Find yourself stuck inside with a bit of time on your hands? In Our Time continues to be an excellent informational resource, study aid and an enlightening, entertaining way to delve into the minutiae of any subject. So why not teach yourself a lesson with In Our Time’s majestical knowledge juggernaut!
Delve deeply into English Literature, History or Science
Listen to the podcasts and read about the topics.
Visit Our Time from the BBC
Cheddar is the most popular type of cheese in the UK. The cheese originates from the village of Cheddar in Somerset, south west England. Cheddar Gorge on the edge of the village contains a number of caves, which provided the ideal humidity and steady temperature for maturing the cheese.
Cheddar Gorge Cheese company explains
There are a great many pretenders, but only one genuine Cheddar – and we are very proud to say, we make the only authentic cheddar cheese in the world; and this, is how we do it
Traditional cheddar cheese – still produced by hand in the village of Cheddar, Somerset, with raw milk from one local farm. Both an art and a science, we are producing & thereby preserving the only truly authentic cheddar cheese in the world. Long-matured in cloth to produce that special taste, texture, aroma, mouthfeel and long lasting flavour. Our cheese is unique and we’re proud to keep the tradition alive.
Cheddar Gorge Cheese company has written about How we make our cheese
And if you are in the UK and want to try out their cheese they have some special Isolation Packs
What is the longest English word? Lexico (Oxford Dictionary) tells us that the answer to the question,
You’re unlikely to come across these words in genuine use: they’re generally just provided as answers to questions about the longest words in the English language.
So what is the answer?
Find out HERE
Hackaday serves up Fresh Hacks Every Day from around the Internet. Our playful posts are the gold-standard in entertainment for engineers and engineering enthusiasts.
We are taking back the term “Hacking” which has been soured in the public mind. Hacking is an art form that uses something in a way in which it was not originally intended. This highly creative activity can be highly technical, simply clever, or both. Hackers bask in the glory of building it instead of buying it, repairing it rather than trashing it, and raiding their junk bins for new projects every time they can steal a few moments away.
The first British Toy and Hobby Fair was organised by Jack Watkins MBE for the British Toy Manufacturers Association and took place in Brighton from 22nd-26th February 1954.
In 1954, Sooty became a Chad Valley hand puppet, and Painting by Numbers, Scrabble and Matchbox vehicles were big hits at Christmas.
Over the next two years, the fair moved to Olympia and then to Earls Court at the British Industries Fair. Celebrity-linked games came to the fore with Stanley Matthews recommending New Footy Table Soccer.
In 1957, the decision was taken to move back to Brighton.
In 1958, the Hula-Hoop was the toy of the moment, Plasticine celebrated 50 years and Frisbees took off.
Here’s a Pathé newsreel showing what was on offer in the Toy Fair in 1958
Visit The Toy Fair for more about its history from the 50s to present day.
Founded in 1998, kottke.org is one of the oldest blogs on the web. It’s written and produced by Jason Kottke and covers the essential people, inventions, performances, and ideas that increase the collective adjacent possible of humanity. Frequent topics of interest among the 26,000+ posts include art, technology, science, visual culture, design, music, cities, food, architecture, sports, endless nonsense, and carefully curated current events, all of it lightly contextualized. Basically, it’s the world’s complete knowledge, relentlessly filtered through my particular worldview, with all the advantages and disadvantages that entails.
Read and subscribe to Jason Kottke’s blog at kottke.org or follow him on Twitter at @kottke for daily updates.
Nik, a writer from Germany, wrote over 365 book summaries in 2016. That’s more than one per day! Nowadays, he and his little team are adding one new book summary every single day. If you find them valuable, you can subscribe to receive a weekly email with more, free, new summaries.
Each book starts with a one-minute summary following a chapter-by-chapter breakdown that will take you 4 minutes to read.
For example, here’s the 1 sentence summary of A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawkins from the 4-minute book summary
A Brief History Of Time is Stephen Hawking’s way of explaining the most complex concepts and ideas of physics, such as space, time, black holes, planets, stars and gravity to the average Joe, so that even you and I can better understand how our planet was created, where it came from, and where it’s going.
You can see the full list of summaries at https://fourminutebooks.com/book-summaries/
With fossil records dating back 400 million years, sharks have outlived the dinosaurs and many other forms of life currently on earth. There are more than 1,000 species of sharks and rays, with new species discovered every year.
Facts, photos and videos from WWF (the World Wildlife Fund)
Many of us use the words hornet and wasp interchangeably, but that’s a vast overgeneralization that does a disservice to these winged creatures. Understanding the differences between hornets and wasps might help you to make better pest control decisions, prevent you from killing beneficial species, and of course, maybe keep you from getting a painful sting.
Here’s the biggest thing to know: All hornets are wasps, but not all wasps are hornets
Read the article What’s the Difference Between a Hornet and a Wasp? at HowStuffWorks to find out more
