What I Learnt Today

Will you have to hunt to for chocolate tomorrow?

 

Chocolate is made from the fermented and roasted beans of the cacoa tree, which is native to South America. It has been cultivated there for almost 3000 years, traditionally mixed with water, chilli and vanilla and taken as a drink. It has always been considered a luxury – in Mayan and Aztec cultures the bean was used as currency, and the Incas considered it the drink of the gods. The process sounds similar to that used to extract coffee from its beans. However, even though they had chocolate, the Aztecs couldn’t make a cappucino, as the coffee bean comes from Africa. Bad luck for them.

 

When Columbus returned to Europe, he took back some of these precious cocoa beans to show Queen Isabella. Spanish friars found that when the chilli was removed and the cocoa was combined with milk and sugar it was palatable to Europeans – very palatable, in fact. Over the next few hundred years, chocolate became as sort after in Europe as it had been in South America.

 

The egg has always been a symbol of new life, and was adopted by early Christians to represent the resurrection. Decorating the eggs has been an especially strong tradition of the Eastern church.

 

The rabbit, like the egg, is a traditional symbol of fertility, for obvious reasons. The rather strange story of a rabbit delivering eggs at Easter time dates from Germany in the 1500s.

 

Replacing real eggs with chocolate ones is a marketing coup of the first order by the Cadbury brothers (really) and dates back Ito 1865.

 

Dark chocolate is made from cocoa, fat and sugar. Milk chocolate has milk as an additional ingredient.

 

“Many of the compounds in chocolate are biologically active and exhibit antioxidant and anti-inflammatory qualities.” says Merlin Thomas, Professor of Preventative Medicine at the Baker Heart and Diabetes Institute, in The Conversation

 

Dark chocolate has a higher concentration of flavolol antioxidants, which have been demonstrated to have health benefits – reducing blood pressure and improving cholesterol.

 

Chocolate has also been shown to improve your mood and sense of well being.

 

As Prof Merlin Thomas says “Tasty, Addicive, Sexy and Good for You.” What’s not to love about that?

 

PS Even the Easter snow bunny may have trouble finding Mike, currently ‘snuggled’ in a tent in bad weather  on a mountain pass 3000m high on his way to the summit of Mt McKinley (Denali). Happy Easter Mike.

http://aprildenali2011.wordpress.com/2011/04/22/snuggled-in-at-10200/

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Will’s Good Friday compilation – sports people doing extraordinary things.

 

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More and more of the stuff we need to do arrives via our email Inbox.

For many of us, it has become our main ‘tasks list’.

‘Inbox Zero’ is that joyful state where we have dealt with everything in our Inbox. Llike Zen monks, we can celebrate ‘the empty mind’

FollowUpThen is a simple (and free) servce that can help us manage our email and reach the nirvana of ‘inbox zero’.

 

How often do we receive a message, don’t have time or the information we need to deal with it, and think to ourselves “I’ll deal with that later’. We carefully leave it in our inbox – and then forget about it.

By replying to the sender immediately, with a bcc to followupthen, we will automatically get a reminder email at the time we specify.

 

Sending an email sometimes feels likes tossing a message in a bottle into the ocean. Who knows whether it ever reaches its destination?  What if your important message is sitting around in their overflowing ‘inbox’? How can you keep track of the things you are waiting to hear back about?

By sending a cc to followupthem.com, you and the recipient will both receive a reminder email at the time you specify.

 

To: april6@followupthen.com
From : tony@here.com
Subject: Don’t forget your anniversary tomorrow

You can also send an email directly to followupthen. You will receive a reminder email when you specify.

There are a number of other options for the time frames you can specify.

everywed@followupthen.com
tomorrow9am@followupthen.com
nextweek@followupthen.com
0600Dec25@followupthen.com

You can try it now, without even going to their website.

 

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If you’re caught in the rain without an umbrella, will you get less wet if you run or walk?

I remember Grunter, Luke and I having this discussion at school. Luke came up with a thought experiment – if you could run at infinitesimal speed, you would not get wet on the head but would catch all the rain drops between you and your destination on the front of your body. If you walked very very slowly, you would get drenched on the head.

This is the approach used by Prof Lewin at MIT in the (very long) mathematical explanation below. (what is it with these TV professors – he looks just like Prof Julius Sumner Miller). His conclusion was similar to Luke’s – run as fast as you can, leaning forward at as much of an angle as you can to minimize your collisions with rain drops ahead of you.

The Mythbusters team had two cracks at answering this question – rather than rely on physics, they walked and ran in the rain and then compared the increase in weight of the clothes they were wearing to estimate how wet they got.
The first result in 2003
http://dsc.discovery.com/videos/mythbusters-running-in-the-rain-minimyth.html
And their second go

Their conclusion after the second experiment concurred with Prof Lewin – run.

All this trouble could have been saved if everyone had remembered this old adage.

When caught in the rain without mac,
Walk at the pace of the wind at your back,
If the wind’s in your face,
Then the ideal pace,
Is as fast as your legs can make track.

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Have you ever wondered what goes on ‘behind the scenes’ at your favourite web sites.

Back of a Webpage gives each of us an exclusive ‘access all areas’ pass.

The Bluebirds at Twitter are busy posting all your tweets.

Find out what the other side of Google, Facebook, Flickr, Apple and YouTube look like.

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