Category archive: 7 things

1. You can use an electric toothbrush to pollinate tomatoes.
2. Red Bull is produced and sold by an Austrian company, and it is based on a Thai energy drink.
3. You cannot delete more than 4000 messages in Microsoft Outlook 2003 in a single operation.
4. The skin growths that appeared on poisoned Ukranian president Yushchenko helped save his life by isolating the dioxin away from his internal organs.
5. In Gmail, z undoes anything (even sending a message if you are quick) when keyboard shortcuts are enabled.
6. Fasting for 16 hours before your breakfast in a new time zone can override the body's sleep clock. This can also work with other irregular sleep patterns.
7. Left-hand traffic and left-hand drive are not the same thing. The former is when cars occupy the left side of the road, the latter means that the driver sits on the left in a vehicle. So vehicles in countries with right-hand traffic have left-hand drive, and viceversa.

1. James Bond's creator Ian Fleming wrote 'Chitty Chitty Bang Bang: The Magical Car. Via a friend's friend who left a comment on my friend's Facebook.
2. If you extract numbers from a text string in Excel they are still stored as text (and therefore uncountable). To turn them into numbers you need to multiply the formula you used to extract numbers from a text string by 1.
3. Simon Le Bon's firstborn is a model like her mother.
4. Will Powers' 'Kissing With Confidence' (that I know via the original 'That's What I Call Music' CD) was part of a whole concept album 'Adventures In Success', a 'parody of the self-help/get rich quick gurus'. Via Joe.My.God.
5. Carly Simon provided (uncredited) the vocals for 'Kissing With Confidence'.
6. We love rounded corners so much because 'A rectangle with sharp edges takes indeed a little bit more cognitive visible effort'.
7. You get only one Gold Card (the paper counterpart to the annual Oyster London transport electronic ticket) per year. You lose it, you stop getting discounts on rail travel (because most of the British Rail ticket offices do not accept the printed receipt as proof of validity, even if TfL claims they should. I fear my Gold Card is likely to be in a recycling bin in Italy.

1. There are more than 35 ways to do pushups.
2. You can go to Gmail in Firefox by typing the letter g in the address bar and hitting Enter.
3. 'Members of the public and the media do not need a permit to film or photograph in public places and police have no power to stop them filming or photographing incidents or police personnel.' Via Mike).
4. MacArthur Park (one of Donna Summer's hits) was originally recorded by the late Richard Harris (Albus Dumbledore in the first two Harry Potter films).
5. Microbial cells outnumber your own by a factor of 10. Via Richard Dawkins.
6. The keyboard shortcut Ctrl-L focuses on the browser's address bar and select the whole URL. Works in Chrome and Firefox, would expect in others too but haven't tried.
7. And something I had a hunch about, and I'm not the only one: swapping the position of batteries in a device makes them last longer. Still scientifically unconfirmed though.

1. Twitter only lets its users retrieve the last 3,200 updates they’ve entered into the system.
2. Venice residents get free city-wide wi-fi. Tourists need to pay about $7 a day.
3. The word oxymoron means 'sharply dull' in Greek.
4. There are 100,000 people buried under Washington Square Park in NYC.
5. Animal welfare legislation generally applies only to vertebrates.
6. Excessive amounts of alcohol interferes with REM sleep.
7. A trip to the dentist before brain surgery could prevent pneumonia.

1. Putting butter, mayonnaise, or ice on a burn is a myth.
2. You can smelt iron ore in a microwave.
3. In the first half of 2009 I covered 2% of the distance to the Moon.
4. Actor Greg Grunberg (Heros' Matt Parkman) is also a social media entrepreneur.
5. If you click on a link with your mouse's scroll wheel, it will open in a new tab. You can then close a tab by clicking anywhere on it with the scroll wheel. Works in Chrome, Firefox, IE (haven't tried other browsers. Requires a scroll wheel that you can click, of course.
6. You can put a Twitter feed on your blog with Google Docs. Create spreadsheet, pull Twitter RSS feed into it, embed spreadsheet in blog. This also mean that you can use Google Docs to read RSS feeds.
7. The method I sometimes use to shorten long cables is called a chain sinnet (or monkey braid). This means I can finally stop calling it 'crochet' (because that's what it is and how I learnt it).

