncertainty principle.

I always hope my enjoyment of this stuff captures my students' imaginations; there aren't enough physicists about!

I have a wannabe physicist at home. She is nearly 11

Please please please encourage it!!!!!

There are so few of us....and even fewer women physicists.

Great thread! The cigarette lighter was invented before the match.

DSiL is a physicist: a nuclear physicist at that (fusion). Meanwhile DB is a sociologist with long hair. Smashing gender stereotypes with a hadron collider in that house!

"Smashing gender stereotypes with a hadron collider"

Love it

Yes, we are totally encouraging DD's passion for physics. She already made me explain the double-slit experiment re light as a wave and Einstein's general relativity with the train, bouncing ball etc.

Cote I'm a nurse 😀. It's something they taught us to look out for in case of transfusion reactions.

I don't buy the theory about the GIs and the British women either.

From time immemorial men have taken less responsibility than women for the consequences of unprotected sex and I've never seen any evidence that men in the UK have a noticeably different attitude to this.

I think the theory of the giddiness brought about by the exciting strangers in town coupled with the impending doom of the situation seems more likely to have triggered a spike in the birth rate.

Add to that the statement that the researcher 'discovered' her facts immediately without having to do any more research points to a very shaky theory.

I wonder though.

In a society where men had a very heavy responsibility for their offspring - regardless of the circumstances of conception - they might be less inclined to risk conception. Similarly, where women suffered the consequences of pregnancy more than the consequences of avoiding/rejecting penetration, they might be more empowered to halt before the finish.

It's possible that British men were more likely to be shamed for having byblows than American men, and that American women were more afraid of pregnancy than rejection.

And I've slightly depressed myself by a hypothetical world which sounds nicer than ours.

Um.

The sides of A-series paper (A3, A4, A5 etc) have sides in the ratio 1:√2 which is why two A5s make an A4 and two A4s make an A3 and the shape always stays in the same proportions.

That's how I learned about multiplying surds.

And two A3s make an A2 and two A2s make an A1. Learnt paper sizes during old fashioned secretarial training 100 years ago

Lots of interesting biology facts from my degrees:

• That the current problems with antibiotic resistance were primarily created by hospitals using strong, broad spectrum antibiotics as first line treatment.
• that some plants lively wholly as parasites inside other plants and only emerge as flowers. Rafflesia is a good example.
• That many chemotherapy drugs were discovered in plants.
• that Pavlov's infamous dogs went mad and had to be shot.

Not a fact as such but I've always loved the story of cyclopamine, an inhibitor I have used many times in the lab. It was discovered when farmers in Idaho reported that their sheep were producing lambs with birth defects, particularly one-eyed lambs. They eventually traced the cause to a plant the sheep had eaten called the corn lilly. The corn Lilly contains a potent inhibitor of a gene called sonic hedgehog, which is needed during embryological development for the body plan to form correctly. They now manufacture the inhibitor for use in research and potentially as a cancer treatment. Which leads me on to my last fact:

• Some cancers are thought to be driven by genes which are needed during embryo growth and development being turned on again in the wrong context.

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Sorry for typos, writing on my phone.

Fascinating stuff, Bolshy.

I can't help but notice the "bookworm" in your name. Care to join us on the 50 Book Challenge thread?

To add - the gene sonic hedgehog, known as sonic or shh to its friends, is so called because disrupting the gene in fruit flies causes prickles all over instead of just in set patterns, so it's known as hedgehog. When the same gene was discovered in vertebrates, it had to have a cooler name (this was in the early 90s so discovering a gene with the same function as an insect one was really exciting!), so obviously given the famous computer game, it was called sonic hedgehog.

Fifteen years later, lecturers had to explain that sonic hedgehog is a character in a computer game...

From my cancer courses: on average, you need seven mutations in one cell to end up with cancer - you need to disrupt the cell's ability to know when to replicate its DNA, when to divide, and when to die (ie switch off the blocks that are in place, becasue it stops listening to its neighbours that say 'there's enough of us'). And the more times your cells divide, the more likely you are to have cells where there's been unrepaired mistakes in replication, ie mutations, which is why cancer is mainly a disease of old age.
By the time you're 90, chances are you have cancer, but as cancer includes so many different types and prognoses, saying someone has cancer is really more like saying they have an infection or they have an allergy.

CuttedUpPear's post has reminded me of a fact:

The phrase 'since time immemorial' actually refers to a specific date: 6 July 1189 (the start of the reign of Richard I).