Leslie Elman

Leslie’s trivia bits - test your knowledge

Published by admin on Tue, 05/30/2023 - 4:29pm

LESLIE’S TRIVIA BITS: May 29, 2023

The U.S. Military Academy Class of 1846 might be the most poignant in West Point’s history. Those 59 classmates who studied and trained together at the academy included 22 who achieved the rank of general during the American Civil War — 12 on the Union side and 10 on the Confederate. Among them were George B. McClellan, briefly general in chief of the Union Army; Confederate General Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson, who died at Chancellorsville; and George E. Pickett, who led the unsuccessful Confederate charge at Gettysburg.

Leslie’s trivia bits - test your knowledge

Published by admin on Sun, 05/21/2023 - 5:44pm

LESLIE’S TRIVIA BITS: May 22, 2023

On May 22, 1960, a 9.5 magnitude earthquake occurred near Valdivia, Chile. It remains the largest magnitude earthquake ever recorded. Tsunamis resulting from the quake caused destruction and loss of life in Southern California, Hawaii and as far away as Japan and Alaska. Four years later came the Great Alaska Earthquake of 1964. With a 9.2 magnitude, it’s the second-largest earthquake ever recorded.

Leslie’s trivia bits - test your knowledge

Published by admin on Sun, 05/14/2023 - 5:20pm

LESLIE’S TRIVIA BITS: May 15, 2023

In poetry, an anapest is a group of three syllables: two unstressed and one stressed. A poem written in anapestic tetrameter has four anapests in each line. (The prefix tetra means four.) It all sounds very fancy until you realize that much of the poetry you loved best as a kid — and possibly still do! — was written in anapestic tetrameter. That includes most of Dr. Seuss as well as Clement Clark Moore’s “A Visit From St. Nicholas.” Read them aloud and you’ll see.

Leslie’s trivia bits - test your knowledge

Published by admin on Sun, 05/07/2023 - 8:39pm

LESLIE’S TRIVIA BITS: May 8, 2023

Helen Magill White was the first woman to earn a Ph.D. in the United States, receiving a doctorate in Greek from Boston University in 1877, the year she turned 24. By that time, she was already a full-fledged academic pioneer. She had been the only female student in her class at Boston Public Latin School and a member of the first graduating class at Swarthmore College.

Leslie’s trivia bits - test your knowledge

Published by admin on Sun, 04/30/2023 - 7:31pm

LESLIE’S TRIVIA BITS: May 1, 2023

Earth isn’t the only celestial body that experiences quakes. NASA started measuring the moon’s seismic activity when the Apollo 11 mission left a seismometer on the moon’s surface in 1969. The InSight space lander recorded more than 1,300 seismic events on Mars between 2018 and 2022. And data from NASA’s MESSENGER space probe showed that Mercury, the smallest planet, is becoming even smaller as a result of “mercury quakes.”

Leslie’s trivia bits - test your knowledge

Published by admin on Tue, 04/25/2023 - 4:26pm

LESLIE’S TRIVIA BITS: April 24, 2023

Chinese checkers is sort of like checkers, but it’s not Chinese. It’s based on a game called Halma — from the Greek word for “jump” — devised in the 1880s by Massachusetts surgeon George Howard Monks. Originally, Halma was played on a square board. The star-shaped board came from Germany, where the game is sometimes called Sternhalma (Star Halma). Naming it Chinese checkers was an American marketing concept from the 1920s intended to capitalize on people’s fascination with the “exotic East.”

Leslie’s trivia bits - test your knowledge

Published by admin on Tue, 04/18/2023 - 4:26pm

LESLIE’S TRIVIA BITS: April 17, 2023

George Clooney became famous playing Dr. Doug Ross in the TV medical drama “ER,” but years earlier he played Ace, an emergency medical technician, in a medical sitcom called “E/R” that ran for 22 episodes in 1984-85. Like “ER” the drama, “E/R” the sitcom was set at a hospital in Chicago, and Mary McDonnell was one of the stars. Unlike “ER,” “E/R” was produced by the same company that produced “The Jeffersons.” Thus, Sherman Hemsley appeared in the pilot episode as George Jefferson.

Leslie’s trivia bits - test your knowledge

Published by admin on Sun, 04/09/2023 - 7:35pm

LESLIE’S TRIVIA BITS: April 10, 2023

The Liberty Bell isn’t the only famous bell with a characteristic crack. The first Big Ben, at the Houses of Parliament in London, cracked beyond repair in 1857 while it was being tested. The second cracked after about three months, was mended and still hangs in the tower. The 202-ton, 20-foot-tall Tsar Bell in Moscow didn’t even make it that far. In 1737, an 11.5-ton piece of the bell broke off during a massive fire. The Tsar Bell — the world’s largest — sits at ground level at the Kremlin.

Leslie’s trivia bits - test your knowledge

Published by admin on Tue, 04/04/2023 - 5:00pm

LESLIE’S TRIVIA BITS: April 3, 2023

Just 250 or so people live on the Pacific atoll Pingelap, and about 10% of them are completely colorblind. This isn’t ordinary colorblindness, though. It’s the result of a rare hereditary condition called achromatopsia that inhibits development of cone cell color receptors in their eyes. The prevalence can be traced to a tribal chief on the island, who passed the condition to the generation that followed him. It’s continued ever since. By comparison, achromatopsia affects about 1 in every 30,000 Americans.

Leslie’s trivia bits - test your knowledge

Published by admin on Mon, 03/27/2023 - 8:51pm

LESLIE’S TRIVIA BITS: March 27, 2023

The Earth has three distinct layers. At its center is a super-hot metallic core. Surrounding that is the mantle, which is about 1,700 miles deep. The outer layer is the crust. And between the mantle and the crust is a defined zone known as the Mohorovicic discontinuity, or the Moho. It’s named for Croatian seismologist Andrija Mohorovicic, who demonstrated its existence by studying the patterns of seismic waves from an earthquake that hit Croatia in 1909.

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