Friday fun fact #10: Chestnuts and conkers

Just two names for the same thing? No, there's a difference. There is one huge difference. Simply speaking, one is edible and the other is not. Take a look at the photographs, both from Google images:

Chestnuts

Conkers

Indeed, they have only two things in common as far as I know - their colour and the fact that they are around at the same time of the year, namely late September through to the end of November, depending on the weather and where you live.

Now the reason for the confusion could be put down to the fact that conkers are also called horse chestnuts. This name probably derived from the fact that, although the fruit is poisonous to humans, due to saponins, it can be given to deer, cattle and horses. Apparently, it gives a horse a lovely shiny coat.

When I was a little girl in short, white socks we used to wait with impatience for conker time to come around. On my way home from school there were a good few conker trees and I managed every year to fill my school bag, day after day, with these lovely, shiny treasures.

What would I want them for, you may be asking. Well, it pleased me simply to admire their beautiful colour and handle them. I used to take a tissue or a clean hanky and 'puff and shine'. Most of all I liked to find the unopened ones and be the first to discover their simple beauty.

But above all, I picked them to have conker contests with the boys in the playground and sometimes even with my brother. I wasn't much of a 'girlie' girl to be honest and this was something I was good at.

To prepare a conker for the fight one had to string it - make a hole through the middle, thread a string and tie a strong knot. You then wound a good part of the other end round your fingers and you were ready for the battle. The opponent had to simply let his conker dangle at the end of the string and inwardly squirm at every hit!

The contest consisted of taking turns in bashing your opponents conker to smithereens. If you missed the opponents conker then it was his turn to bash yours and so on till one or t'other would completely break apart and fall from the string.

If your conker won two battles it was classed as a two-er, if five battles, then you had a five-er, etc.

How did you know if the conker was a good one. Well, before the hole was made one could tell by the weight. The heavier they were the more solid they would be inside. If in doubt, you put it in a bowl of water. If it floated it was no good. Next, if when you made the hole, the skewer went through too easily, then that one was also discarded. Obviously, the best conkers were the heavy, solid ones.

So far this article consisted of refreshing my girlhood memories. But now if you care to look here you will find more information about conkers. If you look here you will find out more about sweet chestnuts, sometimes called Spanish or Portuguese chestnuts (I didn't know that!). Although their names are similar, the two varieties of tree are only very distantly related.

Have a good Friday and a pleasant weekend.

Friday Fun Fact #9: About the song 'Yankee Doodle'

We were having a pasta lunch the other day and my son mentioned that in the 19th century the word 'macaroni' was used to mean 'cool', 'trendy' or 'fashionable'. I decided to look into it and found some really interesting information.

We have all heard the song about Yankee Doodle, haven't we? Well, if you haven't, here are the lyrics of the most well known part:

Yankee Doodle went to town

A-riding on a pony,

Stuck a feather in his cap

And called it macaroni'.

Indeed, "macaroni" became a term for a dandy in the 18th century after young British men returned from their adventures on the European continent sporting exaggerated high-fashion clothes and mannerisms (along with a taste for an exotic Italian dish called "macaroni").

O.K., but another thing I didn't know was the fact that the word 'dude' originates from the same song!

In 1883, the term 'dood', later to be spelt 'dude', was used to describe 'a man who cares too much about how he looks or dresses', even to the extent of being effeminate.

The song itself was thought to have been sung by British military officers to mock the Yankees with whom they served in the French and Indian War, the tune used being that of the nursery rhyme Lucy Locket. It is said that the British invented the song in the first place because they thought the colonists were unsophisticated (just by placing a feather in their hats they thought they were at the height of fashion), womanish and not very masculine.

Today the song is the state anthem of Connecticut.

Friday fun facts #8: Tea

(Image taken from internet)

# Never use reboiled water, as it has lost the oxygen which is needed to bring out the full flavour.

# Tea leaves are a natural means of keeping mosquitoes away. All you have to do is use slightly damp leaves to add the scent of tea to the areas you want to keep insect-free.

# Tea is a natural antioxidant, and rich in vitamins B2, B1 and B6. Tea is also rich in potassium, manganese, folic acid and calcium.

# Tea is the second most consumed drink in the world, the first being water.

# There are many different kinds of tea, but they are all derived from just one plant: Camellia sinensis. The colour and variety of the tea (green, black, white, oolong) just depends on the way the leaves are treated.

# Tea is a natural source of fluoride that can help protect against tooth decay and gum disease.

# Anna, Duchess of Bedford, is credited with creating Afternoon Tea, when, in about 1840, she began taking tea with a light snack around 4:00 p.m. to ward off 'that sinking feeling'.