1. You can use Gmail drafts to mail yourself unallowed files.
2. The song Everytime We Touch by Cascada borrows its chorus from 1992 track Everytime We Touch by 'Moonlight Shadow' singer Maggie Reilly.
3. The dessert I had last night is not called 'eaten mess' but 'Eton mess' (which makes sense since I ate it at a friend's in Windsor).
4. Justin Henry (Oscar-nominated child actor in Kramer vs. Kramer) is now a Regional Director of Sales at online video service Veoh.
5. British film director Duncan Jones (sci-fi thriller Moon) is David Bowie's son.
6. Shoe company Bata used to set up villages ('Batavilles') around its factories for its workers to live.
7. Phoebe Cates has been married to Kevin Kline for the last twenty years.

1. Dominic Purcell is Australian.
2. The word 'avocado' comes from the Aztec 'ahuacatl' meaning tescicle.
3. Tina Fey wrote and co-starred in Mean Girls.
4. You can cure a stomach ache if you lie on your left side for 5 minutes. The stomach is on the left side, the oesophagus enters it on the right and therefore gas bubbles can rise and allow you to burp. Reciting the alphabet is optional.
5. Mary Portas bats for my team. Well, in the female division I suppose, since she left her husband of 13 years and moved in with her partner Melanie Rickey.
6. Labradors are the most popular breed (by registration) in the world.
7. The Japan edition of Lily Allen's 'Alright Still' has a song entitled 'Cheryl Tweedy'.

1. Marc de Champagne is brandy made with discarded seeds and skins from Champagne grapes.
2. Turkey grows 70% to 75% of the world's hazelnuts.
3. Kennington Park was the site of public executions until the 1800s, and the speakers’ corner of south London.
4. Parkour derives from parcours du combattant, the classic obstacle course method of military training. Via Joe.My.God.
5. Melrose Place is being rebooted. With Ashlee Simpson-Wentz. Heather Locklear will not join the cast as 'there wasn't a way to bring Amanda back that made sense'. Yeah, as if that ever stopped scriptwriters before.
6. There is such a thing as a professional nagger. I may have to apply.
7. Japanese manholes are works of art.

1. Jodrell Bank is not a bank.
2. Belarus is the only European country to carry out executions.
3. The vocals on Michael Gray's The Weekend and De Souza's Guilty are both from the same woman (Shena)
4. It is possible (but unadvisable) to lose 30 pounds in 24 hours (as in weight, not money).
5. You can be 'debaptised' from the Catholic Church, but not from the Church of England because it does not regard baptism as a sign of membership.
6. The number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships is commonly approximated to 150 (Dunbar's number).
7. The iPhone is not big in Japan.

1. Gordon Brown lost the sight in one eye after an accident as a teenager.
2. The salt used to prevent roads from icing does not come from the sea.
3. The Union Flag is not symmetrical.
4. Status Quo covered Men Without Hats' Safety Dance in their 1996 album 'Don't Stop'
5. The original F*** My Life is the French site Vie de merde. Both are 'shadenfreude' websites with short everyday anecdotes of unfortunate moments that ruin someone's day
6. Wasabi has anti-bacterial properties. Via Tim Ferriss.
7. Branston pickle was originally made in the Branston suburb of Barton upon Trent, 5 miles from where my boyfriend's parents live.

1. You can search for images on Google with the exact dimensions you need, by adding to your search query 'imagesize:1280×960' (no quotation marks, and change the numbers to the width and height you are looking for)
2. Four out of the last five US presidents have been left-handed.
3. There appears to be a word to describe a wad of wet toilet paper that is thrown in the air and stuck to the ceiling. I found no evidence via Google, but friends who were raised as far apart as Staffordshire and Australia agree that it's called a flobby dobb.
4. 'The smartest man in the world is gay'.
5. In Windows Photo Gallery on Vista you can tag whole batches of images at once by dragging and dropping them on to a tag.
6. Matt Mullenweg is a Dvorak user. That is to say, the 25-year-old who founded the blogging software WordPress types with a keyboard where letters are shuffled around for easier access.
7. Even if you do not set Outlook to manually send messages with the 'Send/Receive' button, if you right-click on a file and select the 'Send to > Mail recipient' option, it gets sent right away. I only use Outlook at work, so it could be a Windows XP thing.

