It’s Hump Day: Wednesday, September 27, 2017, and we’re nearly into October. My beloved mallard Honey hasn’t shown up for two days, and I wonder if somewhere there’s another duck-struck sucker feeding her in another pond. It’s National Chocolate Milk Day, and I have to admit that that’s the kind of milk I wanted as a kid. Does anybody remember those chocolate-filled straws you could use to suck up regular milk, turning it chocolatey?
It’s Google’s official birthday, too, but that seems to be a made-up date. There’s an animated spinner, and when you stop it, you get to play one of the old Google games, but on full screen. The Independent lists them, and tells you how to bypass the spinner and go to a game you want. Click on the screenshot to go to the game:
As I noted two days ago, on September 25 of 1066, the Brits defeated the Vikings at the Battle of Stamford Bridge. Well, two days later in the same year, William the Conquerer and his forces set sail from France on their way to conquer England. It was a rough year for the natives of Britain. On this day in 1822, Jean-François Champollion announced that he’d at last deciphered the Rosetta Stone (do you remember the three languages in which it’s written)? On this day in the “miracle year” of 1905 for Einstein and physics, der treue Albert published his paper “Does the Inertia of a Body Depend Upon Its Energy Content?” in Annalen der Physik. That paper contained everybody’s favorite equation, E=mc².
The paper is here (it’s only three pages), and I couldn’t find the equation in that form, but I believe it’s on the page below in the fourth paragraph from the bottom: “Gibt ein Körper die Energie L in Form von Strahlung ab, so verkleinert sich seine Masse um L/V².”
My rough German translates this as “If a body gives off the energy L in the form of radiation, then its mass will be reduced by L/V²”. Rearranging, if mass is M, then the energy accompanying that loss of mass, where I use “m” to stand for mass, is L = mV². Clearly Einstein was using “V” instead of “c” to stand for the speed of light, and, as he says, energy is “L.” If you use “E” and “c”, then E = mc². (I probably screwed up something here, but this is the best I can do at 6:00 a.m.)
On this day in 1908, Henry Ford turned out the very first Ford Model T at the Piquette Avenue Plant in Detroit. Finally, on this day in 1962, Rachel Carson’s seminal book Silent Spring was published, launching “the environmental movement” and eventually leading to the creation of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
Notables born on September 27 include Samuel Adams (1722; his beer is ok, but Sam Smith’s is better), Sam Ervin (1896), Albert Ellis (1913), Meat Loaf (1947), and Avril Lavigne (1984). Those who died on this day include Edgar Degas (1917), Engelbert Humperdinck (1921; not the pop singer!), Babe Didrikson Zaharias (1956), Clara Bow (1965) and Donald O’Connor (2003). Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is throwing caution to the winds, and starting her annual Winter Thickening:
Hili: This is excellent cream.A: Aren’t you afraid of gaining weight?Hili: Tasty things are not fattening.
Hili: To doskonała śmietanka.
Ja: A nie obawiasz się nadwagi?
Hili: Dobre rzeczy nie tuczą.
Here’s a tw**t from Matthew Cobb. Don’t know what a fossa is? Go here.
Feisty & furry, these fossa #pups know how to have fun.🐾 #FeistAndFurrious pic.twitter.com/EjCNU4pD61
— San Diego Zoo (@sandiegozoo) September 26, 2017
I’ve stolen three tweets from Heather Hastie, but in return I’ll plug her post that has an excellent Twitter analysis of the Saudi’s lifting their ban on women driving. First, though, look at these adorable wild sand cat kittens (Felis margarita):
And now for something completely different: Sand cats! These kittens were recently spotted in the Moroccan Sahara: https://t.co/SL2PFjOqcK pic.twitter.com/wByMeI5xp5
— PantheraCats (@PantheraCats) September 25, 2017
Cats with eyebrows, split faces, and hearts!
https://twitter.com/EmrgencyKittens/status/912844762801217536
And a parrot dancing to the Beach Boys. I wonder if the music was put in later:
There is a pair of Cooper’s hawks nesting near Harper Library on the University of Chicago campus.
https://mag.uchicago.edu/university-news/birds-and-prey
This is less than two blocks from PCC(e)’s office. I think Honey is too big for them so she should be safe. Pigeons on the other hand …
Must say we have water (ponds) around our residential area and plenty of ducks and geese. Sure enough I see an eagle on the ground the other day with what looked like a duck diner. Did not think an eagle would be so bold in such an area but they are domesticating along with the ducks and geese. Adaptation or starve.
