It’s Friday, and about noon I’ll head to the American Humanist Association meeting downtown. That means that posting will be light here until Monday, and then on Wednesday I go to Boston for a week or so. Like Maru, I do my best.
On May 27, 1703, Peter the Great founded the city of St. Petersburg (named Petrograd by the Bolsheviks and now restored with its original name). Also on this day, but in 1937, the Golden Gate Bridge opened in California, linking San Francisco and the Marin Headlands.
Those born on this day include Julia Ward How (1819), composer of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” and, in 1907, biologist, environmentalists and writer Rachel Carson. On May 27, 1923, Henry Kissinger was born: the old warmonger and Nobel Laureate for Peace (!) is 93 today.
Notables who died on this day include John Calvin (1564), Robert Koch (1910; the Father of Microbiology and discoverer of the organisms causing tuberculosis, anthrax, and cholera), and Jawaharlal Nehru (1964), a great secularist and one of the architects of modern India. Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is chewing out Andrzej for not meeting her needs. Sometimes she’s a bit of a jerk!
Hili: Can we stop working and go for a walk?M: I just have to finish this paragraph.Hili: Your life is divided into paragraphs.
Hili: Czy możemy przestać pracować i pójść na spacer?
Małgorzata: Muszę dokończyć ten akapit.
Hili: Wasze życie jest podzielone na akapity.
Lagniappe: here’s Gus in a photo called “Chat Eau”. He’s drinking from the backyard pond but, curiously, ignores the goldfish in there
Wasn’t that Leningrad?
The Bolsheviks named the city Petrograd after taking power in 1917/1918. It was renamed Leningrad after the death of Lenin 1n 1924 and remained so until the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991.
FWIW, Nicholas II changed the name to Petrograd in 1914 because he didn’t like the German influence on the original name. The Bolshevik revolution happened in 1917 and they later changed it to Leningrad, as you said.
It was Petrograd first and then Leningrad, and then changed back to St. Petersburg.
Purported interview in the 1980’s:
Q: Where were you born?
A: St. Petersburg.
Q: Where did you grow up?
A: Petrograd.
Q: Where do you live now?
A: Leningrad.
Q: Where would you like to live?
A: St. Petersburg.
First time I have ever seen Polish and English be identical.
And here I thought I’d suddenly become bi-lingual.
Fixed, thanks.
Re Kissinger’s Nobel Prize: at least Lê Đức Thọ had the good taste (and good conscience) to decline his half of the Peace Prize, on the ground that no peace had been established (only the opportunity for Nixon to slither out of SE Asia ahead of the NVA’s ultimate victory).
Maru reminded me of a slightly amusing bit of science news frpom yesterday. His playmate/not playmate Schrödinger’s cat has gotten two boxes to play in. Or do we have two cats?
“Doubling down on Schrödinger’s cat”
“A team of Yale scientists created a more exotic type of Schrödinger’s cat-like state that has been proposed for experiments for more than 20 years. This cat lives or dies in two boxes at once, which is a marriage of the idea of Schrödinger’s cat and another central concept of quantum physics: entanglement.”
“”This cat is big and smart. It doesn’t stay in one box because the quantum state is shared between the two cavities and cannot be described separately,” said Chen Wang, a postdoctoral associate at Yale and first author of a study in the journal Science, describing the research. “One can also take an alternative view, where we have two small and simple Schrodinger’s cats, one in each box, that are entangled.””
[ https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/05/160526152031.htm ]
So now we not only don’t know if the cat is dead or alive, we don’t know if it is one or two cats in the boxes.
(The result may have applications to error correction for extending quantum computing into something that may be practically useful.)
Entangled cats? There’s got to be a ball of wool somewhere.
1. Julia Ward Howe.
2. “…the old warmonger and Nobel Laureate for Peace (!) is 93 today.”
Only the good die young.
3. “Hili is chewing out Andrzej…”
Where Andrzej = Malgorzata…
Idyllic Gus pic. 🙂