I did not know that yesterday!

I grabbed a cup of tea and hoped that a "sugar" search would do the trick, but, after browsing through the various category matches, I decided that I'd save time and get better results by phrasing my search more specifically. So, I typed "white sugar brown sugar difference," without any punctuation.

Lo and behold, there was a site titled SKIL - Sugar Types. I noticed the URL, sucrose.com, and wondered about the acronym SKIL. On the home page we learned that it stands for Sugar Knowledge International, an independent organization and industry resource for sugar technology professionals based in the United Kingdom. It seemed like a reliable place to look up types of sugar.

Granulated white sugar is essentially pure sucrose, whether derived from tropical sugar cane, or temperate sugar beets. White sugars vary mostly in the size of their crystals. The degree of processing by the manufacturer may also account for different degrees of whiteness.

Brown sugars are of two basic types: sticky and free-flowing. Both are produced by adding a suitable type of syrup (these days it's usually molasses) to purified or refined sugar. The color and texture of the final product are determined by the ratio of sugar to syrup in the mix, as well the the original colors of the constituent ingredients.

For additional culinary information about sugar, I headed to the Epicurious Food Dictionary. There I found descriptions of raw sugars, tips for storage, and a list of sugar substitutions for cooks and bakers.

One more noteworthy difference: a cup of brown sugar has slightly more calories than white, but it "also contains 187 milligrams of calcium, 56 of phosphorous, 4.8 of iron, 757 of potassium and 97 of sodium, compared to only scant traces of those nutrients found in granulated sugar." Sweet!

A search on the two key words "invented basketball," scored a number of web page results. I browsed around and eventually pieced together the colorful history of the sport.

Basket Ball (the original name of the game) was invented in 1891 by Dr. James Naismith, a teacher at the YMCA Training School in Springfield, Massachusetts. At Hoophall.com, the official site of the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame, I learned that, "The game of basketball was the result of a challenge from a teacher to his student to pique the interest of an incorrigible class during the usually dull winter months."

Apparently, the class was tired of calisthenics and Naismith's instructor assigned him the duty of inventing a new indoor sport. Taking to the task at hand, Naismith rounded up two peach baskets (the janitor didn't have any boxes handy) and a soccer ball. Next, he developed 13 rules for the new game.

He divided his class of 18 into 2 teams of 9 players each (the team today would be the equivalent of 3 guards, 3 centers, and 3 forwards) and set about to teach them the basics of b-ball.

The object of the game was to throw the soccer ball into the peach baskets nailed to the lower railing of the gym balcony. Every time a point was scored, the game was halted so the janitor could lug out a ladder and retrieve the ball. Of course, that didn't happen too often -- the score of the very first basketball game ever played was an amazingly low 1-0.

A lot has happened since the introduction of the game and basketball has undergone many changes , both in equipment and rules.

Yes, the cable is laid on the bottom of the ocean. The answer to this fascinating question is perhaps quite dull: "they" use ships to lay cable across the ocean floor. Simple as that. But finding the answer was not that dull; it was actually fairly tough. Here's what I did:


Among the handful of results in google, there was a listing for Pacific International Cable Consulting, Inc., a company that, according to the site description, participates in most aspects of the "loading, laying, and repair of high capacity submarine optical systems." While the site is little more than a corporate profile for the company, I did manage to find something new: a better keyword search. Namely, "submarine cable."

A Google search on the new phrase didn't get me very far, but I did notice that many of my leads were listed in the Telecommunications category. I decided a new strategy: search the web sites in that category for specific pages that included the phrase "submarine cable."

There, I found a link to the FTL Design History of the Atlantic Cable & Submarine Telegraphy. In short, it's a fascinating look at the early days of cable laying in the Atlantic. You should explore all of the links, but one in particular, to a 1925 article, "On Board the Cable Ship," clearly indicates: they use ships to do this work. Also, check out the cool images of actual cable from the mid-1800s.

I hoped for something more definitive, however, so I decided to fine tune my search strategy one more time. A search on the phrase "undersea cable technology" (using the quotation marks) led me to an article entitled " Evolution of a Wired World: The Growth of an Undersea, Intercontinental Network."

Besides being an interesting read on the history of this subject -- and reaffirming that "they" use ships to lay cable on the ocean floor -- I was able to determine who "they" are.

Among others, the U.S. conglomerate Tyco International is heavily involved in the business of laying undersea cable. A visit to the company's site led us to Tyco Submarine Systems. If the top page image doesn't answer your question, searching on Marine Services should do it. Happy reading!

I picked a link to the Tofu and Miso Homepage, an introduction to tofu (also known as bean curd) for Americans. On the site I found a step-by-step summary of the lengthy process that turns soybeans into soymilk, soymilk to slurry, and slurry to curds and whey. The curds are then skimmed off the top of the whey and pressed into a forming container lined with cheesecloth. This "cheese" of the soybean becomes tofu, and, traditionally, the pigs get the whey.