# There is, it seems, an estimated 1500 different types of tea.

# The United Kingdom drinks about 165 million cups of tea a day, or 62 billion cups per year.

# Tea has a finer taste when taken in a bone china tea cup than with other vessels.

# Tea plants only thrive in hot, humid climates with plenty of rainfall.

# Herbal tea is not tea. Its correct name is 'infusion' or 'tisane'.

Friday fun fact #7: A baker's dozen

(Photo taken from Google Images)

Did you know that a baker's dozen is, in fact, 13 and not 12? Well, maybe you did. But, do you know why?

The expression goes back to the times of Henry II of England (1154 - 89) but the origen of the expression goes much further back in time, probably to the year 1000.

As it is very difficult to calculate the exact quantity of dough needed to make a loaf, bakers were often finding that they were accidentally cheating their customers. If they were found out that they had sold short then they were quite likely to have their hand chopped off! Not good. This was also true in other countries, like Egypt and Babylon where similar fates awaited those who were accused of selling 'light loaves'.

So, to get around the problem, the bakers started to add a loaf of bread to their vendor's or customer's sack, giving them 13 loaves for every 12 ordered. The addition was called the 'in-bread' or 'vantage loaf'.

This practice eventually made its way into the Worshipful Company of Bakers (London) guild code.  This guild was actually started in the 12th century and had a large part in formulating the rules on the Assize of Bread and Ale statute.

While modern bakers no longer fear medieval law, they have found other reasons for a baker's dozen, as seen in the tidy way 13 disks (loaves, cookies, biscuits, etc.) can pack a rectangle (baking tray) of appropriate proportions. Modern standard sized packing trays have a 3:2 aspect ratio, and the most efficient two-dimensional array is hexagonal close packing, which has sixfold symmetry, such that each baked item is equidistant from its six nearest neighbours. The corners of a cookie sheet heat up and cool off faster than the edges and interior, so any item placed near a corner will not bake at the same rate as the other items. A 4+5+4 arrangement provides the dense hexagonal packing while avoiding corners, and would have been discovered empirically by bakers with the goal of baking the maximum number per batch with optimal uniformity. 

Talking of cookies, I'm off to bake some for the weekend. It rained ALL DAY yesterday so you can guess which ones I'll be baking. See here if you are in any doubt!

A dozen things you might want to know about eggs

1. When preparing eggs for an omelette, beat the eggs together with a pinch of salt. This helps to mix the egg yolk and white quicker so that you don't have to beat the egg as much. The less you beat, the lighter the omelette will be.
2. Ideally, use a separate non - stick pan only for your egg recipes.
3. When scrambling, beat the eggs together with a drop of milk.  This will make the end result light, fluffy and moist. Do not stir too much.
4. Always use your eggs at room temperature. 
5. Eat vitamin C, preferably citric fruits, at the same meal. The vitamin C favours iron absorption and the citric acid helps to absorb calcium.
6. Add lemon juice or vinegar to the water when hard boiling eggs to prevent the shells from cracking. To hard boil eggs, bring water to boil, turn off heat, cover and let eggs sit for 20 minutes. Peel and enjoy.
7. In Columbia and other S. American countries, where there might be a shortage of other calcium sources, eggs are soaked for some days in vinegar to dissolve the shell and then the vinegar is drunk.
8. Egg white is also known as albumen or glair
9. An egg white is made mainly of protein and also contains niacin (vitamin B3), riboflavin (vitamin B2), chlorine, magnesium, potassium, sodium and sulphur. The yolk is a favourable source of iron, calcium, sodium and potassium.
10. A double yolk egg is longer and thinner than other eggs. To determine a double yolk, the farmer will shine a bright light behind the egg and, almost like an x-ray, he sees through the shell and it's content. This process is called "candling" because, before the invention of powerful electric bulbs,  farmers used a candle.
11. The only difference between brown and white eggs is the price. The colour of the hen indicates the colour of the egg it will lay.  There is no nutritional difference whatsoever.
12. Eggs take 24 - 26 hours to form. The hen lays the egg large end first and within 30 minutes the whole process starts anew.

O.K. Just some info. I have picked up on my way through life, speckled with one or two things I have found interesting in internet.

Lunch maths - fractals

My daughter and I were eating our lunch together one day at the end of last week, when suddenly I noticed that A. had stopped eating and was looking intensely at her food.
"Is everything all right, dear?" I asked.
"Mama, this is amazing," she replied.
"Well, I'm glad you like it" I said, pleased.
"No, well yes it IS delicious, but look, there's a fractal on my pickled cabbage!"

So what are fractals, you may be asking. This is how my daughter described them in her research project:

A fractal is a mathematical object of great complexity defined by simple algorithms (a collection of instructions or steps used to solve a problem or carry out a task.) It’s a semi geometrical object of which the basic structure repeats itself on different scales, partially or irregularly.

She continues to explain a little history:

Fractals first appeared because of the need to find a geometry which could describe natural objects.

