Recent Changes

After researchers at the University of Washington trapped [[Crow|crows]] while wearing a caveman mask, crows kept mobbing anyone wearing it for over five years. Most of the scolding birds had never been captured and apparently learned the danger from parents and flockmates.

In 1998, a [[Pixar]] employee accidentally ran a delete command that wiped about 90% of [[Toy Story 2]]'s files, and the backups had been failing for a month. The film was saved by the home computer of supervising technical director Galyn Susman, who was working from home on maternity leave.

[[Street Fighter II]] combos were not a designed feature. They came from an unintended bug that let one attack cancel into the next. The developers left it in rather than fix it, and it became a core system of the [[Fighting game]] genre.

The North American [[Frog|wood frog]] freezes in winter, with its heart and breathing stopped, and revives when it thaws. Alaskan wood frogs stayed frozen for about 193 days in a study, and all of them survived.

Many languages name the [[@]] sign after an animal or a food. Korean calls it a sea snail ("golbaengi"), Dutch a little monkey's tail ("apestaartje"), and Hebrew a strudel ("shtrudl").

In [[Major League Baseball]], new [[Baseball|baseballs]] are rubbed with a special river mud to remove their slick shine. Coach Lena Blackburne found it in a Delaware River tributary in the 1930s, and his company still harvests and sells it.

In [[Space Invaders]], the aliens speed up as you shoot them because of a hardware limit: with fewer sprites to redraw, the processor finished each frame faster. Designer Tomohiro Nishikado chose to keep the effect as a gameplay feature.

A level in [[Crash Bandicoot]] ran tens of megabytes, but the [[PlayStation]] had only 2MB of RAM. [[Naughty Dog]] solved this by loading just the needed chunks from the CD and constantly swapping them in and out of memory.

[[Pierre de Coubertin]], founder of the modern [[Olympics]], won gold in literature at the 1912 Stockholm art competition. He entered his poem "Ode to Sport" under pseudonyms.

[[Cup Noodle|Cup Noodles]] hang in mid-cup because the noodle block is wider than the cup's base. Dropped in, the blocks kept tipping over. Momofuku Ando's fix: set the block upside down, lower the cup over it, then flip both upright.

The "yang" (羊) in [[yokan]] means lamb. Originally a [[food]] made with lamb's [[Blood curd|blood]] in [[China]], it was reinvented with red bean paste in [[Japan]], where a 1,200-year meat ban made slaughtering sheep impossible. This version persists to this day.

[[Ulleungdo]]'s famous [[Pumpkin yeot|pumpkin yeot]] was originally 'hubak [[Yeot|yeot]].' Made from the island's [[Hubak tree|hubak tree]], the name spread as '[[Pumpkin|pumpkin]] yeot' because the words sounded alike. Ulleungdo embraced the mix-up and began making actual pumpkin yeot.

In 1915 [[Coca-Cola]] asked glassmakers for a bottle recognizable by touch in the dark or by its shards. Designer Earl Dean found no images of coca leaves or kola nuts, so he sketched a similarly named [[Cocoa|cocoa]] pod instead—the mix-up shaped the bottle.

A [[Narwhal|narwhal]] is a kind of [[Dolphin|dolphin]] whose long [[horn|tusk]] has a porous surface that lets seawater reach its nerves. Alternating salty and fresh water on it measurably changes the animal's heart rate, revealing it as a salinity sensor.

[[Piano]] keys once had the opposite color layout. In the era of [[Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart|Mozart]] and [[Ludwig van Beethoven|Beethoven]], wide keys were black and narrow keys white. This was likely because [[ivory]] for white keys cost more than ebony for black keys.

[[Tetris]] doesn't actually hand out pieces at random. Early versions used pure randomness, so a given piece could fail to appear for dozens of drops in a row. To fix this drought problem, later games switched to a '7-bag' system that guarantees all seven pieces appear once before repeats.

[[Instant noodles]] are yellow because of added [[vitamin]] B2. In the 1980s, ramen companies began adding vitamin B2 to address nutritional concerns. The alternate name for vitamin B2, "riboflavin," contains "flavin"—derived from the Latin word "flavus," meaning yellow.

[[Dizzy Dean]], a [[National Baseball Hall of Fame]] inductee who retired at 31, became a commentator known for relentlessly criticizing players. His team eventually put him on the mound to prove his words. At 37, six years after retirement, Dean pitched four scoreless innings.

In [[Pokémon]] Red and Blue, the [[Old man|old man]] blocking the road out of [[Viridian City]] was passed out drunk in the Japanese original. Western versions changed it to 'grumpy without his morning coffee' — but his sprite still has the original's flushed cheeks.

According to Lanchester's square law, when 500 soldiers fight 1,300 under equal conditions, the 500 kill only about 100 before being wiped out. Numerical inferiority is far deadlier than simple subtraction suggests, making [[divide and conquer]] the key strategy in disadvantaged battles.