h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

......if you're someone like me

Really old Yogurt gets bug-infested (verminous)

I've heard that indigo was chosen as a rainbow colour because it was a colour all literate people saw daily: in their ink. It's there ok, but would we have classified it sepatately from blue, if it wasn't on the list already handed down to us? It is the colour of blue jeans.

=> Riding on yaks gravely bruised Jean's vertebrae.

Ink in manuscripts from the seventeenth century now looks a ruddy brown, because of its iron content, which has since rusted.

Not a lot of people know that. Or maybe they do. , ,

~R

Probably not. Well, possibly not anyway.

As for the rhyme, I always learned it as Richard Of York Gave Battle In Vein, referring to King Richard III who lost to Henry Tudor (later to become Henry VII) at the battle of Bosworth Field in 1485.

In truth, however, I learned the order of the colors of the rainbow long before I could remember the rhyme, so it all was a little pointless.

It's like the mnemonic for the order of sharps in key-signatures:
Father Charles Goes Down And Ends Battle. Which is all very well until you notice that the flats are the same in reverse: Battle Ends And Down Goes Charles's Father. Then the two start getting mixed fused shuffled melted and amalgamated into a hopeless blur.

Again making the whole thing a little pointless. Oh well. The only one I found useful was for the classification of speies. Kill pink cats or fight giant spiders. In other words, kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, species.

Thank you sooo much! I'll treasure that. Here's one for the first 12 decimal places of pi:

I wish I could recollect of circle round
The exact relation Arkimedes (found)

viz (3.)141592653589(5)

Get it? the number of letters in each word. You have to spell Archimedes with 9 letters instead of 10, and the 13th number is 7 not 5, but twelve places is enough for now, innit?

Or of course you could say
"The exact relation Arkimedes frowned" -- this is getting silly.

Wow. And to think that up to now I was resigned to only knowing pie to four decimal places. The only problem is that to calculate the circumference of a circle to so many decimal places I would probably need a calculator, and that handy pi button calculates it to umpteen places.

It could possibly be useful in pub quizes however. Perhaps also people would think I was better at maths if I could recall so many decimal places of pi. Then again, perhaps not.

It's in the same category as Tom Lehrer's song listing the chemical Elements -- "This may prove useful to some of you one day, in a somewhat bizarre set of circumstances"

'I hope you're all taking notes, as there's a short quizz next period'. Ah, love that song. And the other ones. 'But I digress'.

There's only one more that I know - 'My Very Excited Mother Just Showed Us Nine Planets' (Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Pluto). The usefulness of this one runs out at the end of primary school, however.

The moment had come, I swallowed my gum, We knew there'd be blood on the sand pretty soon The crowd held its breath, hoping that death Would brighten an otherwise dull afternoon And then: - the matador did what we wanted him to, He raised his sword and his aim was true; In that moment of truth I suddenly knew . . . That someone had stolen my wallet. Brilliant! See http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/alabaster/F107979?thread=243131 re A907517 "Tom Lehrer - Satirical Singer-Songwriter"

And thanks for the planets. That's really useful. Truly.

The classification of species; I learnt a different rhyme K P Nuts Only For Good Students not as good as the cats and spiders maybe my Biology Teacher just wasn't as good...lol.

Theres also the music one I learnt so long ago Every Good Boy Desevres Favour.

I learned the music one as well when I attempted to play the violin in primary school, except that it was 'fudge' instead of 'flavour'. As the rest spelled 'FACE', it wasn't necessary to be any more imaginative.

Spirit, I just went to your space. I didn't leave a message because I ought to let an ACE get to you first. I could of been reading a shortened version of my own space! You're the first other environmental science student I've come across here , and to add to that you also like fantasy books. To increase to coincerdance, this conversation was also one of the first places I posted.