A second web page match led me to the U.S. Soyfoods Directory and an informative tofu entry, where I learned that tofu was used in China around 200 B.C.

According to Chinese legend, the first batch was a happy accident that resulted when nigari, a traditional coagulant that occurs naturally in ocean water, was added as flavoring to a batch of pureed soybeans. The rest is culinary history.

Finally, I typed "how to make tofu" into the search box, and found precise instructions for making tofu at home, descriptions of the many types and textures of commercially available tofu, and abundant recipe suggestions.

Tofu-making is a time consuming process -- if you work at home and enjoy baking your own bread from scratch, you might enjoy making your own tofu. If not, well there's always the local grocery store.

I've often pondered how the good doctor gets the peculiar taste. I've heard it's prune juice. I've heard it's grape juice. I've even heard it's a top-secret combination of ingredients that only a few people know.

I started with a simple Yahoo! search on "Dr Pepper," which led me to two Dr Pepper categories. Choosing to head down the Drinks and Drinking > Dr Pepper path, I found six web sites dedicated to the popular soft drink. I clicked on the Official link, which actually led me to the commercial side of the directory. I went straight to the site from the doctor himself, Drpepper.com, a pretty cool site with Flash animation.

I clicked on the Our Story link and quickly learned that Dr Pepper is the oldest major soft drink in the U.S. It was first made and sold in 1885 in Waco, Texas. I scrolled down and learned more about the soft drink, its history, and Dr. Charles Pepper, the man after whom the drink is named. However, I didn't find any information on the drink's flavor. We decided to check out the FAQs.

The quest for an answer was solved, sort of. The second question asks, "What's in Dr Pepper? Is prune juice in Dr Pepper?"

The answer:

The formula for Dr Pepper is proprietary, but prune juice is definitely not one of the ingredients. It is a blend of many spices and flavor extracts. The color is supplied by caramel especially made for the product.

So, the question remains unsolved, but at least some of the conjecture can be put to rest. Looks like you'll just have to be satisfied knowing that "Dr Pepper makes the world taste better."

A modem (a portmanteau* constructed from modulate and demodulate) is a device that modulates an analog carrier signal to encode digital information, and also demodulates such a carrier signal to decode the transmitted information. The goal is to produce a signal that can be transmitted easily and decoded to reproduce the original digital data. Modems can be used over any means of transmitting analog signals, from driven diodes to radio. Experiments have even been performed in the use of modems over the medium of two cans connected by a string.

The most familiar example of a modem turns the digital '1s and 0s' of a personal computer into sounds that can be transmitted over the telephone lines of Plain Old Telephone Systems (POTS), and once received on the other side, converts those sounds back into 1s and 0s. Modems are generally classified by the amount of data they can send in a given time, normally measured in bits per second, or "bps".

The 300 bit/s modems used frequency-shift keying to send data. In this system the stream of 1's and 0's in computer data it translated into sounds which can be easily sent on the phone lines. In the Bell 103 system the originating modem sends 0's by playing a 1070 Hz tone, and 1's at 1270 Hz, with the answering modem putting its 0's on 2025 Hz and 1's on 2225 Hz. These frequencies were chosen carefully, they are in the range that suffer minimum distortion on the phone system, and also are not harmonics of each other. For the 103F leased line version, internal strapping selected originate or answer operation. For dial models, the selection was determined by which modem originated the call. Modulation was so slow and simple that some people were able to learn how to whistle short bits of data into the phone with some accuracy.
Lovely - now you know :)


* portmanteau is a term in linguistics that refers to a word or morpheme that fuses two or more grammatical functions.)

A consulate is like a junior embassy. It's generally located in a busy tourist city, and takes care of minor diplomatic tasks such as issuing visas. The word consulate literally means office of the consul, who is a diplomat appointed to foster trade and take care of expatriates. You can read some pointed essays about the role of the modern day consulate at the American Foreign Service site.

Embassies are much bigger deals. The word embassy comes from the French ambassade, or office of the ambassador. Ambassadors are high-ranking diplomatic representatives who serve as spokespersons for their national governments. If one country recognizes the sovereignty of another, they generally establish an embassy there. Embassies take care of the same administrative duties as consulates, but they also represent their governments abroad.

This can be tricky business. For instance, the United States doesn't maintain an embassy in Taiwan (in order to maintain diplomatic relations with China), but it does operates a consulate there to take care of its overseas citizens. For an interesting online look at another prickly diplomatic relation, check out the U.S. Embassy in Malaysia, which features a reaction statement to the recent incarceration of Malaysia's former Deputy Prime Minister, Anwar Ibrahim.

You may recall the famous photograph from 1975 of American citizens ostensibly fleeing the American embassy in Saigon. The building was in fact an apartment complex across the street, but the message was clear: once the embassy leaves, the country symbolically leaves.