Fact of the Day

[DarkRavie]

Fact of the Day - SHOWER IDEAS

Did you know.... The shower creates the perfect conditions to bring out your inner genius.

 

You’re in the shower, mindlessly scrubbing your toes, when—bam!—a prophetic thought pops into your head. Maybe you finally solve that glitch bugging you at work. Or maybe you learn something more important. The meaning of life, perhaps. Or what the 23 flavors in Dr. Pepper are.

 

Those aha! moments aren’t locked inside a bottle of Irish-scented shampoo. Soaking yourself in suds, though, does have a lot to do with it. The shower creates the perfect conditions for a creative flash, coaxing out your inner genius. Oh, and it makes you clean, too. 

 

Mind Your Mindless Tasks ...
Research shows you’re more likely to have a creative epiphany when you’re doing something monotonous, like fishing, exercising, or showering. Since these routines don’t require much thought, you flip to autopilot. This frees up your unconscious to work on something else. Your mind goes wandering, leaving your brain to quietly play a no-holds-barred game of free association.

 

This kind of daydreaming relaxes the prefrontal cortex—the brain’s command center for decisions, goals, and behavior. It also switches on the rest of your brain’s “default mode network” (DMN), clearing the pathways that connect different regions of your noggin. With your cortex loosened up and your DMN switched on, you can make new, creative connections that your conscious mind would have dismissed.

 

That’s why the ideas you have in the shower are so different from the ideas you have at work—you’re a pinch more close-minded at the office. Thinking hard about a problem deactivates your default network. It boosts your prefrontal cortex’s control. This isn’t a bad thing—it tightens your focus and gives you the power to stop gawking at cat pictures and hit that deadline. But it can also dig you into a creative rut. Because when you’re deeply focused on a task, your brain is more likely to censor unconventional—and creative—solutions.

 

Strange as it sounds, your brain is not most active when you’re focused on a task. Rather, research shows it’s more active when you let go of the leash and allow it to wander. Shelley Carson at Harvard found that highly creative people share one amazing trait—they’re easily distracted. And that’s the beauty of a warm shower. It distracts you. It makes you defocus. It lets your brain roam. It activates your DMN and encourages wacky ideas to bounce around. So when the lather rinses off, your light bulb switches on. 

 

... And Relax
But what makes the shower different from a boring board meeting? Doesn’t your mind wander there, too?

 

 

Well, yeah. You probably have the doodles to prove it. But a shower is relaxing. It’s a small, safe, enclosed space. You feel comfortable there. (Comfortable enough to be in the buff!) On top of that, you’re probably alone. It may be the only alone time you get all day. It’s your chance to get away from any stresses outside.

 

When you’re that relaxed, your brain may release everyone’s favorite happy-go-lucky neurotransmitter, dopamine. A flush of dopamine can boost your creative juices. More alpha waves will also ripple through your brain—the same waves that appear when you’re meditating or happily spacing out. Alphas accompany your brain’s daydreamy default setting and may encourage the creative fireworks. 

Timing Is Everything
Wait! There’s more! The time you shower also plays into the equation. Most of us wash up either in the morning or at night—when we’re most tired. According to the journal Thinking and Reasoning, that’s our creative peak. The groggy morning fog weakens your brain’s censors, keeping you from blocking the irrelevant, distracting thoughts that make great ideas possible. It’s likely that your shower gushes during your creative sweet spot.

 

There you have it. You’re distracted, relaxed, and tired. Your prefrontal cortex slackens its power as your default network switches on, your dopamine supplies surge, and your alpha waves roll. The shower creates the perfect storm for the perfect idea.

 

Source: The Reason Why Our Best Ideas Come to Us in the Shower

[DarkRavie]

Fact of the Day - BROWNIE POINTS

Did you know..... In a Los Angeles Times column published on March 15, 1951, writer Marvin Miles observed a peculiar phrase spreading throughout his circle of friends and the social scene at large. While standing in an elevator, he overheard the man next to him lamenting “lost brownie points.” Later, in a bar, a friend of Miles's who had stayed out too late said he would never “catch up” on his brownie points.

Miles was perplexed. “What esoteric cult was this that immersed men in pixie mathematics?” he wrote. It was, his colleagues explained, a way of keeping “score” with their spouses, of tallying the goodwill they had accrued with the “little woman.”

 

Over the decades, the phrase brownie points has become synonymous with currying favor, often with authority figures such as teachers or employers. So where exactly did the term come from, and what happens when you “earn” them?

 

On the Origins of Brownie Points
The most pervasive explanation is that the phrase originated with the Brownies, a subsect of the Girl Scouts who were encouraged to perform good deeds in their communities. The Brownies were often too young to be official Girl Scouts and were sometimes the siblings of older members. Originally called “Rosebuds” in the UK, they were renamed Brownies when the first troops were being organized in 1916. Sir Robert Baden-Powell, who had formed the Boy Scouts and was asked to name this new Girl Scout division, dubbed them Brownies after the magical creatures of Scottish folklore that materialized to selflessly help with household chores.

 

 

But the Brownies aren’t the only potential source of brownie points. In the 1930s, kids who signed up to deliver magazines like The Saturday Evening Post and Ladies’ Home Journal from Curtis Publishing were eligible for vouchers labeled “greenies” and “brownies” that they could redeem for merchandise. They were not explicitly called “brownie points,” but it’s not hard to imagine kids applying a points system to the brownies they earned.

 

The term could also have been the result of wartime rationing in the 1940s, where red and brown ration points could be redeemed for meats.

