Things I learned recently

• 4/13/25 - From 1940 through 1946 The Office of Price Administration (OPA) rationed scarce items and regulated prices. At its peak, 90% of retail food prices were frozen. E.g. in Nov 1945 Grant's Hill Tavern was fined for selling salads for $1 when the ceiling was $.60 and a half chicken for $1.25 when the ceiling was $1.
• 1/31/25 - East coast butter is cut into longer, thinner blocks than west coast butter: "East Coast butter sticks are called Elgins after the equipment used by the Elgin Butter Tub Company for processing and packaging butter. West Coast butter sticks are called Western Stubbies because of their shorter, fatter shape. Totah notes that West Coast butter sticks are commonly called Westerns."
• 1/31/25 - Mayo doesn't need to stored in the refrigerator (also that Hellmann's Mayo is called Best Foods in the west)
• "vet" comes from horseracing and veterinarians
• vision that perceives and vision for action are two completely different processes (dorsal path and ventral path, experiments with brain damaged persons who could orient an object to a slot or tell you the orientation of a slot but not both
• The best language translators (e.g. google) are now created with little or no knowledge of the languages themselves, and are analytic engines that are fed human translations to do pattern matching.
• Parenting may be bad for human happiness, but satisfy other needs for attachment, meaning and purpose.
• West Virginians eat 481 hot dogs per person per year, tops in the U.S. (The U.S. average is 78/person) - USA Today
• 2/3/2923 - To this day some Pennsylvania homes, bars, and distilleries hang a portrait of Alexander Hamilton upside down in protest of his role in the Whiskey Rebellion. (Washington gets off the hook somehow.)
• 3/6/23 - Nearly 3% of Antarctic glaciers is penguin urine