Things you have just found out

The adverb "well" is related to "will".

I was typing something and did something wrong which led to a discovery of the utmost importance: Ctrl + . is a shortcut for ...

I assumed that was a joke, because reversing a familiar saying for comic effect seemed too modern for Thomas More, or at least too unserious for him. Then I wondered how old the saying was, so I looked it up, and discovered More was the first person to use it in English, at least as far as we know. Which either Terry knew, or is one hell of a coincidence.

Which is more than the rest of us knew, I suspect. Until now.

LD let you search for 'quote' on its own, and didn't tell you it was too short or too common?

I didn't really know how the greenhouse effect worked. I knew it had something to do with absorption somehow, but now I realize I didn't know how it fit into the bigger picture. For one thing, I thought greenhouse gases absorbed sunlight (i.e. radiation of certain wavelengths coming directly from the sun), but nope, they absorb some of the infrared that Earth's surface radiates. Like all bodies that are heated up, the Earth tries to get back to thermal equilibrium by radiating some of the heat in the form of infrared radiation back into space; what causes global warming is that since greenhouse gases absorb some of that infrared light, Earth loses some of its capacity to evacuate the heat.

It's not just that greenhouse gases absorb heat and function as some sort of heater or hot watter bottle: it's that they prevent the heat from being radiated back into space, and that the only way for Earth to get back to equilibrium (i.e. to radiate as much energy as it receives from the sun, 240 W/m² on average) is to warm up, because hotter bodies radiate more energy than cooler ones. Global warming is about Earth trying to clear its energical debt: what goes out must equal what went it, and the only variable of adjustment is its temperature.

(thankfully the universe isn't greedy: zero interest-rate!)