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Today I Learned (5 Things)

My roommate Dan Randall and me at the 2013 AECT Convention in CA.
  1. Why Do I Always Wake Up 5 Minutes Before My Alarm Goes Off?  At the center of your brain, a clump of nerves—called the suprachiasmatic nucleus—oversees your body’s clock: the circadian rhythm. It determines when you feel sleepy and when you feel bright-eyed. It controls your blood pressure, your body temperature, and your sense of time. It turns your body into a finely tuned machine. That machine happens to love predictability. Your body is most efficient when there’s a routine to follow. So if you hit the hay the same time each night and awake the same time each morning, your body locks that behavior in. And that’s where things get sciency. Read the full text here: http://mentalfloss.com/article/53710/why-do-i-always-wake-5-minutes-my-alarm-goes#ixzz2l9AFPrZl
  2. What is Oxford Dictionary's 2013 Word of the Year?  Every year, Oxford Dictionary names a Word of the Year, the word “that is judged to reflect the ethos, mood, or preoccupations of that particular year and to have lasting potential as a word of cultural significance.” The winner for 2013 is “selfie.”  Read the full text to discover the runners up: http://mentalfloss.com/article/53746/word-year-selfie#ixzz2l9AR18Mu
  3. Why Squinting Helps You See Better?  Squinting causes two reactions that help you visualize the world around you in better detail. First, it changes the shape of our eye, allowing light to be focused better. Secondly, it decreases the amount of light that is allowed to enter the eye. Light coming from a limited number of directions allows that light to be more easily focused. Read the full text here: http://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2013/11/squinting-helps-see-better/
  4. Why does the Creative Commons license, CC-BY, mean include attribution, when all the other creative commons licenses are acronyms?  After a bit of research, I discovered that CC-BY was one of the original licensing terms that just didn't change over time, like the others—evidently because it was so intuitive already, and it would have been too much of a pain to ask everyone to go back and change the licensing on all of their previously submitted content. (But it wasn't clear to me why CC-BY was so "intuitive" until today...)  BY refers to giving attributing to who the content was originally created "by." Doy! 
  5. How do you create a Parallax effect using a still image (illustrated in the video below)?  “Learn how to create motion in still photographs, a technique made popular in the film The Kid Stays In The Picture. In the tutorial above, Joe Fellows shows us how he’s able to bring photos to life using the parallax effect with Photoshop and After Effects.” — TCP
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