*~* The Mystic Realm Tree of Knowledge *~*

The More You Use Your Mind, The More It Works

This page was created because I wanted to not just give you nice images to look at on my website, but I also wanted to feed your brain. I wanted to include some questions which I researched that I thought you might find interesting. So, if you have time....stay awhile and find out what you knew already or didn't know. What did you learn? Now...here's a good question for all those who are using Microsoft Internet Explorer version 4 or better: What colour is the background on this page? Look at it for 10 more seconds. What is happening? For all those who are using Netscape or an older version of Internet Explorer, don't worry. You aren't missing too much. ~*~ MARY SHAW ~*~ P.S. A thank you goes out to Carl Vance for composing the midi file you hear playing in the background.

How much does your head weigh?

The average human head weighs about 7.5% of a person's body weight. So if you weigh about 40 kilograms, your head weighs around 3 kilos. If you are a 90-kilogram person, your head weighs about 6.75 kilos. There's a lot in there to make up that mass. Your head has 22 bones - the cranium, which protects the brain, has 8 bones, and the face, 14. So when you get tired of holding your head up high, you know why. It's heavy!

What do you call words you can read both backwards and forwards?

Words like Bob, Mom, Hannah and madam? They're called palindromes. Palindrome comes from a Greek word that means "running back again." The word was first used in English in 1629. A palindrome is a word, phrase, number, sentence or series of sentences that read the same backward and forward. Palindromes can be small words or large, from: mom, tot, peep, boob, madam, kayak, radar and reviver, right up to tattarrattat, kinnikinnik, detartrated and redivider. Palindromic prime numbers include 101, 131, and 313. Palindromes are not to be confused with something people do when they flip words backwards, like stressed for desserts or drawer for reward. Palindromes have to read the same both ways.

Why are the keys on the keyboard not in alphabetical order?

If you've only ever used a computer, this will take some imagination. The first keyboards were on typewriters. They were designed so that each letter was on the end of a separate bar of metal. As you hit the key, the metal bar swung forward and hit the sheet of paper, placing the inked letter where you wanted it. The first keyboards were arranged in a logical way - alphabetically. However, we use some letters more than others. Often-used letters close to each other would jam each time their swining bars collided. No one could pick up any speed, making typing a very frustrating process. Christopher Sholes patented what is close to the current typewriter in 1868. (The first recorded patent for a typewriter was granted to Henry Mill, a British Engineer, in 1714, but it was nowhere near as practical as Sholes' design.) In 1872 Sholes went back to the drawing board. He figured out which letters were used the most, and rearranged the sequence on the keyboard. His goal was to make sure that when you typed ing or th or any of the other common combinations of letters, the keys would be spread out in such a way that the metal bars would never jam. What he came up with is called the QWERTY keyboard, after the six letters in the top row, starting at the left. It took a while for typists to catch on to the QWERTY keyboard, but it is the standard even today. There has been one significant attempt to replace the QWERTY keyboard. The Dvorak, named after August Dvorak, who taught education at the University of Washington, was invented in 1936. Dvorak decided that the middle row should contain the vowels for the left hand (a,e,i,o,u) and the most frequently used consonants for the right hand (d,h,t,n,s). He thought his set-up let typists go faster, but people complained that it was too much trouble to learn something new. The QWERTY keyboard is pretty much the only part of a typewriter that is also part of a computer. We've come a long way since 1872.

Also of interest:

Mark Twain (who wrote Tom Sawyer) bought one of the earliest typewriters. He was the first American author to deliever a typewritten manuscript to a publisher: Life on the Mississippi.
Using only the top row of the keyboard, you can type the word TYPEWRITER. Here are some more top row words: PREREQUIRE, PROPRIETOR, REPERTOIRE, REPETITORY and PERPETUITY.
The longest words which can be typed using only the fingers of the left hand is: AFTERCATARACTS. Slightly shorter words are: STEWARDESSES and REVERBERATED.
The longest words which can be typed using only the fingers of the right hand are LOLLIPOP, POLYPHONY and HYPOPHYLLIUM.
The longest word which can be typed using only the middle row is ALFALFAS.
The following sentence uses every letter of the alphabet: "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog."
The letters used most often, in order, are: e , t , o and s.
The letters used least often are: h , j , x , z and q.

Why is it called chicken pox?

This is a great question, because the answer is absolutely not what you would expect. It seems that when chicken pox was first noticed, the medical people of the time thought that the spots or blisters were stuck on the skin - when in fact the skin erupts into the rash. The stuck-on-the-skin school thought the spots look like garbanzo beans attached all over the body. The Latin word for garbanzo beans is cicer - thus their more common English name, chick peas. And from that we get chick[en] pox. If the Spanish term, garbanzo beans, had been more popular, we might be using the term garbanzo pox today! So likely the source of the term chicken pox is not about the animal - chicken - it's about the vegetable - chick peas. One other theory is that the common illness might have been called chicken pox because it's less serious than smallpox, and the term "chicken" suggested that it wasn't so dangerous.

What the heck does "Pez" mean?

It's a shortened form of the German word for peppermint: pfefferminz. Pez has been around since 1927, when it was created in Vienna, Austria. At first these mini-sized, soap-shaped candies came in only one flavour -- peppermint -- and they were meant for adults. They arrived in the U.S. in 1950 in a plain dispenser. No Garfield heads, snowmen or cellphone replicas. By 1952 the manufacturers added fruit flavours and cartoon heads, beginning with Popeye. Now the folks at Pez (who call their product the pioneer of "interactive candy") have produced hundreds of dispensers over the years, spawning collectors galore. Pez sells over 3 billion candies a year in the U.S. alone -- no peppermint flavour anymore, though -- as well as in 60 countries around the world.

