I’ve decided to believe that during the year I’m so absorbed in my learning that I mostly forget to note when I do learn anything. So it will forever look like in 2024 I’ve learned very little, and the vast majority of my year has been a dull flow of ignorance and despair.
- I had one about crêpes being a French adaptation of the Italian crespelle, whose recipe may have been invented or commissioned by a pope. But history may be doused with myth at this point, so I’m not sure what the thing I learned is anymore.
- In Fortaleza there’s a school named after Topo Gigio, one of the most annoying characters to come out of Italy. I can’t stress enough how annoying he is.
- I always thought that summing the digits of a number together repeatedly to obtain a single digit was just a thing kids did to invent numerologies, but it turns out it’s a legitimate math thing, with a slick way to calculate it without going through all the trouble. It’s called the digital root of a number, and in base 10 it’s the remainder of the number’s division by 9, or 9 if the remainder is 0. Easy as pie (and maybe easier than π).
- Harvard owns a villa in Florence. And I’m not sure why I was even surprised. Now, can I just tap my work ID to get in?
- This one makes no sense in English, but it demolished an entire worldview. The Italian word papero denotes a young goose, not a young duck, despite what Donald Duck’s Italian name has made everyone believe all these years. Wiktionary tries to soften the blow by calling the improper usage colloquial, but I’ll forever feel deceived.
- Cirrus clouds warm the earth and might become more frequent as the climate warms. At least we’ll have beautiful skies, right?
- One of my favorite French popular songs, “Nous n’irons plus au bois”, may be about prostitution? Embrassez qui vous voudrez.
- I already knew that caribou and reindeer are the same species, but now I know caribou are always wild and reindeer can be domesticated. I learned that on my trip to Alaska last summer, which was a lot of fun until I tested positive for covid.
- Similarly, the Italian word for chestnut, castagna, denotes wild varieties, which can have up to seven fruits per bur (although my dad claimed it was up to two, but I guess he’s got something to learn too). What we call marrone, just like the French marron, is cultivated, and can have up to three fruits per bur, although some sources claim it must have only one fruit to qualify.
- Inevitably I ended up researching horse chestnuts, which are common where I grew up. I’ve always known they are not chestnuts at all, but what I didn’t know is that, presumably due to their saponin content, they can be turned into an eco-friendly laundry detergent. Despite my quest for detergent that doesn’t make me cringe, I will not start harvesting and mashing horse chestnuts.
- This morning the Italian Wikipedia had a front-page article on the deranged toy known as the Gilbert U-238 Atomic Energy Laboratory, which contained actual radioactive material. Because humans are out of their fucking minds.