1. In late 1985 one pound was worth a little over one US dollar.
2. Yarnbombing is the use of knitting as a form of graffiti.
3. Around a third of children in care have been voluntarily given up by their parents.
4. The name of the Japanese trainers brand ASICS stands for 'Anima Sana in Corpore Sano', a sound mind in a sound body
5. David Tennant's real name is David John McDonald, he chose his acting surname from Pet Shop Boys' singer, Neil Tennant
6. Juan Pablo di Pace (Argentinian model and actor, you might know him from the Call on Me and What a Feeling videos, and more recently in Mamma Mia) went to my school and directed a short film on it. Maybe he even slept in my bed…
7. Wimbledon station is the only London station that provides an interchange between rail, Underground, and Tramlink services.

1. Madonna does not like being called Madge, just as I do not like being called Lulu (don't ask). But I do feel special to have a nickname, and at least it's not 'baldy'.
2. You can remove cork taint from wine by pouring it through a sheet of plastic wrap. The smelly molecule (2,4,6-trichloroanisole) sticks to the plastic because it is chemically similar to polyethylene. Stuart has a doctorate in chemistry, so if this is nonsense you will soon hear it from him.
3. Bolivia produces more Brazil nuts than Brazil. In related news, eating a whole 125g packet in one go makes me sick (a friend says it is because nuts have digestion inhibitors).
4. The Loving Kind (Girls Aloud's current single) was co-written by the Pet Shop Boys.
5. You cannot use a PayPal Personal account to sell on eBay. If you do, you have to upgrade to Premier or Business, which allows PayPal to collect fees on payments you receive.
6. If you tag a file as an audiobook in iTunes it will leave the Music library (and not show up when you search it) and appear in the Audiobooks library instead.
7. Argyle (the pattern) uses the archaic spelling of what is today known as Argyll (the region in western Scotland).

Gordon recently pointed out that I have been running the '7 things I did not know last week' weekly post since January 2007.

That's… two years! And possibly the longest I have enjoyed doing something for, which makes me wonder how I managed to do that. I believe that it is because I did not set out to do something special, but shared my innate curiosity with others, via a very simple method.

The process I developed is the easiest I could think of. Whenever I learn something new during the course of the week, I send myself an email. Since most of the time this happens while I am online, this is as easy as sending a link to the page I am on. Most weeks I collect more than seven items, so I rarely have to start looking for ideas.

I have experimented with Gmail filters, labels, custom-made email addresses and saved searches, but in the end I went for the simplest possible solution: when I send these emails to myself, I stick in the subject line a special made-up word that triggers a rule that marks the email as read and archives it. I found it had to be a unique word to avoid false positives coming up in search results. Then, when I am ready to write the post in WordPress I fire up Gmail, search for that made-up word and find all the notes I sent myself on the subject. Once I have blogged them, I delete the email.

You can use the same system to track anything you like. I regularly use it to capture ideas and notes on the go, and to track the cash I spend and food I eat if I am on a diet. Then, once a week or so, I sit down and report the data if needed, extracting it from Gmail as above.

I hope you enjoy reading my '7 things' posts as much as I enjoy putting them together for you.

1. Stuart and I have something in common with the Obama girls: we all got a Wii for Christmas from Mum and Dad.
2. The expression 'For the win' (FTW) entered popular culture via the TV show Hollywood Squares.
3. One century ago, pink used to be a colour for boys (a 'more decided' and 'stronger' colour) while blue was considered more suitable for girls (more delicate and dainty).
4. Noel Clarke (Mickey in Doctor Who) wrote the screenplay for Kidulthood and directed and starred in the sequel, Adulthood.
5. The cost of the items in the carol 'The Twelve Days of Christmas' has been added up and tracked since 1984 as a tongue-in-cheek economic indicator.
6. The original 1981 Now That's What I Call Music (that Stuart painstakingly put together as a playlist from single tracks) is being re-released on Monday.
7. If you email iPhone photos to Flickr they carry geotags and an option to add them to your map.

