#FridayFunFacts - the rogue edition
Good morning you curious creatures. This is my last day with 42courses and therefore my final #FridayFunFacts, so I have decided to go down in flames with my personal favourites and my dark sense of humour.
If you really like the way someone smells - not their deodorant or perfume, just their skin as is - there's a high chance that your immune systems are very different from each other, which means that the two of you would most likely make healthy babies together. So hop to it, it's all you wanted to do anyway right? (Unless you're just a skin-sniffing vampire, then please don't.)
MDMA (3,4-methylenedioxymethamphetamine), the popular psychoactive drug, was used to treat post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) before it was made illegal in the late 1970s. It causes an increased release, and slow re-uptake of serotonin, dopamine and norepinephrine, making the taker feel particularly open and empathetic, which helps PTSD patients talk through counselling. In 2017 the FDA approved tests in this realm, and MDMA could possibly become legal again for use in psychotherapy. And raves. But probably not raves.
Elvis Presley was a talented heartthrob, no doubt, but his fame actually came from a tragically unfair circumstance - A music producer named Sam Phillips recognised that music made by black people was leagues ahead of the music white people were making, but white Americans wouldn't buy it. What they needed was a white guy who could sing and dance like a black guy. He found his answer in young Elvis and so Rock n Roll was "born".
Right, that's sex, drugs and rock n roll out the way, what else...
"Ye Olde" is pronounced "the old". It is the last vestige of the Anglo-Latin alphabet established in the year 1011. The "Y" should really be a harp shaped glyph called "thorn", used for "th" sounds, but when the printing press and movable type came around, printers needed to cut down on glyphs, and thorn was chucked. The closest looking letter they had was a Y, and so we have Ye, pronounced as The.
And finally, the best story ever - Lewis Carrol was a mathematics professor at Oxford. He was conservative in thought (I know, right?!) and did not like the 19th century developments in mathematics, like imaginary numbers and multidimensional geometry. His creation of Wonderland was a satire meant to mock the nonsense logic of abstract maths, easily seen when the Mad Hatter asks "why is a raven like a writing desk?" And Alice, the ever rational hero, answers "I think you might do something better with the time than wasting it in asking riddles that have no answers."
I disagree, however, and think you should spend all your time asking impossible questions, dreaming far flung dreams, and always staying curiouser and curiouser.
