Hey y’all.

Two quick Wikipedia articles today because I happened across both of them in search of…something very different, haha.

FIRST UP: Cyanometer

It’s an “instrument for measuring “blueness” and was initially developed to measure the color intensity of blue in the sky.

Why does it exist?

Because humans are weird little creatures who like to quantify everything.

Because one of its creators, Horace-Benedict de Saussure, believed that the color of the sky was dependent on the amount of particles suspended in the atmosphere, and differing shades of blue corresponded to different approximate amounts of particles.

SECOND: Contronym

A contronym is a word that has two opposite meanings, such as clip (which can mean “attach” or “cut off”), cleave (“to cling” or “to split apart”), or buckle (“to fasten” or “to break”). There are, of course, a fair number of English contronyms, but they show up in other languages, too.

END!