The mathematics behind fractals was first studied during the 17th century by Gottfried Leibniz, who considered the recursive self-similarity. He was followed by Karl Weierstrass in 1872, who gave an example of a function which was everywhere continuous but nowhere differentiable; Helge von Koch, who in 1904 gave a more accurate geometric definition of a resembling function (the Koch curve or snowflake, a mathematical curve and one of the first fractal curves to have been described); in 1915 Waclaw Sierpinski constructed his triangle (one of the basic examples of self-similar sets, that is, a pattern that can be reproducible at any magnification or reduction) and one year later his carpet; Paul Pierre Lévy took the idea of self-similar curves further in 1938 with the Lévy C curve; and Georg Cantor explained the Cantor sets (constructed in the unit interval [0, 1] by deleting successive middle thirds of intervals) which are also now recognized as fractals.

In the 1960s, Benoît Mandelbrot, a mathematician born in Poland to a Jewish family who later went to live in France, started investigating self-similarity and studied fractals thoroughly. He illustrated the mathematical definition of fractal with striking computer-constructed visualizations. The term fractal comes from the Latin word “fractus,” which means “torn,” “fractured,” “irregular.”

Even today, in 2013, there is still no exact and generally accepted mathematical definition for the fractal concept.

Here are some of my favourite fractals, taken from Google images:

Here is a  link to a maths web which simplifies pretty much the whole concept, and if you have a look here, you will find 17 more fractals which appear in nature. Interesting stuff.

Friday Fun Fact #6: Babies have no kneecaps

Did you know that babies are born without any kneecaps? Kneecaps are formed between the second and sixth year of life.

Friday Fun Fact #5: Golf

I suppose most of us have heard of the sport of golfing. While the modern game of golf originated in 15th century Scotland, it seems the Romans and the Chinese were playing very similar games between the eighth and twelfth centuries. The idea of the game is to hit a small ball into a series of holes, using the least moves possible.

(Photo from Google images)

But where did the word GOLF come from? It is an acronym and stands for Gentlemen Only Ladies Forbidden!

Friday Fun Fact #4: Random animal facts

@ Pigs are the only animals that can suffer from sunburn
@ Polar bears are not white. They have black skin and their hairs are transparent hollow tubes.

@ Polar bears are left-handed
@ The eyes on a starfish are located at the end of each leg
@ In the Caribbean there are oysters that climb trees
@ It is possible to get a cow to go upstairs, but not to go downstairs
@ Sloths take two weeks to digest their food
@ A tiger has striped skin, not just striped fur
 

@ Polar bears have blue tongues
@ An elephant's trunk contains 40,000 muscles

Friday Fun Fact #3: The Amazon River

# The Amazon River, located in the central northern part of South America, along with its tributaries, runs through seven different countries: Guyana, Ecuador, Venezuela, Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia and Peru.

# The Amazon River is approx. 6400 km long. It is the second longest in the world, beaten only by the Nile river in N. E. Africa.

# During the wet season there are parts of the river which reach 190 km. wide.

# The Amazon River is the only home of the pink dolphin.

# This river contains 1/5 of the worlds fresh water.

# Its source is in the Andes mountains in Peru, and it flows into the Atlantic ocean.

# This river has no bridges.

# The mouth of the Amazon river is over 320 km wide and contains the world's largest freshwater island, Marajó Island.

#  It was named by Francisco de Orellana, a Spanish explorer who led the first expedition to explore the river. On this expedition he was attacked by "mighty female fighters" called Amazons, after the female fighters which appear in Greek mythology.

Amazon meanders

Friday Fun Fact #2: Feet

Here are five interesting facts about feet:

! There are 52 bones in your feet which make up 25% of the bones in the human body.

! Two feet together have 250,000 sweat glands, most feet lose more than 1/4 l of moisture daily .

! Finger and toe nails grow more during hot weather, pregnancy and your teenage years.

! Many people have one foot larger than the other.

! The pressure on your feet when running can be as much as four times your body weight.

Feet!

Friday Fun Fact #1

The Hundred Years War did NOT last 100 years. In fact it lasted a total of 116 years.

It was a series of conflicts waged from 1337 to 1453 between the Kingdom of England and the Kingdom of France, about who should control the French throne. It was a dynastic disagreement dating back to William the Conqueror who became King of England in 1066, whilst remaining Duke of Normandy. The war started as a result of King Edward III of England's refusal to pay homage to King Philip IV of France, leading to a retaliation by the latter who confiscated King Edward's lands in Aquitaine, south west France.

 King Edward III

The war rapidly became an economic conflict also, as the French monarchy squeezed  more and more money from northern Europeans. War was an expensive business and the French began taxing many everyday items such as salt, bread and wine so that they could finance their battles.

 William the Conqueror

Such famous people as Robin of Sherwood, King John,  King Richard II, Joan of Arc, Bertrand du Guesclin and King Charles ( called The Victorious) all had important parts to play during this war.

The Hundred Years War ended because another internal war - the War of the Roses - broke out in England, leaving the kingdom in no position to wage war against the French.

It is to be mentioned that Calais remained in English possession until 1558 and the title of King of France was claimed by the British until January 1st, 1801.