1. Portishead topped the UK dance chart in April 2008 with Machine Gun.
2. Lamb is almost always grass-fed, and therefore a very good source of Omega-3 fatty acids compared to other meat.
3. Some plants need no soil to grow and if soaked they can go one month without water.
4. Blighty, the colloquial English term for 'Britain', is derived from the Hindustani word for 'foreign'.
5. Singer Shakira and Nobel prize winner writer Gabriel García Márquez are friends.
6. Ricotta used to be made entirely from whey (and therefore was classified as a dairly product) but these days it is made from whey and milk, and can be called cheese.
7. The EU standard emergency number 112 can be dialled in the UK and Ireland alongside the national official emergency number 999.

1. The number on plastic containers is a recycling code that tells which plastic has been used. The number 7 is for plastic that contains BPA (the chemical suspected to leak from plastic into the human body).
2. The iPhone fart application pulls in nearly 10,000 dollars a day.
3. Norad's 50-year tradition of tracking Santa started because of a misprinted phone number in an ad that directed calls to Santa to the North American Aerospace Defense Command by mistake.
4. You must be registered blind to work as a massage therapist in South Korea.
5. The spoken verse in Madonna's Sanctuary (from her 1994 album Bedtime Stories) is from Walt Whitman's Voices.
6. Cross-platform media player VLC can do much more than just play any video you throw at it: it also rips DVDs, encodes video in other file formats, streams media to other computers and plays ripped DVDs.
7. The Spanish word for 'nativity scene' is 'belen' (= 'Bethlehem').

1. A new cycle hire scheme is due to be introduced to central London in 2010.
2. There are more slaves in the world today than at any time in human history. Via kottke.org.
3. Adultery is a crime in South Korea.
4. Kirk Douglas is into social networking and writes a blog on MySpace.
5. The Killers' Brandon Flowers is a practicing Mormon.
6. You can reduce camera shake if you pull your elbows in and exhale completely before depressing the shutter.
7. Hayden Panettiere (Claire Bennett in Heroes) is dating her co-star Milo Ventimiglia (Peter Petrelli)

1. Igloos are built in a spiral pattern. Via Kottke.
2. New year 2009 will be delayed by one second to correct atomic clocks.
3. It is estimated that Google uses 21 times more bandwidth than it pays for.
4. Amazon Mechanical Turk is only available to people with addresses in the USA.
5. Martine Aubry (the new leader of France's Socialist Party) is the daughter of former European Commission President, Jacques Delors.
6. Omega-3 fatty acids make you feel full.
7. Shoe feticism is also known as retifism (after French writer Nicolas-Edme Rétif). Via Tom.

1. The tallest building in Europe (the 268-metre Naberezhnaya Tower) is in Moscow, where construction of an even taller building was stopped this week.
2. Ping.fm also lets you update your (Twitter, Facebook, etc) status via IM.
3. You can skip typing 'www.' and '.com' in the address bar if you press Ctrl and Enter together. Found out in Chrome but checked and it works in Firefox, IE7 and Safari.
4. Greasemonkey's founder, Aaron Boodman, works on the Google Chrome team.
5. Illy coffee and Coca-Cola announced a global joint venture to produce a premium ready-to-drink espresso in October 2007. My caffeine days are over, but I am curious to know if this is out yet, or if it has flopped before even being released.
6. Music producer and songwriter Felix Howard (who wrote, among other things, Stronger for the Sugababes) was the child dancer in Madonna's 'Open Your Heart' video.
7. If you copy some text and paste it into a folder, Windows will create a 'Scrap Object'. I accidentally found out at work using XP, then tried it at home but the paste option does not seem to be available on Vista Home Premium.

