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#1123: a paradoxical reaction is when a medicine has the exact opposite effect to usual. for example if an antibiotic is over-used, the number of bacteria paradoxically increases (aka the Eagle effect). the paradoxical effect is also perhaps more common with people with ADHD, particularly with stimulants: amphetamines, caffeine and so on have been reported to cause drowsiness. one of the first attempted treatments for ADHD was benzedrine, a potent energiser, which allegedly caused subdued and sensible behaviour in children with ADHD. for a period, they were used to diagnose ADHD because a paradoxical reaction would occur - but in actuality, paradoxical reactions have a range of causes (including genetic) and only a minority of those with ADHD had the paradoxical reaction.

the reason i say perchance is because recent research is disputing statistically that there is insignificant correlation between the paradoxical amphetamine responses and ADHD.

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#1183: l-vocalisation does some interesting things in the many dialects of German. for example, particularly before a -ch (or a -g in Missingsch), an "L" will become an "i", which also changes the vowel slightly. for example, solche "such" will converge with Seuche "disease" as "zojkhə". this is especially prevelant in colloquial speech and sociolects. in a lot of central Swiss dialects, "L" would rather become a "w", similar to english (see fotd#1098), making "Salz" turn from standard "zalts" into "sauwce". the vowel is also different, moving more closed and backwards, but i can't tell if that's because of this or not. in Austrian and Bavarian dialects, "L"s become "i" or "ü" in most cases. for example, in Munich, they roughly say "vui" for "viel" (typically rhymes with English "veal") and in Vienna it becomes "vü".

back to Missingsch, this is a really cool dialect heavily influenced by Low German, which is much more alike English. for example, "Kind" becomes "Kinn" (like a word you might recognise). they also change a lot of vowels - nasalising some, lengthening others, sometimes both. oh and the aspiration turns on and off!!

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this may come as a shock to you, pun intended, but there is no such thing as a bird-bourne, voltage-breeding bacterium. here's the real fact, for suresies this time:

#1187: the Swiss Cheese Plant has the specific name Monstera deliciosa, and i think that's a fantastic description of Swiss cheese. the fruit supposedly tastes of fruit salad, hence why it's also called the "fruit salad tree", as if you can grow all sorts of fruit on it. it's also called "monster fruit": the 10-inch-long fruit takes over a year to ripen, and before it's ready, its flesh is filled with needle-like crystals which will literally stab you if you try to eat it. (i wonder if that's why it's called the delicious monster.) but it smells of fruit salad!! mmm

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it brings me great pleasure to say that the last fact was simply an April Fool's!! no such thing as an oglefish. who could've guessed. anyway here's a replacement fact

#1187: Tolkein invented the Irish language for one of his earlier-published novels, set in medieval Ireland. British colonialism had rendered the real Irish poorly documented, incomplete and un-learnable, so Tolkein designed a whole conlang. he looked at the few existing texts, nearby Celtic languages and indigenous mythology to make it as realistic as possible. during the mid-20th century political tensions, the Irish people looked for a source of unity and found it in JRR's language. they adopted it into legislation in the 70s and amended the constitution to make it the "primary official language", demoting English to "secondary".

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#1102: in Halesworth, Suffolk, there's a level crossing over the railway that's also a platform! half of each platform is on rollers, and splits in two and rotates inwards (over the track) to form a gap either side of the rail line, opening the road. each of the four 70-tonne moving sections of platform had to be moved manually, on simple but efficient rollers, which took a while. when trains came by too close together to have time to fully open the platforms, smaller sections of platform could be more quickly opened for pedestrians. there's an electronic model of the mechanism in the station.

as the railways in britain grew rapidly, the station in Halesworth, a small town in Suffolk, became insufficient for the increasingly longer trains. unlike most other places where this was the case, they didn't have the space either side of the platform to expand the platform, because of a road one way and warehouses belonging to the railway the other way. the platform is now grade II listed because of its uniqueness.

it stopped operating in the 50s when an increase in cars warranted a larger road and a bridge shortly up the line. you can see where a road goes up to the line and peters out [highlighted], and the platform and mechanism still remain today.

