I'm going to visit China for a short while this summer. I'M GOING TO CHINA THIS SUMMER! Let that sink in. Anyway, to prepare for the trip -- which is intended to see as much as possible while hanging out with a friend from college who's teaching there now -- I'm reading a book called "A Traveller's History of China" by Stephen G. Haw. And the book has taught me some rather interesting tidbits. Ancient Chinese philosopher Yang Zhu subscribed to the ideal of Hakuna Matata, and the Daoist movement his ideas were incorporated into boiled down to "if it ain't broke, don't fix it." The dynasty that left behind its Terra Cotta Warriors and built the first Great Wall (later extensively rebuilt/repaired) lasted just 50 years. One random Chinese Buddhist monk spent 16 years on a jaunt around India collecting Buddhist texts to take back home. Those texts got their very own pagoda for storage -- the Wild Goose Pagoda in Xi'an. The...

I opened my lovely newspaper Friday morning and was immediately perplexed by the op-ed page. On it, an editorial cartoon poked fun at all the egregious potholes drivers get slammed by on Indiana roads. The cartoon pictured a little fairy tossing potholes onto the roads in front of a driver. The fairy was named – ready? The “chuckhole” fairy. I asked around at work for someone who’s grown up in Indiana and upon finding one such coworker, asked her if chuckhole was a normal word for potholes. She looked at me a little funny and said yeah. I’ve since learned, via Facebook, that the term is strange to some others living around here, yet recognized by a smattering of Ohio friends, too. My own mother said she recognized the term from her hometown. Am I the only one left that didn’t know what a chuckhole was? (And a note: I keep posting these “What I learned” pieces late, so I snipped off the “today” in the series title. Get over it. )

If you ever watched The Magic School Bus when you were a kid, maybe you remember this bit about Arnold turning to ice: Don’t worry, he thaws out. I always kinda believed that that’s essentially what would happen to an astronaut if one really did remove the helmet out in space. Apparently that’s not the case! A nuclear physicist and wannabe-astronaut I know informed me today that somebody who takes his helmet off in space is probably going to survive for a minute or so (and would thus have enough time to get back into the safety of a ship – maybe). No air, you say? People can hold their breath for at least a minute. Nothing about that changes by being out in space. It’s cold, you say? Yes – around 3 degrees Kelvin apparently (almost as cold as it gets anywhere in the universe) – but it takes quite a lot of time to cool you down when there’s no air hitting you to transfer your body heat to. Not exactly a snap freeze. No air pressure, you say? So you depressurize fast – on earth, ...

One of the things I covered today was a children’s theater workshop. Like, there were two five-year-olds in this class. Can you imagine getting a couple five-year-olds to actually do anything intelligent on stage? Apparently it’s not impossible. And it can even be done without all that fidgeting and pulling at their shirts. How, you ask? Simply this: You tell them to press their thumb and middle finger together on each hand (right thumb with right middle finger… we’re not playing itsy bitsy spider here) and pretend they’re pushing into the floor with their feet, like you would on sand. That keeps their feet planted and their hands busy. I had never heard of that technique before this morning. I wonder if it would work on busy Sunday Schoolers?

When I moved to my new job/church/apartment/life, I decided soon after that I wanted to learn to play bass. That’s because my church has one bassist who’s just beginning the instrument and plays every other week. The media coordinator was all for my giving it a try to fill in the gaps on the other bassist’s off-weeks. First of all, they had to get the strings replaced on the church bass. Once that was done, it could hold a tune and it made sense to start practicing. So I lugged the thing home after church last week, agreeing to try it out and perhaps start playing with the church praise band the following week or three. So, first time I plugged it into a small amp and played with it, it was surprisingly easy (thanks to a YouTube video tutorial ) and I fooled around with a few songs out of my old rock’n’roll music book and my worship song collection. I mainly had to practice remembering what notes could be played where. That’s the biggest difference between rhythm guitar and bass – o...

Actually I learned this yesterday. But I don’t care. My bike started having a problem with the gears early last week – they’d suddenly disengage from the pedals. It’s really frustrating when that happens mid-ride, you know, because I end up walking all the way back to wherever I started from. Fortunately I was able to keep the bike engaged in first gear by constantly squeezing the gearshifter, but that’s all I could do. No second gear for me. So I was bereft of the bike for about a week. Sunday morning, I asked the bike repairman who goes to my church what he knew about that sort of problem. And he was able to tell me just what to do. Apparently, on an old bike with all the gears inside this little hub, there’s a special point at which the bike’s gears will catch the pedals. And that’s where the gear cable’s supposed to be aligned. But sometimes, the cable gets stretched – or I mess it all up as I change the inner tube, not sure which – and suddenly, it’s not pulling hard enough on...

Well, actually I learned this on Monday. But I didn’t get around to writing about it either Monday night (when I was tired) or yesterday (when I was busy). My cousin – half Michigan now, as a result of college and summer jobs – informed me that Michiganers who live in the “mitten” part of the state are called “trolls.” That’s because they live “under the bridge,” that is, south of the five-mile bridge connecting the mitten with the Upper Peninsula. (I don’t know exactly where this bridge is, but it’s obviously up north somewhere!) In return, the “trolls” call everybody from the Upper Peninsula a “yooper.” That’s the phonetic spelling of how they pronounce “UPer.” UP, of course, standing for Upper Peninsula. I never knew Michiganers had such interesting geographic terminology!

There’s a word for taking animal’s body parts and implanting them into humans for medicinal purposes, like taking a pig’s or a cow’s heart valves and doing heart surgery with them. It’s xenotransplantation. I had never heard of that word before. I learned it in tonight’s church small group lesson. We’re going through a worldview curriculum called “Understanding the Times” (already somewhat familiar to me) and started the bioethics videos tonight. Xenotransplantation is just one of the several bioethical issues that will be coming up here soon. Another is a combination of nanotechnology and artificial intelligence. As the video speaker pointed out: What’s scarier than invisible robots that can think like you? Not much. This new series of random observations is inspired jointly by my sister and my dad. Abby suggested that I blog about stuff I learned each day, and Dad used to ask me and my siblings every night at dinner—“what did you learn today?” We often responded with “nothing,” ...