The most meta of queries finally get their due.
1. Who invented FAQs?
The Frequently Asked
Questions format has existed for a while, just not by that name. (The
Four Questions of Passover have been in the Talmud since around the 4th
century.) Today’s popular FAQ format actually began at NASA. In 1983,
Eugene Miya was tired of seeing the same old questions posed by new
members of a pre–World Wide Web newsgroup. The excessive questions took
up space on the mailing list’s servers and flooded users’ inboxes. To
correct it, Miya started posting a monthly Frequently Asked Questions
list to the group, and thus, the FAQ was born.
2. Who asked the first question?
Believe
it or not, someone’s taken a crack at answering this: Joseph Jordania,
an Australian-Georgian ethnomusicologist and the author of
Who Asked the First Question? The Origins of Human Choral Singing, Intelligence, Language and Speech.
He proposes that the first question was asked by the first human
being, because—as he explains it—the ability to ask a question was a
critical evolutionary leap in distinguishing hominids from their
ancestors. So we can't say who, exactly, but that individual gets
credit for kicking off the entire human species.
3. Do other species ask questions?
Apes
have understood and answered questions humans have asked in studies,
but despite their sense of curiosity, they don’t ask questions
themselves. “Chimpanzees in the wild have vocalization that has elements
of questioning behavior,” Jordania writes. But aside from
call-and-response dynamics, questioning is distinctly human.
4. Who came up with the question mark?
Linguists
generally credit British scholar Alcuin of York with the first
question mark, which was a tilde over a Roman dot that was meant to
help with reading inflection. But in 2011, Cambridge researcher and
manuscript expert Chip Coakley discovered the earliest documented
instance of a question-indicating mark. The symbol, known as a “zagwa
elaya”—which looks like a colon— was in a 5th-century Syriac text
following what was clearly a question.
And Four Burning Questions We Just Can’t Answer
Despite all of the incredible things humans have figured out, we don’t know everything.
1. What’s inside a black hole?
We’ll
probably never know. Nothing can communicate from inside of one—light,
radio waves, anything. Even if we could send something (like a signal)
into a black hole, we couldn’t get it back. The closest thing we have
to an answer employs two established theories (gravity and quantum
mechanics). Scientists even have a name for this combined
theory—quantum gravity—but they still don’t get how it works. For now,
they think everything sucked into a black hole is bunched up and stacked
on top of itself in its center, like a big, galactic dogpile. Other
people think black holes could be a gate to another universe. But until
someone goes into one and comes back? No idea.
2. Why do we have an appendix?
Total mystery! It’s just there (unless you had it removed). A 2007 issue of the
Journal of Theoretical Biology
posited that the vestigial organ once acted as a storehouse for “good”
bacteria, so when pre-medicine bodies were hit with dire illnesses
affecting the gut, an appendix could help repopulate the stomach with
disease-fighting bacteria. Scientists agree that this guess is as good
as they come, but the author of the study admitted there’s no way to
confirm it without a “very expensive, heinous” experiment that might
involve infecting people who don’t have access to modern medicine with
dysentery. No thanks!
3. What’s the CIA hiding about JFK’s assassination?
Maybe nothing—
or not.
In 1963, Lee Harvey Oswald applied for a visa to travel to Cuba, via
the Soviet embassy in Mexico City. The CIA picked up on it. Five senior
CIA officers signed off on a cable basically saying Oswald wasn’t a
concern (whoops). Of the approximately 3,600 JFK files that remain
sealed in the National Archives, 1,100 concern the CIA. And while the
JFK Records Act of ’92 mandated all files related to the assassination
be released in 2017, it also holds provisions that if the files could
potentially compromise national security upon release, they can remain
classified ...
of course.
4. Did Tony die in The Sopranos finale?
In
the most infamous last scene in TV, Tony Soprano eats onion rings to
“Don’t Stop Believin’” in a sketchy New Jersey diner, then...nothing.
It cut to black. Outrage and conspiracy theories abounded! Show creator
David Chase was mostly mum on it until an April 2015 Directors Guild of
America interview: “I never considered the black a shot. I just
thought that what we see is black. The biggest feeling I was going for
... was don’t stop believing. Life is short. Either it ends here for
Tony or some other time. But in spite of that, it’s really worth it.”
In other words: You’ll never know.
Two police officers in Richmond, Virginia, are recovering after being
hit on the head with a frying pan while responding to a call at around
1am on Friday.
A police source says that a suspect assaulted the officers with the
frying pan at an apartment complex.