Why do so many blonde or light-haired men often have darker beards?

Before we attack the topic of colour, let's look at facial hair in general. Men grow beards for all sorts of reasons: to be fashionable, to be unfashionable, to be a rebel, or to hide behind. (Or maybe because it hurts their skin to shave.) It's important to know that Gillette didn't invent the safety razor until just before World War I. Shaving was much easier after that. Over the centuries, facial hair has gone in and out of fashion. Back in the second century A.D., Hadrian the emperor grew a beard to conceal some scars, and bingo - Romans copied their emperor. And that's been the pattern: beards have been pretty common, with little surges of popularity when influential men wore one. Today, movie stars rather than emperors often lead the trends. You have to admit, a beard is one accessory that any man can afford. Sideburns, too. They are named after Ambrose Burnsides, an American Civil War general who sported the odd hairline extension. Back in the sixteenth century, there were intriguing descriptive names for beard styles. The Sugar Loaf was long and rounded, wider at the top than bottom. The Bush, French Fork, Swallow-Tail, Needle, Screw and Fan-Tail all have names that describe them well. The goatee is a beard with an odd history. When you think about it, representations of the good guys in the Bible (like God, Jesus and Moses) all have big beards like Santa Claus. Yet the devil is usually shown with a goatee. His beard doesn't join up with the sideburns. It's basically a moustache and a goatee (a short pointed beard) that don't meet. It can disguise a disappearing chin, or maybe add sophistication...but mostly it makes a man look menacing. Moustaches also seem to have a fairly sinister reputation, as over the years bad guys wore them. But let's talk about colour, finally. The fact is, doctors and scientists don't really know why so many blond or light-haired men have darker, often ruddy beards. (And remember that what you see may not be entirely true, because you have no idea who is dyeing their hair these days.) Hair and beard colour differences may or may not relate to the apparent age of the follicle. Hair on your head ages first. It gets lighter and thinner and disappears first because the follicle shrinks. Partially that is because of too much time in the sun without a hat. And density seems to decrease from the top down. It's sort of like the places where people go grey first. Most people grey in the area in front of the ear, not behind it or above it. But this doesn't apply to everyone.

Also of interest:

The man sporting the longest recorded beard was Hans Langseth. It measured 5.25 metres when he died in 1927 in Kensett, Iowa. The beard is in the Smithsonian Institute in Washington, D.C.
Whisker facts: The average man's beard contains 15,500 hairs, which grow 0.038 cm each day, or 14 cm a year.
During his liftetime the average man will spend 3340 hours shaving off 8.4 m of whiskers. He will shave off nearly a kilogram of whisker hairs every sixteen years. (Eww....gross! Tell that one to your boyfriend or guy friend!!!!) haha....

Why do you cry when you cut an onion?

It's actually a very long story, but basically people cry because cutting the onion releases enzymes that mix with other molecules, converting the sulphur compounds in the onion to molecules that produce strong smells. The body reacts by producing tears to keep the nasty chemicals away from the eyes. The conversion takes about 30 seconds from the time the onion is first cut, and the whole things is over in about 5 minutes (unless another onion is cut!) There are a few things people can do to make sure not as many of the stinky burning molecules make it as far as their eyes. The chemicals are soluble in water, which means that if the onion is cut while it's being held under water, most of the chemicals go down the drain. That way, not as much gets into the air to drive people's eyes crazy. Other good ideas are to heat or freeze the onion to slow down the reaction between the sulphur compound and the enzyme, to chop them in a breeze, or use a fan to disperse the chemicals. Different kinds of onions contain a different amount and type of sulphur. Some are harsher and some are milder, so people can pick their onion according to their tolerance level. It's worth the tears, since onions taste great, have lots of nutrients (including vitamins B, C and G), and have many other great characteristics such as anti-inflammatory, anti-allergic and anti-asthmatic properties.

Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious - What does it mean? Who made it up, and why?

All 34 letters of this word were made up for the movie, Mary Poppins, by a writing team of two brothers, Bob and Dick Sherman. Their most famous song is "It's a Small World," which they wrote for the World's Fair in New York in 1964. You can hear it on the ride of the same name at Disneyland. The Shermans wrote all the songs for Mary Poppins, including "A Spoonful of Sugar," "Feed the Birds" and "Chim Chim Cher-ee." "Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious" means nothing, really. It is a very long nonsense word that is made up to sound like you are terribly smart and "You'll always sound precocious." Now we use it to mean that something is fantastic or super-fabulous.

Where did "mind your own beeswax" come from?

Well, it does sound like "Mind your own business," and it does mean that you should pay attention to your own issues, your own problems. But it came from a very surprising place - cosmetic history. Some say the term comes from the days when smallpox was a common disease, and the resulting pockmarks (little irregular ugly holes) stayed on the face. Fine ladies would fill in the pockmarks with beeswax. (Yes, that's right....ewwwie! BEESWAX!) The problem was that in warm weather, or if the lady got too close to the fire, the beeswax would melt. But it was considered rude to tell a lady that she needed to attend to her make-up -- in the Victorian era wearing make-up wasn't considered proper, so the beeswax application was done in private and kept secret. If you mentioned it, you might get "mind your own beeswax" as a sharp response.

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