This is the first day in a week that I’ve been able to look at the Hili dialogue before late afternoon. And I love chocolate milk still, but developed lactose intolerance (don’t tell the SJWs) about six years ago. Whenever I am in the dairy aisle, I look longingly at those little bottle of chocolate milk.
A Brit writes. William the Conquerer, a Norman – frog speaking Vikings – sailed from his homeland in Normandy, to take the throne of England he believed to be rightfully his. France never!
Normandy is in France geographically, even if it wasn’t politically at the time of the Norman Conquest.
Go to the top of the class.
Its probably also anachronistic to call Harold Godwinson and his army “Brits”, which at that time still meant “Welsh”.
They might have called themselves English, though we now tend to call them Anglo-Saxon or Anglo-Danish.
That fluorescent yellow dancing cockatoo looks the same color as those marshmallow easter chicks we used to get as kids, and it looks just as artificial. Could some horrible person have dyed that cockatoo? Maybe there’s a wild species that color, I don’t really know. Or maybe it has been bred to look like that. Hope so.
Oops, I wrote that before I played the video. I see it is not a cockatoo and not dyed. The green on the wings is a mix of yellow and structural blue. The structural blue is missing on most of the bird, could be bred for that or could be some species I don’t know. Not dyed. What a relief!
Hell, the Vikings’ve been defeated by the Raiders, the Steelers, the Chiefs, and everybody else ever to face them in the Super Bowl, so why not the Brits? (Sorry, Minnesota fans, the Donald’s got me thinking about the NFL.)
The Donald got you thinking? I did not know that was possible.
I feel like I’ve been thinking about the Donald far too much for far too long. This country really isn’t big enough for the both of us. He’s gotta go.
Yes, I know the gears of justice grind terribly slow but Mueller and company need to speed this thing up. I want to see this guy, along with others, in the crowbar hotel, not Trump tower.
I believe graybar hotel is the correct expression, but I share your sentiment.
I’m guessing that the parrot was actually dancing to the music, as opposed to having the music dubbed in afterwards. Why do I think that? Because the bird’s timing seems to be accurate; it’s synched to the music. Back when I published my book on music (Beethoven’s Anvil, Basic Books, 2001) it was widely believed that humans were the only animals that could synchronize precisely. That’s now known not to be the case. There are any number of YouTube videos of synchronized birds. I believe that Ani Patel (Tufts, formerly the Neurosciences Institute in San Diego) has published on this.
He has:
https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=XidyyJkAAAAJ&hl=en&oi=ao
By my count this bird takes 19 steps to 18 beats of music, so it’s perhaps not as accurate as you think. When I watch it with the sound on, and then again with the sound muted, I perceive a slightly faster tempo on the second viewing.
I do know German, but it looks like ‘Masse un L/V^2’ is the mass-energy equivalence.
In introductory relativistic quantum mechanics this relationship can be developed in expansion form utilizing the Lorentz frame.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass–energy_equivalence#Low_speed_expansion
OMG sandcat kittens. OMG. I laughed out loud they were so cute.
The e=mc2 paper was in November 1905. “On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies,” received on June 30 and published September 26, and which reconciled Maxwell’s equations for electricity and magnetism with the laws of mechanics by introducing major changes to mechanics close to the speed of light. This later became known as Einstein’s special theory of relativity. –EDN magazine
Stephen Colbert once asked Neil DeGrasse Tyson where he saw beauty in science and Tyson answered right off that E=mc2 is the most beautiful thing in science. On this same equation, Graham Farmelo wrote that “Great equations share with the finest poetry an extraordinary power, and it was featured on BBC4s program on “beautiful equations”
E=mc^2 is everyone’s favorite physics equation.
But probably the favorite equation in pure math is e^(π*i) + 1 = 0.
Wikipedia reports ‘Stanford University mathematics professor Keith Devlin has said, “like a Shakespearean sonnet that captures the very essence of love, or a painting that brings out the beauty of the human form that is far more than just skin deep, Euler’s equation reaches down into the very depths of existence”.’
Euler’s equation *almost* makes me tempted by mathematical Platonism. 😉
Samuel Smith. One of my top three favorite beers.
All of them delicious.
Man, after this I’ll never forget the (admittedly accidental) connection between Einstein and Carson.
Funnily enough, as a school kid I learned about Silent Spring, when Nero Wolfe was reading it in a Rex Stout novel.
Engelbert Humperdinck (not the pop music idol) is probably is probably best known for his opera “Hansel and Gretel”.