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#1098: L-vocalisation is a phenomenon in many languages where the lateral approximant (L) becomes a vowel. in Early Modern English, -all and -oll dragged out, (from "al" to "awl" and from "oll" to "ole"), and were embedded into the language, giving us the weird pronunciations of "tall" and "roll". compare that to "shall" which was unaffected. but L-vocalisation is still going on! in a range of English accents from Cockney to Australian, "L"s are being pronounced as "w"s (or similar, like a strange o), with words like "old" turning into "owd" or "kill them" becoming "kiw them".

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#1212: Crush, Texas was the temporary town set up for the publicity stunt of crashing two full trains head-on at high speed into each other. as a one-day event in 1896, it beckoned over 40k visitors who were offered reduced travel fares and free entry, making it the second-largest settlement in the state at the time. Crush wasn't actually named that because of the railroading shenanegans, though: it was named after William Crush (nominative determinism!!!), the passenger relations guy at the Missouri–Kansas–Texas Railroad (MKT). the Katy, as they were known, had a bunch of recently obsolete locomotives to get rid of, so, um, boom!

Crush assured his employers that every safety measure had been taken and that the boilers would resist rupturing. of course, they exploded immediately upon impact, "as if controlled by a single impulse", killing two attendees and injuring many more. Crush was fired but got the job back within a couple of days because the whole thing turned out to be a roaring success regardless.

the photos are actually very cool. and Scott Joplin wrote a commemorative piece which is worth a listen too. oh and the score tells you how to make the sound of two trains crashing on a piano

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happy international penguin day!!! truly the holiest of occasions.

#1211: the word penguin originally referred to the great auk, a white and black bird of Northern Atlantic coastlines (it went extinct in 1852 - always saddening when they give you that much precision). it's thought to come from Welsh "pen gwyn" (white head), either referring to the white patterning on the auk's head or the island in Newfoundland on which they were found. alternatively, it could come from Latin pinguis "fat" but that's a lot less cool. penguins were simply called penguins because they look like an auk (convergent evolution!), even though they're hardly related. penguins eat small rocks, partially to help them grind up harder food (they don't have teeth, but they do have spines on their beak and even tongue) and to let them dive deeper, reducing buoyancy. they don't have swim bladders, yet the emperor penguin can go as deep as 550m below the surface. the the fastest penguin is the gentoo penguin, reaching up to 36kph; the most populous species is the macaroni, at 11.7m pairs; the most-decorated penguin is Nils Olav, a king penguin, baron and colonel-in-chief of the Norwegian King's Guard. the group noun of penguins is a waddle, but when they're swimming it's a raft. penguin facts are the best.... stay tuned until next year!

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#1210: if you're reading this, chances are that the screw head you're most familiar with is the Phillips, with a cruciform hole and a 57-degree driver, (actually invented by Not Phillips (fotd#165)) - but in Canada, you're probably a Robertson head user, with a square taper (aka Scrulox, and also created by Not Robertson). both of these were intended (the latter before the former) as a replacement to the slotted screws. these days, the Robertson is in many ways simply better than the Phillips, to the point that it's slowly been escaping the Great White North and is appearing in shops elsewhere - but why do we use such an awful standard everywhere else? when the Robertson was dreamed up (by Not Robertson), it left the head of the screw much weaker because of the stamping process. by the time this had been ironed out (by Yes Robertson), the Great War had broken out and the industries, focused on the fighting, didn't want to shop from a Canadian.

but that wasn't the screw in the coffin, so to speak - when Ford realised that he could use the efficiency of the Robertson head to save money, he asked for control of the business. when Robertson said no, the auto manufacturer ousted him from the market and turned to the Phillips head instead, restricting the superior shape to the land of maple syrup. it was the same force that displaced Robertson that gave Phillips the edge: during WW2, car makers turned into plane builders and everything was filled to the brim with Phillips heads. when the allies returned, they demanded the same tools that they had used in action. Robertson drivers are great because they don't easily come out of the screw and they hold onto the screw on their own, making one-handed driving much more reliable.

