As everyone knows, cross-examination is the dramatic part of a criminal trial—at least in films—when the attorney of the defendant is allowed to question the witness: The main purposes of cross-examination are to elicit favorable facts from the witness, or to impeach the credibility of the testifying witness to lessen the weight of unfavorable testimony [more...]
A differential is the set of gears between the drive shaft of a vehicle’s motor and the wheels, in rear-wheel drive vehicles. It not only changes the direction of the effort but also allows the wheels to turn at different speeds. In vehicles with front wheel drive, those with a cross-mounted engine, there must also [more...]
Whiffletrees are a part of the harnessing of a horse or horses to a plow or wagon. The whiffletree consolidates the force applied by the horse or horses, and applies that consolidated force to the plow or wagon as smoothly as possible. But you also have an example of a whiffletree every time you get [more...]
Holdout, Nail House, and Spite House are all expressions for a building that obviously shouldn’t be there, when one views its neighbors. But there they are, and they exist in many countries where real estate development is—or was—strong. Take a look at Edith Macefield’s house in Seattle. The owner simply refused to sell, forcing the [more...]
The expression “boat lift” suggests a crane or other facility for lifting boats in a shipyard, but this is about an alternative to locks on a canal or river to allow boats to move from a higher to a lower level, or the reverse, of course. Normally, a lock or a series of locks is [more...]
Most people know what a dunce cap is (also called a fool’s cap): a tall, conical paper cap, usually associated with humiliation of a “learning challenged” school child, the “dunce” of the class—at least on that day. (He probably wasn’t really dumb, just inattentive or hadn’t done his homework.) First, why was he called the [more...]
When we hear or read one of these words—mammoth, behemoth, leviathan, gargantuan, juggernaut—most of us understand them to mean something enormous and hence powerful, but perhaps only from the context. Most people know, of course, that a mammoth was a large, prehistoric ancestor of the elephant. Why was it called a mammoth? The word comes [more...]
Pareidolia is the phenomenon of perceiving something significant from a vague or random stimulus, usually from something one sees, but also from something one hears. We all experience it occasionally. Being the miserly sort who picks up pennies, when a circular spot on the pavement catches my eye, it triggers “coin!” in my mind, but [more...]
The odds are that you have used at least one Bowden cable, and that you know pretty well how one works. You just didn’t know what it is called. Right! The brake and gearshift cables on a bicycle are Bowden cables, as is the cable release for an older camera. (The cable was screwed into [more...]
Some people may immediately think that the flag of the German Reich—or the Nazi flag—is red, white, black and yellow (with gold fringes for the yellow). But they did not read the question carefully; it asks about one color or the other. So maybe tulips? There are red, white and yellow tulips, and more seldom, [more...]
If you want to float a thing that weighs one kilogram in water, how much water do you need? First, of course, the thing must float in water: a piece of wood, a can of peanuts or glass of instant coffee, any closed container weighing one kilogram (2.2 lb) that is larger than one liter [more...]
Everyone knows what a stave is: a slat of wood in various contexts, a barrel stave, for example. The medieval Norwegian stave churches are so call because of the relatively narrow vertical boards that form their walls. Stave is also an alternate form of staff, again in various contexts, such as the lines on which [more...]
There are a surprising number of placenames in Germany with the prefix “Bad”: Bad Kreuznach, Bad Orb, Bad Ems, Bad Godesberg to name just a few; also since 1991, Bad Wildbad (previously just Wildbad), which would seem to be bad coming and going. More surprising is that the residents of these Bad places are rather [more...]
What should a young husband know about cleaning up in the kitchen? If you muttered: “as little as possible”, that may have been honest, but not appropriate for your new role, all the more reason to read the following. There are stories about men managing to drop their wife’s favorite plate the first time they [more...]
In Greek mythology, the River Styx is the river between the earth and the Greek underworld, Hades. In modern times, it is generally assumed that Charon ferried people across the River Styx, but in Greek and Roman mythology he carried them across the Acheron, one of the other five rivers in Hades. There is an [more...]
Deadly Maps and Evasion Charts are just two of the very many types of maps referenced on a website that is a gold mine for map searchers, that of the Dudley Knox Library at the Naval Postgraduate School. The well sorted website provides links to a great many websites for current and historical maps as [more...]
Operational Navigation Charts (ONC) and Tactical Pilotage Maps (TPM) are large 42” x 57.5” topographical maps prepared and published by the US Defense Mapping Agency Aerospace Center in St. Louis, Missouri, for flight navigation. There are now, of course, digital devices and CDs that pilots use, which can be updated easily. But most of us [more...]
Delacroix’s famous painting from 1830 is titled Liberty Leading the People, but his allegorical figure of a woman with a Phrygian cap carrying the Tricolor and a rifle with disregard for her state of undress influenced later representations of Marianne. Earlier, during the French Revolution, there were other personifications of Liberty and Reason, eventually combined [more...]
What did the Iban headhunters on Borneo do with their trophies? No surprise; they did what the winners of any competition do: took their trophies home and showed them to their wife or mother. And the women on Borneo did just as proud wives and mothers of Olympic gold medalists do—or those of a member [more...]
Photography was invented in the 1820s, based on work by Nicéphore Niécpe, which Louis Daguerre advanced to practical level, using Johann Heinrich Schultz’s discovery in 1816 that a silver and chalk mixture darkens when exposed to light. The problem was not the camera, per se, but how to capture the image. The first color photograph [more...]