Sequential Knowledge

When I was younger, my parents sent my brother and me to summer camps. Save for the first time, it was always the same one. It made for good times and good memories, I guess... most of the time. Anyway, you know how these things have many little cabins? The funny thing is that we always ended up in cabin #16. I'm not sure if someone was doing it on purpose but for all the four or five summer months I spent there, I didn't get to sleep in any other cabin than that one. It was the worst one too. It was half-buried into the earth on one side, with a window exactly there. It was hell to clean it and we had to do so every morning. This has led me to loosely associate the number 16 with fatalism.

Now, you may wonder: "What kind of one-of-a-kind one-hour activity relates with someone's experiences from summer camps? Well, I'm sorry to disappoint but it was just a trap to make the reader wonder that. For this day's novelty, I did reading again. I picked up volume 16 from the home encyclopaedia and just started reading it. I read about "kamikaze", furnaces, the Camorra, bells, bell towers, a handful of important historical and/or mythological figures and an indeterminate number of small villages. As always, keeping my concentration was half the work I had to do; only now am I realising how bad this thing is.

So, among other things, I learned that:

• Kamikazes were named that because the same name was used before for a wind that created problems for the Mongolian fleet when it tried to attack Japan.
• There are way more types of furnaces than I thought there were.
• Bell towers took their shape from watchtowers.
  
• Greece is full of little villages that just need to have an entry in an encyclopaedia.
• Tommaso Campanella lived an interesting but tough life (and I really liked him for some reason).