Interesting Things with JC

Interesting Things with JC #1751: "The Wasps That Know Your Face" – Northern paper wasps recognize individual nestmates by their faces. Change a familiar face, and the colony responds with aggression until it learns who that face belongs to.

Interesting Things with JC #1750: "Trebizond" – Ships carry coffee, copper, cloth, salt, and other goods through Trebizond while steep roads climb from the Black Sea harbor into the Pontic Mountains. The empire that once ruled from the city is already gone, but Greek Orthodox communities remain for centuries—until violence, displacement, and a compulsory population exchange remove most of them from the coast.

Interesting Things with JC #1749: "Ouzel Lake and the Dangers of Alpine Swimming" – Ouzel Lake can look inviting after a 4.9-mile summer hike, but the mountain water can remain cold enough to trigger an involuntary gasp and rapid breathing almost immediately. Stay in, and cold can begin taking away strength and coordination while you're still nearly five trail miles into Rocky Mountain National Park.

Interesting Things with JC #1748: "Follow the Leader" – August 18th, 1998 a legendary album dropped. Korn’s original Follow the Leader CD starts with twelve five-second tracks containing no music. A full minute passes before the album finally begins on track thirteen, turning the physical CD’s track sequence into part of the album itself.

Interesting Things with JC #1747: "Davy Crockett Before the Legend" – Davy Crockett was becoming a legend while he was still alive. He claimed 105 bears in less than a year, fought Andrew Jackson’s Indian Removal Act, and watched stories turn him into a frontier character before the Alamo made that character permanent.

Interesting Things with JC #1746: "Julie Newmar" – Julie had already won a Tony and trained for years in ballet before playing Catwoman, then used that same attention to movement and body shape to redesign women’s undergarments. In the 1970s, the actress who adjusted Catwoman’s costume for a more feline line secured U.S. patents for pantyhose and brassiere designs under her own name

Interesting Things with JC #1745: "The Wow! Signal" – A radio telescope in Ohio detected a powerful narrowband signal from the direction of Sagittarius for 72 seconds, matching the rise and fall expected from a fixed source in the sky. The signal vanished before the telescope’s second beam crossed the same region, and nearly fifty years of searches have never detected it again.

Interesting Things with JC #1744: "The Lemon Juice Heist" – McArthur Wheeler robs Pittsburgh banks with lemon juice on his face because he believes security cameras cannot see him. The cameras see him clearly.

Interesting Things with JC #1743: "The Dunning-Kruger Effect" – Low performers overestimated their scores, but the famous “Mount Stupid” graph wasn’t part of the study, and researchers still debate what causes the effect.

Interesting Things with JC #1742: "The Milk Hill Spiral" – In a wheat field on Milk Hill, 409 separate circles form a six-sided spiral across roughly 780 to 900 feet of rolling ground. The circle sizes change as the pattern spreads outward, but the larger geometry holds across the hillside. The formation is documented; who designed and built it is not.