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#1209: when the Australian quiz show Spicks and Specks played Men at Work's Down Under (you'll recognise it if you look it up), the band lost money. they got the royalties ofc, but they still became poorer as a result. the game was to identify nursery rhymes inside other tunes, and the panel spotted a flute solo that had been directly lifted from the popular children's number Kookaburra. turns out that the original composer of it died in 1988 and it was still under copyright. after a lawsuit, they settled for 5% of the total historical profits.

the person who played the riff allegedly fell into alcohol abuse as a result of the proceedings and died of a heart attack, and the lead singer's father also passed during the case, possibly under the stress. so uhhh

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#1208: patternmakers use rulers that are 1-3% longer. it's quite weird because you look at one of these and you wouldn't be able to tell until you put it next to a normal one that's a few millimetres shorter. patternmaking is when you make a positive model of what you want to cast in metal (often for structural/mechanical things) so they make everything slightly larger to account for shrinkage when it cools. they also have to work out how the end product gets removed and factor in distortion.

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#1207: only one American has been inducted into the Hall of Fame for speed skating, figure skating and hockey, and not someone with the bulk of a defender and the grace of a dancer: it's Frank Zamboni! in 1947 he built an ice resurfacer to reduce downtime on his California rink by mounting basically a huge razor on an army jeep chassis. now they're just referred to by the genericised trademark of Zamboni. it shaves, washes, wets, then squeegees the ice, which is apparently a proper word. in fact, "to squeege" has been around for over 200 years. i would like to know where window cleaners get their squeegees because apparently they're special.

oh and apparently you can get squeegee training? the technique the pros use is called the "swivel method" and you have to get all the angles just right to reduce "streaking". there are annual national window cleaning championships too, and the world record holder is Teddy Burrows of Essex, who cleaned three standard 45"x45" windows in 9.14s with 9L of water.

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#1206: Boktai: the Sun is in Your Hand is a Game Boy Advance game with a photometer on the cartridge. you can charge your in-game solar weaponry by standing outside in daylight. it was received well by parents, who liked that it encouraged their kids to touch grass while playing and made it less fun to play at night. there are lots of other sun-based mechanics for which you have to input the current time and zone, and then the 24-hourly cycle mirrors the real-life sky.

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#1205: any orchestral musician knows the pains of transposition, where instruments have a "written" and a "concert" pitch that sounds different (eg a D on the viola and a C on the clarinet sound the same), but, uh,,, why?? one of the reasons is for instrument families that have variants that vary by irregular intervals, but have common fingering. for example, a "written A" on a French double horn in F is played similarly to the same written note on a horn in Bb, allowed by transposition. also, there were many historical reasons for various instruments to transpose (like, before valves were invented you could only use a certain key without switching out parts; also there were a bunch of different standards for what A was back in the baroque days) and it was just easier to leave it like that than to rewrite every piece ever and retrain every artist ever.

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#1204: rudimentary can describe both the understanding you have of something ("my grasp is rudimentary"), or the basicness of that thing that you have the comprehension of ("i speak rudimentary english"). it comes from "rudiment", which means a fundamental principle (and is a word that i intend on using). this comes from Latin rudis which is also the root of rude, both meaning simple or untrained. an erudite is someone who is well-learned or accomplished and is an assimilated form of this plus ex "out". your education is your erudition and you could call scholarship or any body of book-origin knowledge this too.

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#1203: on the Moscow metro (of which most of the lines are radial), the PSA voices are male as you head towards the city centre, and female as you head towards the suburbs. it was initially introduced as a measure to help the blind (or even non-Russian speakers, i guess), according to one random unreliable news article. the same page said that the ring route has a female reader going clockwise and male when anti-. the mnemonic is "your boss calls you to work, and your wife calls you home". just try to look over that i guess. the network also apparently extremely well-signed with lots of information and maps everywhere. and of course the famous deco. but it's also unique for having large gaps between stations - an average of 1800m - which means it can run at around 40km/h.