After I visited the Snapple web site this week, I used to be served one of many drink model’s well-known enjoyable details: {that a} jiffy is an “precise time measurement equaling 1/a centesimal of a second.” Enjoyable certainly! And arguably even a bit of bit true!
In 2013 in The Atlantic, Adrienne LaFrance courageously uncovered that a lot of Snapple’s bottle-cap details had been false. I wanted to find out whether or not the corporate had since cleaned up its act; the intervening rebrand from “Actual Details” (scare quotes theirs) to Actual Details (no quotes!) felt like a vow.
Alas, a jiffy was first proposed because the identify for the time gentle takes to journey one centimeter in a vacuum—about 33 trillionths of a second. In electronics, a jiffy could be 1/50 or 1/60 of a second. Solely in Linux computing particularly can it’s 1/100 of a second, and even then solely typically.
Oh properly. I didn’t have the center to verify the following assertion: “Mangoes can get sunburned.” No matter, positive. For the foreseeable future, follow Atlantic Trivia to your enjoyable details.
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Tuesday, December 16, 2025
- The movie director Chloé Zhao describes what line of William Shakespeare’s as “the nice paradox of the universe”?
— From Shirley Li’s story about reinterpreting Shakespeare for the display screen - The post-hardcore band Fugazi typically stopped reside units to chastise violent fan conduct in what area simply in entrance of the stage?
— From James Parker’s story concerning the empathy you will discover at heavy-metal exhibits - What Black-nationalist chief of the early twentieth century spearheaded the “Again to Africa” motion, which inspired Black People emigrate to the continent?
— From Dara T. Mathis’s story concerning the Black-liberation activist Audley Moore
And by the way in which, do you know that the nation of Liberia was based when previously enslaved Black People migrated there en masse within the mid-Nineteenth century? It’s the oldest republic in Africa (it declared independence in 1847), and it’s the one state there by no means colonized or occupied by a European energy.
Its first 10 presidents had been all born in the US, and its capital, Monrovia, is the one on this planet (apart from America’s) to honor an American—specifically, President James Monroe.
See you tomorrow!
Solutions:
- “To be, or to not be.” In Zhao’s new movie, Hamnetthe speech containing this line exhibits up twice, delivered as soon as by Shakespeare himself and as soon as by certainly one of his actors. Shirley writes that it’s a daring take to reinterpret the soliloquy as extra of a dialog. Learn extra.
- The mosh pit. James not too long ago attended a metallic music pageant on the hunch that the self-policing pit may maintain classes for the right way to reside collectively in 2025. He admits that it’s “the form of concept solely a journalist would have,” however the pit ended up educating him lots. Learn extra.
- Marcus Garvey. Mathis writes that Garvey’s philosophy was massively influential within the early lifetime of Moore, who turned an ideological “midwife” to lots of the century’s Black-nationalist activists however herself stays sorrowfully neglected. Learn extra.
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