What have you learned from doing quizzes today?

I found out that a vixen is a female fox. I always thought it was a deer!

No, it was always a female fox, at least since I was taught that in school 60 years ago. A doe is a female dear, it says so in the Sound of Music, My Favourite Things.

I think 'The Night Before Christmas' made me think that because it's the name of one of the reindeer.

Today I found out that salamanders breathe through their skin.

What a wonderful thing is FT! Welcome Acrylicink!

Anyone else found something they didn't know before?

Quite a bit, but sometimes it's hard to remember where exactly I saw something. I learned of Benford's law in a question here first, thought it was incredibly interesting/useful, and then forgot his name. I came across the name again while helping a student with a stat question and I'm not forgetting it this time.

I'm pretty sure I learned on FT that in his diary for 4th July George III said "Nothing of importance happened today"... only the other day I learned that wasn't true because George III never kept a diary. It was in fact Louis XVI, who on 4th July 1789 wrote in his diary "rien" - he'd been hunting and caught nothing. So you learn something, unlearn it, then learn something else.

That song would be Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer that you are thinking of...

"You know Dasher and Dancer and Prancer and Vixen
Comet and Cupid and Donner and Blitzen"...

'The Night Before Christmas' is a book which children have read to them on Christmas Eve, quite a tradition in some families.

Magnesium makes chlorophyll green.

It's a poem A Visit from St Nicholas by Clement Clarke Moore, an American professor of Oriental and Greek Literature in New York. It's often called "(Twas) The Night Before Christmas" because of its first line.

The reindeer Rudolph was created as a marketing device in 1939 for Montgomery Ward, an American retailer; the author's brother-in-law turned it into a song Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer and the rest is history.

And Vixen is indeed mentioned in "A Visit from St Nicholas" (or "The Night Before Christmas" as it is often known)

"Now Dasher now Dancer now Prancer and Vixen
On Comet on Cupid on Donner and Blitzen"

That's why it's in the "Rudolph" song - because people already knew those reindeer.

And in Clement Moore's poem, the reindeer's name is actually "Donder." It wasn't until the song that the name somehow turned into Donner.

That poem is one of the most parodied in the English language - there's even a list of 1000 parodies, published in 2007, with links to the relevant verses. Sadly this was published before the Revenge of the Llamas published their own version in 2012.