A running list of things I've learned — big and small, tech and non-tech.

2026-03-07 - Update from GH Mobile App: Anthropic named Claude after the American polymath Claude Shannon, who is known as "the father of Information Theory"
2026-03-07 — The CSS property text-wrap: balance makes headings distribute text more evenly across lines. No JS needed — just one line of CSS:
```
h1, h2, h3 {
    text-wrap: balance;
}
```
Supported in all modern browsers since late 2023.
2026-03-06 — You can use git log --oneline --graph --all to get a nice ASCII art visualization of your branch history right in the terminal.
2026-03-05 — In Python, you can unpack a list into function arguments with *. For example:
```
def add(a, b, c):
    return a + b + c

nums = [1, 2, 3]
print(add(*nums))  # 6
```
Works with ** for dictionaries too — func(**{"a": 1, "b": 2}).
2026-03-04 — Honey never spoils. Archaeologists have found 3,000-year-old honey in Egyptian tombs that was still perfectly edible. Its low moisture, high acidity, and natural hydrogen peroxide make it inhospitable to bacteria.
2026-03-03 — The Voyager 1 spacecraft, launched in 1977, is the most distant human-made object — over 24 billion km from Earth. It still communicates with NASA using a 23-watt transmitter, about as powerful as a refrigerator light bulb.
2026-03-02 — Sharks are older than trees. Sharks have been around for about 400 million years; trees appeared roughly 350 million years ago.
2026-03-01 — The word "robot" comes from the Czech word robota, meaning forced labor. It was first used in Karel Čapek's 1920 play R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots).
2026-02-28 — A jiffy is an actual unit of time. In computing, it's the duration of one tick of the system timer interrupt — typically 1 to 10 milliseconds. In physics, it's the time light takes to travel one centimetre — about 33.4 picoseconds.
2026-02-27 — There's a high-altitude lake in Bolivia called Laguna Colorada that is naturally bright red due to algae and sediment pigments. It's home to thousands of flamingos — and speaking of which, a group of flamingos is called a "flamboyance."
2026-02-26 — The <details> and <summary> HTML elements give you a native collapsible/accordion widget with zero JavaScript:
```
<details>
    <summary>Click to expand</summary>
    <p>Hidden content here.</p>
</details>
```
In action:

Click to expand

Hidden content here.

Works in all modern browsers and is accessible by default.
2026-02-25 — The Oxford English Dictionary took 70 years to complete (1858–1928). The first editor, Herbert Coleridge, died before reaching the letter C. The current edition has over 600,000 entries.