1. 'Mr Smith', the alien computer in The Sarah Jane Adventures, is voiced by comedian Alexander Armstrong.
2. You can easily get the higher quality version (if available) for any YouTube video by sticking &fmt=18 at the end of the URL (or &fmt=22 for highest quality).
3. Cyndi Lauper's mother, Catrine, played herself in the 'Girls Just Want to Have Fun' video.
4. In Google Chrome you can right-click the top of the browser window, or right-click the taskbar tab to access Task Manager.
5. In Lichtenstein women were granted the vote in general elections in 1984.
6. The word galore, meaning in abundance, descends from the Gaelic (Irish 'go leor' and Scottish Gaelic 'gu leòr') expression meaning enough, plenty.
7. The largest fully functional WiMAX network in the world is in Pakistan.

1. Leonardo DiCaprio's mother is German.
2. The record for most voices recorded on an audiobook by a single person is held by Jim Dale for his 146 voices in Harry Potter and the Deadly Hallows.
3. Apple released a games console (the Apple Bandai Pippin) in the mid-nineties.
4. The Google Reader shortcuts to add subscriptions and email items are respectively a and e.
5. Wile E. Coyote's middle name is Ethelbert.
6. Wile E. Coyote is a pun on the word 'wily' (shrewd, cunning) – a word I have learnt this week.
7. The origin of the name London might be traced to the pre-Celtic Old European 'Plowonida' meaning 'boat river or flooding river, river too wide to ford'.

1. Selfridges was founded by an American.
2. Ryan Kwanten (very convincing Louisiana born and bred Jason Stackhouse in True Blood) is Australian and played lifeguard Vinnie Patterson in Home and Away for many years.
3. Katherine Ellis (featured in last week's 7 Things too) is the voice of the Gaviscon 'What a Feeling' adverts.
4. A still unknown Madonna dated artist Jean-Michel Basquiat in 1982.
5. iTunes stops downloading podcasts if you don't listen to them.
6. Unesco defines a book as having at least 49 pages. Fewer than that, it's a pamphlet.
7. The 'File' menu has been removed from Office 2007 applications. It took me the best part of half an hour and a bit of Googling to figure out the new way to access those options.

1. Ron Grainer (Doctor Who theme tune composer) also wrote the Tales of the Unexpected theme (via Mike)
2. Eating dirt is good for you.
3. A Dirty Sanchez is a sexual act.
4. New design UK coins are already in circulation (via Diamond Geezer). I have not used cash since I stopped drinking coffee, so I am not surprised I had not noticed.
5. Fructose makes your body convert sugars into body fat, while other sugars don't.
6. Sport stacking (also known as speed stacking) involves stacking and unstacking cups very fast in a pre-determined pattern.
7. People working on the MP3 format did all their tests using the Suzanne Vega song 'Tom's Diner' (via Kottke).

1. Shots, props and costumes from Battlestar Galactica were reused in Buck Rogers in the 25th Century.
2. Google Chrome's concept of 'one process per tab' is nothing new: IE7 on Vista already prohibits mixing security zones in the same process, and IE8 creates one process per tab.
3. The North American video games market crashed in 1983 due to market saturation with low-quality games.
4. Increasing thread count over 300 adds very little comfort. Via Kottke.
5. The iPhone GUI does not let you turn off voicemail. You can either call your provider to disable it, or use the standard GSM codes.
6. All four members of Kings of Leon share the same family name (Followill), as they are three brothers (whose father and grandfather are called Leon) and a cousin.
7. Jools Holland was a member of Squeeze (1979 hit 'Cool For Cats', skip to 2:39 to see Mr Holland) from 1974 to 1980.

