Skeleton Trivia for Thursday, 2025-11-20
Illuminating the nudniks
Hiya Skeleton Crew,
I’ve been gettin into some bad habits lately. Well, today’s the day I turn ’em all around! Today’s the day I finally see the light & start doin all the things I wish I’d do more of, & stop all the bad stuff I keep doin even though I really should know better!
Yep, today’s truly the day!
Just, uh, after I check what’s happenin on the Internet one more time.
Answers to Last Time
- The whale substance I was hopin ya’d answer yesterday was spermaceti (sperm for short). A buncha youse all answered blubber or whale oil (which is made from blubber) & that was a good guess, ’cause people definitely DID use it in lamps—but it was really mainly spermaceti that got turned into candles.
- The stat known as passer rating goes by a few different names (passing efficiency, QB rating, etc.) but whatever ya call it, it’s on a very intuitive scale that runs from 0 to 158.3.
Today’s Trivias
Trivia 1
Like I said yesterday, the unit called the candlepower was defined off a standardized spermaceti candle. Nowadays most folks use the candela, that’s the official SI unit for what science-y folks call luminous intensity. (Although a candlepower & candela are close enough that sometimes the words’ll kinda get used interchangeably.)
If ya take a candela & multiply it by a solid angle of one steradian, ya get a unit of luminous power called a lumen. Then, if ya take a lumen & DIVIDE that by some amount of area, ya get a measurement of somethin called illuminance. One lumen per square foot is called a foot-candle, but one lumen per square METER is called what?
In not-entirely unrelated news ... have ya listened to this new album by the Spanish singer Rosalía? It’s been rockin my Spotify non-stop for the past coupla weeks! I mean it: it’s really good, youse guys!!!
Trivia 2
What “Project” was caught tryin to sting the Washington Post with a fake sex-scandal story back in 2017? As far as I recall, this group’s shtick was mostly based ’round takin secret videos & then deceptively editing ’em to look damning; they did it to a group called ACORN back in 2009, for instance.
I dunno, youse guys. I don’t exactly love askin a question ’bout these nudniks. But their name works with today’s theme, & the main other things I coulda asked for were, like, a defunct German car brand, or a French international certification agency, or a planned NASA mission to Venus—none of which I don’t think anyone’s really heard of. So we’re stuck with the nudniks, I guess!
OK then
Byeeeeeeeeeeeeee