Hey Learn This

01/28/2026

Did you know about these parts of France in North and South America? Off the coast of Canada near Newfoundland, there are the islands of St. Pierre and Miquelon. And in South America, there is a part of France called French Guiana. In all of these French places, residents are French citizens, and they use the Euro. That would be interesting to be in S. America or Canada and then all of a sudden you're in France. French Guiana is actually where the European spaceport is located for launching rockets.

06/07/2024

Horses used to be small! Up to about 30 million years ago, they were 1-2 feet tall. Some grew taller to run faster and gain strength to fend off predators. About 12,000 years ago, all the North American horses went extinct for reasons unclear. Taller horses weren't reintroduced to North America until Christopher Columbus in 1493.

06/05/2024

This shows that sometimes in life you shouldn't trust your intuition.

The Monty Hall problem is an interesting puzzle loosely based on an American TV game show Let’s Make a Deal hosted by Monty Hall. While the puzzle looked simple, it perplexed some of the brightest mathematical minds in the United States, including the great Paul Erdös who was one of the most prol...

05/03/2024

ChatGPT is incredible. I was tutoring a student in Probability today. We weren't sure how to handle a certain problem. The student took a picture of the homework question and put the picture in ChatGPT. We asked ChatGPT how to answer one of the questions in the picture. It quickly spit out a lengthy description along with the step of the calculations and the answer. It's mind blowing how this A.I. was created and how good it is.

05/02/2024

I was chilling in a Chemistry class today, and while the professor was doing some gas law calculations, she put up this Captain Picard meme. Respect

04/30/2024

I've been sitting in an Astronomy class at the U of O, because that's what I do for fun. Some of the stuff about our universe that is being talked about is mind-blowing, and it's incredible to think about us existing in this huge mysterious place. Unfortunately though, the instructor is having a tough time having it connect with the students. I find myself surrounded by kids on their computers watching Ultimate Frisbee games and texting their friends.
People are funny like that. They can hear things like "This expanding universe is 13.7 billion years old with trillions of galaxies, and there's this question of whether the universe is flat, open, or closed. A closed universe would eventually collapse back into itself..." And they respond "Interesting. Hey, what's for dinner?"

04/12/2024

I was walking around looking at the insides of nice Spring flowers and thinking about how cross pollination is cool. Bees get nectar from flowers. Then pollen from that flower will stick to the bee, and it will be transferred to another flower when that bee goes to the other flower for more nectar. Pollen is transferred from the anther in one flower to the stigma in the other, and then a seed can be created for a new flower. What a world!

03/08/2024

Do y'all know about cellular respiration in a cell? How did they figure this out?

Cellular respiration is a metabolic pathway that uses glucose to produce adenosine triphosphate (ATP), an organic compound the body can use for energy

03/05/2024

https://www.mentalfloss.com/posts/what-in-tarnation-meaning

We may have a Mandela effect situation on our hands here.

02/21/2024

Brian Greene is a cool dude. This is a really cool video about time explained at 5 different levels.

Time: the most familiar, and most mysterious quality of the physical universe. Theoretical physicist Brian Greene, PhD, has been challenged to explain the na...

02/04/2024

It's great that the Museum of Natural and Cultural History at the University of Oregon is free on first Fridays. Did you know the oldest shoe ever found was about 10,000 years old, and it was found right here in Oregon? Also, apparently there were humans where Oregon is about 14,000 years ago in the Paisley Caves. They found and dated fossilized human f***s (coprolites)!

02/02/2024

Crystals and minerals are super cool. They're sometimes called "nature's treasures." Here's a neat exhibit in the Environmental Studies department at The University of Oregon. Understanding the difference between a mineral and crystal is a little confusing. A mineral is a naturally occurring compound that is not alive nor was it a part of anything that was alive, and it has an orderly internal structure. It has crystalline structure. A crystal has a more basic definition: it has a crystalline structure, so its atoms, molecules, or ions are arranged in an orderly pattern extending in all three spatial dimensions.