Trivia Bits 01 September

 

 

The autopsy depicted in Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp (pictured) , an oil painting by Rembrandt, was a real event which took place on 16 January 1632.

Nihil, from Latin means nothing with Nihilism being a philosophical doctrine most commonly presented in the form of existential nihilism, which argues that life is without objective meaning, purpose, or intrinsic value.

Situated at the Willkanuta River in the Sacred Valley, the Peruvian village Písac derives its name from a ruined Incan citadel which represents the wing of a partridge.

An immigrant from a strange foreign land, often speaking in his foreign tongue (actually composed of gibberish, often using invented phrases such as "ibi da" or "nik nik"), but when speaking English he speaks with a very heavy accent, working as a mechanic, fixing the taxis, Latka Gravas was played by Andy Kaufman on the sitcom Taxi, American sitcom that originally aired from 1978 to 1982 on ABC and from 1982 to 1983 on NBC.

Linguistically a hyponym is the semantic relation in which one word is the hypernym of another as in chair to furniture, cherry to red and apricot to fruit.

When referring to mining company BHP-Biliton, the acronym BHP stands for Broken Hill Proprietary which was incorporated in 1885, operating the silver and lead mine at Broken Hill in western New South Wales, Australia and in 2001, BHP merged with the Billiton mining company to form BHP Billiton.

In his poem Dushenka, the 18th-century Ukrainian-born poet Ippolit Bogdanovich changed the setting of Apuleius's story about Cupid and Psyche to a contemporary Russian village.

The famous mathematician and astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus formulated a model of the universe that placed the Sun rather than the Earth at the centre of the universe with the publication of this model in his book De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres) just before his death in 1543.

Though human noses have an impressive 5 million olfactory cells with which to smell, sheepdogs have 220 million, enabling them to smell 44 times better than man.

The Sargasso Sea is a region in the gyre in the middle of the North Atlantic Ocean and is the only sea on Earth which has no coastline with the ocean water in the Sargasso Sea is distinctive for its deep blue colour and exceptional clarity, with underwater visibility of up to 200 feet (61 m).