TIL: Today I Learned

TIL that half an hour ago Eliud Kipchoge started a marathon in Vienna with as goal to finish within two hours.

 

If ThinkGeek were still in business, this would definitely be something they would sell as some sort of carry bag for tablets.

 

"Marathon" is cultural appropriation

 

Sharing culture is human enrichment free of charge

 

Easy to say when no one wants Zwarte to be shared in the first place

 

And he did .
The conditions were hyper-artificial though.

 

The original marathon actually was on rugged terrain, and there was a point to running the distance. It is why Pheidippides actually died upon completing his task and giving the important message "We won".*

Now it is mostly vanity fairs with fat locals, who are cheered for giving up a few hundred meters in, or fake events like the one in Fasaustria. (I am not counting the modern olympics, cause at least in that case there was a similar event added after Marathon, in the ancient era).
I am against "cultural appropriation" arguments, but if there is a case to be made for one, this would be it. It's beyond trivializing... The Athenians were contemplating evacuation to Thurioi (their colony in Italy) if they had lost the battle of Marathon or if they didn't get news of the victory in time. Such a move would have significantly altered western history. Such fake "marathons" are contemptible

*prior to that run (from the field at Marathon to Athens), the same hoplite was sent (cause he was the fastest) to Sparta, to ask for their help in the battle. There legend has it (Herodotos mentions it) that the god Pan appeared before him in Arcadia, claimed that he would help by instilling pan-ic to the persians, and complained that Athens doesn't yet honour him with his own temple.
The Athenians did in fact build a temple to Pan later on. Trivia: near a shrine to Pan is where the only fully extant play by Menander is set.

 

We had a room full of these at one of offices back in the stone age.

 

Hmm. I'd rule out the modern one in 1904.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/hist...on-may-have-been-the-strangest-ever-14910747/
Dyskolos sounds like it had some depth and sophistication. The 1904 St. Louis Marathon was classic American slapstick.

 

Re Dyskolos, sadly it wasn't good, imho (maybe just not as good as I expected, though ok it wouldn't be quite on par with Oepidus...) Maybe parts are missing (seems to be the case at some point, with the young man's father, and there is no chorus at all), but it certainly isn't high literature plot-wise
It's just a comedy, about a misanthropic old farmer and his hot daughter. And a sub-plot is being kind to those who have little money. A couple of jokes are about slave girls being prone to blackmail their (non-slave) lovers to prevent scandal. There is also a wiseguy cook, who prepares the feast in honour of Pan, which is devoured by non-working high society types.

 

TIL you have to adjust the tension on bike spokes after braking it in, especially if you're a fatass like me.

 

TIL that Broca’s and Wernicke’s regions, parts of the brain that are important for certain aspects of human language, both contain several sub-regions that themselves connect to other parts of the brain that are relatively distant from those two regions.

 

Shirihai and colleagues faced a difficult challenge to develop an approach to map the voltage on the membrane of mitochondria in living cells at a resolution never seen before. Two students, Dane Wolf and Mayuko Segawa, optimized a form of high-resolution microscopy to visualize the interior of mitochondria and watch energy production and voltage distribution inside the organelle.

“What the images told us was that each of these cristae is electrically independent, functioning as an autonomous battery,” Shirihai said. “One cristae can get damaged and stop functioning while the others maintain their membrane potential.”

Between each cristae, where the inner membrane of the mitochondria loops back outward, clusters of proteins form the boundaries of each cristae. Researchers knew that without these proteins, mitochondria were more sensitive to damage. Now, Shirihai has explained why: The proteins normally divide each cristae from their neighbors, acting as electrical insulators. In cells lacking those proteins, Shirihai found that each mitochondria became one giant battery.

http://newsroom.ucla.edu/releases/cells-mitochondria-tesla-battery-packs

The most fascinating organelle.

 

TIL that in most complex organisms, mitochondrial functions rely on >1000 nuclear genes. Not all of those genes were transferred over time from the ancient mitochondrial genome to the nucleus (i.e "vertically"), but from a variety of bacteria (i.e. "horizontally").

 

After all, a mind is a terrible thing to chaste

 

TIL Greg Bear is Poul Anderson's son-in-law.

 

TIL an optometrist is a "doctor"

 

Ummm...of course they are? As opposed to an optician, who may be just moving into their second job after a career of burger flipping, the optometrist has completed medical school and a fair amount of additional specialized training.

 

No, the ophthalmologist completed medical school, the optometrist completes optometry school and gets an OD (doctor of optometry) degree.