 

Brownie Points Gets Popular
The phrase didn’t really seem to pick up steam until Miles’s column was published. In this context, the married men speaking to Miles believed brownie points could be collected by husbands who remembered birthdays and anniversaries, stopped to pick up the dry cleaning, mailed letters, and didn’t spend long nights in pubs speaking to newspaper columnists. The goal, these husbands explained, was never to get ahead; they merely wanted to be considered somewhat respectable in the eyes of their wives.

 

Later, possibly as a result of its usage in print, grade school students took the phrase to mean an unnecessary devotion to teachers in order to win them over. At a family and faculty meeting at Leon High in Tallahassee, Florida, in 1956, earning brownie points was said to be a serious problem. The practice, also called “apple polishing,” prompted other students in class to shame their peers for being friendly to teachers. As a result, some were “reluctant to be civil” for fear they would be harassed for sucking up.

 

In the decades since that time, the idiom has become attached to any act where goodwill can be expected in return, particularly if it’s from someone in a position to reward the act with good grades or a promotion. As for Miles: The columnist declared his understanding of brownie points came only after a long night of investigation. Arriving home late, he said, rendered him “pointless.”

Source: Where Did the Term ‘Brownie Points’ Come From?

[DarkRavie]

Fact of the Day - CREAM SODA FLAVOR

Did you know... The answer lies in the way our brains and taste buds respond to vanilla.

 

There is no shortage of drinks and dishes with misleading names. Welsh rabbit is melted cheese on toasted bread, served with Worcestershire sauce and mustard, a dish in which no long-eared creatures are harmed. Bombay duck is a species of lizardfish, not a bird; prairie oysters are deep fried bull testicles, and you would be hard-pressed to find a bar that serves Long Island iced tea with actual tea in it.  

 

The same goes for cream soda, which contains zero actual cream. The soft drink tends to be prepared using the same non-dairy ingredients: carbonated water, natural or artificial sweeteners, and some form of vanilla flavoring. There are a few regional variations, like Crush Cream Soda, a pink bubble gum-flavored brand in Canada, and Bickford’s Creamy Soda from Australia has notes of raspberry. 

 

Nor was cream part of cream soda’s ingredient list in the past, the way cocaine used to be a part of Coca-Cola. Two of the earliest published recipes, uncovered by writer Dan Nosowitz in Bon Appétit, leave no room for cream. Michigan Farmer magazine’s recipe from 1852 calls for only water, cream of tartar, Epsom salts, sugar, tartaric acid, milk, and egg. 

 

One possibility, then, is that cream soda derives its name from cream of tartar, an acidic powder that can be used to stabilize whipped egg whites and stave off crystallization of sugar syrups.

 

“That Real Smooth Finish”
Alternatively, cream soda may owe its name to another longtime ingredient, vanilla. Originally a luxury essence produced by orchids, its rich flavor profile became widely available following the invention of synthetic vanillin in the 1930s. Vanillin, in turn, became a staple flavoring in cream soda brands around the world.

 

The result is a soda with a distinctly smooth and sweet finish, one connoisseur told Nosowitz: “They all have a cream finish on them, no matter what the flavor profile is. You can get a raspberry or a bubble gum or whatever it is, but it just has that real smooth finish on it. You know it when you taste it.” 

 

That creamy mouthfeel isn’t a just a result of food science. It’s also due to human physiology. Our brains and taste buds associate vanilla flavor with creaminess, and this association is so strong that, in one study, adding a little bit of vanilla to low-fat milk greatly altered participants’ perception of its cream content. Cream soda, whether colored bubble-gum pink or golden brown, taps into this same sensory shortcut.

 

Source: Why Is It Called “Cream Soda” If There’s No Cream In It?

[DarkRavie]

Fact of the Day - HORSEPOWERED HORSE

Did you know.... Horsepower, a common unit of power typically referring to the sustained output of an engine,  was developed in the late 18th century by Scottish engineer James Watt (after whom the watt is named) as a way to demonstrate the power of steam engines. Watt calculated that in an average day’s work, a horse could turn a 24-foot mill wheel roughly 2.5 times per minute. This amount of energy worked out to 33,000 foot-pounds (approximately 746 watts) per minute, which Watt deemed a new unit of measurement called horsepower. 

 

Logic would suggest the power of a solitary horse should equal one horsepower, but the measurement is meant to represent a horse’s continuous output over a full workday, not what horses are capable of in short bursts of extreme effort. In 1993, biologists R.D. Stevenson and R.J. Wassersug used data from the 1925 Iowa State Fair horse-pulling contest to calculate the maximum output of a horse over a short period of time, ultimately finding that one horse can exert up to 14.9 horsepower. Humans, by comparison, have a maximum output of slightly more than a single horsepower. 

 

The earliest ancestor of the horse is estimated to have lived 55 million years ago.
Around 55 million years ago, the first members of the horse family were scurrying through the forests that covered much of North America. These hoofed mammals were called Hyracotherium, one of which was about as big as a medium-sized dog.

 

With its arched back, raised hindquarters, four functional hooves on each front foot, and three on each hind foot — unlike the unpadded, single-hoofed feet of modern equines — this early ancestor was quite unlike modern horses as we know them. Paleontologists initially thought the species entirely unrelated to equines, until fossils were found that showed a link between Hyracotherium and later extinct horses.

 

For more than half their history, the majority of horse species were small, forest browsers, eating leaves and twigs from trees and shrubs. Then, about 20 million years ago, new horse species began rapidly evolving when changing climate conditions allowed grasslands to expand. Some of these new grazers grew to much larger sizes, becoming more like the horses we’re familiar with today.

 

 

Source: One horse can have up to 15 horsepower.