1. British physicist Dr. Brian Cox used to play keyboards in D:Ream.
2. Apple has granted another two-month free extension to MobileMe users because of poor service, bringing the free trial up to four months now. Mine expires on 7 December, perhaps by then I will have won the lottery and switched to a Mac for my main machine and MobileMe will be worth it.
3. Strawberries are not berries but bananas are.
4. The vocals on Mousse T's 'Horny' are by 'Nasty Girl' Inaya Day.
5. Apparently, Opera was supposed to be the default iPhone browser.
6. 'So Strong' by Meck feat. Dino samples (from the 2:14 mark) the 1994 track 'Hold That Sucker Down' by the O.T. Quartet. Skip to the 2:37 mark for the exact bit that was lifted.
7. Egg breakfast enhances weight loss. But as usual, only within a calorie-controlled diet. So put your fry-up down now.

1. Basshunter started to produce music in 1999 with the computer program Fruity Loops (Now: FL Studio).
2. As of 2007 there were 200 million dead blogs.
3. Google Reader trends has a 'starred' tab, often a better indication that I have saved a post for thorough reading at a later stage, than simply skimmed to check if there was anything of interest in it.
4. You can stream live radio on iPlayer but you cannot download radio programmes on iPlayer for rights reasons.
5. You cannot play radio programmes on iPlayer on the iPhone and iPod Touch yet.
6. The iPhone takes screenshots of everything you do to create the window-shrinking effect when you press the 'home' button.
7. The dollar sign probably comes from the Spanish coat of arms, but there are several other possible origins, none of which is certain.

1. Google is not the first search engine in Russia, China, South Korea and the Czech Republic.
2. Dogs drink via a 'reverse slurp'.
3. You can tweak the AwesomeBar's suggestion algorithm in Firefox 3, and rank some items higher than others, for instance bookmarks higher than history.
4. The faux swear word 'frak' used extensively in Battlestar Galactica was originally spelled 'frack', then changed to a four-letter word by producers of the current show.
5. The Pro version of Instapaper (one of my favourite free iPhone apps) lets you scroll up and down a page by tilting the device. I have not tried it and cannot decide whether it is a gimmick, or worth the extra USD 9.99?
6. The ken and barbie gene in the Drosophila fly takes its name from the fact that its mutations cause genitalia to be malformed (most often they remain inside the body).
7. There is a 'Master Password' option in Firefox that auto-fills all saved passwords but asks for an additional master password the first time you access a website in a Firefox session.

1. You can use the Firefox 3 toolbar search as a calculator: type your formula and the tooltip displays the result, no need to leave the page you are on. It works if the selected engine is google.com, not if it is google.co.uk. It probably also works in Firefox 2, possibly IE but I haven't look at it for years.
2. The iPhone headphones button also operates the iPod function as a remote control (play/pause/skip) when not placing calls.
3. The songwriter and lead vocalist in 30 Seconds to Mars is actor Jared Leto (Justin in My So-called Life, Fight Club, Alexander…)
4. Caffeine, theine, guaranine and mateine are all synonyms for the same chemical compound.
5. The youngest Academy Award winner for Best Actress (as of 2008) is Marlee Matlin for Children of a Lesser God (which incidentally was also her debut).
6. 'Random' smart playlists in iTunes do not refresh automagically. You either have to clear and repopulate them, or add some sorting criteria (e.g. 'not played in the last x days') and turn on 'Live updating' if you want them to constantly refresh.
7. When you are in Gmail, hitting the key where the question mark sits places the cursor in the search field.

1. Stephen 'Tin Tin' Duffy was the original lyricist and singer with Duran Duran. He left the band the year before they signed with EMI.
2. Caffeine relaxes the internal anal sphincter muscles.
3. Safari now has a 'Develop' menu. Among other things, it also emulates other browsers.
4. Ofcom allocates unused telephone numbers for drama purposes. You can spot them because they usually range from 496 0000 to 496 0999 for thirteen main area codes.
5. The lyrics in 'Bleeding Love' do not go 'You cut me up and, and I…' but 'You cut me open and I…' – I only noticed when I heard The Wombat's version of the song on the NME 2008 Awards covers compilation.
6. The price of NHS prescriptions is set to 7 pounds 10 pence (as of 1 April 2008) regardless of how much drugs cost.
7. Radiologists at Shanghai's school of medicine use iTunes to organise medical PDFs so that they can be searched and categorised with ratings and multiple tags.