It’s Tuesday, the last day of April (the 30th), 2019. It’s National Raisin Day, and perhaps I’ll have some in a steaming bowl of oatmeal. It’s also Honesty Day in the U.S., a day whose existence implies that, by and large, Americans are dishonest. It’s also International Jazz Day (a UNESCO holiday). In honor of that, let’s have some international jazz. How about the great Django Reinhardt, who played spectacular jazz guitar using only two fingers (his third and fourth fingers were injured in a fire)? His partner on violin, Stéphan Grappelli, also swings.
It was on April 30, 1492, that Christopher Columbus got his commission of exploration from Spain, and the rest is history (and infamy). On this day in 1789, George Washington was inaugurated as the first President of the United States, taking the oath of office on the balcony of Federal Hall in New York City. On this day in 1803, the U.S. bought the Louisiana Territory from France for $15 million, which more than doubled the size of our country. The price worked out to be just 3 cents per acre.
On April 30, 1897, J. J. Thomson of the Cavendish Laboratory at the University of Cambridge announced, at a lecture at London’s Royal Institution, that he had discovered the electron. Exactly eight years later, Albert Einstein finally finished his Ph.D. thesis at the University of Zurich. In 1927, the first two celebrities so honored left their footprints in cement at Hollywood’s Grauman Chinese Theater. Can you recognize them?
And on this day in 1938, according to Wikipedia, “The animated cartoon short Porky’s Hare Hunt debuts in movie theaters, introducing Happy Rabbit, an early version of Bugs Bunny).” Here’s the cartoon. Bugs, with long ears and face, hasn’t yet become neotenized, according to Stephen Jay Gould’s theory for Mickey Mouse.
It was on April 30, 1945, that Evan Braun and Adolf Hitler committed suicide in the Führerbunker as the Russians closed in, having raised the Soviet Victory Flag over the Reichstag:
On this day in 1966, again according to Wikipedia, “The Church of Satan is formed in The Black House, San Francisco.”
Finally, on April 30, 2008, the Russians confirmed that two skeletons exhumed near Yekaterinburg, Russia, were those of Tsarevitch Alexei and his sister Anastasia, two of the Tsar’s children who were murdered, along with the family and its retainers, by the Bolsheviks. Here are the family’s graves in the wall of Peter and Paul Cathedral in St. Petersburg; I took this in July of 2011, and you can see Alexei’s plaque on the left on the wall and Anastasia’s on the right, facing you:
Notables born on this day include Carl Friedrich Gauss (1777), Alice B. Toklas (1877), Johnny Horton (1925), Bobby Vee (1943), Mimi Fariña and Annie Dillard (1945), Wonder Mike (1957), and Gal Gadot (1985).
Those who died on April 29 include Robert FitzRoy (1865; Beagle commander), A. E. Houseman (1865), Édouard Manet (1883), A. E. Housman (1936), Muddy Waters (1983), and Harry Kroto (2016, Nobel Laureate).
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili ponders the transience of life;
A: What are you thinking about?Hili: About fading of beauty.
Ja: Nad czym się zastanawiasz?
Hili: Nad przemijaniem piękna.
Diana MacPherson put this great photo up on Facebook:
A tweet from reader Dom:
Video clips captured by camera traps, like the one seen here, give us a window into the snow leopard's world. A camera trap situated in the high mountains of Northwestern China captured stunning footage of a female snow leopard and her two cubs roaming through the snow. pic.twitter.com/kCA4ABvizF
— World Wildlife Fund (@World_Wildlife) April 29, 2019
And another cat, this time a jaguar, taking down a croc. I’ve posted this before, but it’s so amazing that it’s worth seeing again:
https://twitter.com/InterestingSci1/status/1122925764872146947
From reader Nilou, a guy who likes Canada geese and is trying to save one. I hope it was okay in the end.
Just picked up this poorly goose last night & have taken it to the best place I know @wildlifeaid to try fix & get it back into the wild. @wildlifeaid are just extraordinary their dedication and expertise is second to none I can’t thank them enough for ALL they do for wildlife pic.twitter.com/OWFf68AKfE
— Richard Symonds (@richwildart) April 29, 2019
From Heather Hastie, a cat on a hot slate roof. I love its pose.
https://twitter.com/AMAZlNGNATURE/status/1122574214672687104
Speaking of cats on roofs, here’s one from Grania, who loves the photo in the first tweet:
Roof doubles as cat organizer pic.twitter.com/HdjVRsVMWA
— Featured Creature (@ftcreature) April 28, 2019
More from Grania: a sign of the coming Apocalypse:
Watch this pack of robot dogs pull a truck pic.twitter.com/ACptJBmAmR
— TIME (@TIME) April 18, 2019
Don’t know what a Zoetrope is? Read here, but watch the video, too.
https://twitter.com/MichaelGalanin/status/1119243504440553472
From Matthew. First, a kitten rescue—a successful save of Archimedes:
Is this the tiniest kitten EVER? #LittleButFierce 😻😻😻 pic.twitter.com/qVE3ubrxNT
— The Dodo (@dodo) April 29, 2019
These are, of course, Didga and Boomer (a Bengal):
Meet the most doglike cats ever 😺🌟 pic.twitter.com/qkXiof1a36
— The Dodo (@dodo) April 5, 2019
There’s no sound as mournful as a distant train whistle in the night—a whistle like this one:
https://twitter.com/balticthe144/status/1122328384569212934
JJ Thomson, not Thompson (Lord Kelvin was also a Thomson, without the p).
Thomson is generally Scottish in origin
Thompson is generally English in origin.
fixed, thanks.
I wonder if there is a similar geographical separation between Dupond and Dupont in France. Perhaps a french reader can enlighten me.
Just a guess, but I’m gonna go with Douglas Fairbanks and Ruby Keeler leaving their footprints in cement in front of Grauman’s Chinese.
I was going to say Fairbanks and Mary Pickford.
Yeah, after I wrote that, it occurred to me that Pickford (Mrs. Fairbanks) or Lilian Gish would’ve been a better guess.
Doug and Mary were the “King and Queen of Hollywood” during the silent era, and their best films still hold up very well today (“Sparrows” and “My Best Girl” for Mary, “The Iron Mask” and “The Black Pirate” for Doug). Fairbanks could be considered the first action movie star and he remains the best as well—his films depended on stunts and athletic bravado rather than CGI and explosions.
I say Mary Pickford, too.
Sid Grauman?
In honor of Gauss, I offer :
In his classroom as a child, Gauss and his classmates were punished by being ordered to add every number between 1 and 100. While students were barely getting started, Gauss had the answer. How did he do it?
Anyone else know this one? It’s one of my favorites. And no, I have no idea if the story is true.
The story is true as far as I know. It comes up every time anybody wants to talk about Gauss and demonstrate what a genius he was.
The answer is he observed that 1 + 2 + …. 99 + 100 is the same as
1 + 100 + 2 + 99 + 3 + 98 …. + 50 + 51
i.e. (1 + 100) x 100 / 2
and it’s generalisable to adding up all the numbers between 1 and n (aka the triangle numbers)
triangle(n) = n(n + 1) / 2
Yes! I admit, I am a Ron Obvious of sorts, obvs.
The triangle number fact is interesting, didn’t know (obvs.)
You have no idea how many times I had to sit and listen to that story when I was an undergraduate maths student. It seemed that every maths professor was under the impression that they had sole custody of the story.
Despite that, it is a really good illustration of how a little thought and mathematical ability can simplify a task.
Also it came up in an episode of Person of Interest.
The wikipedia article in triangular numbers suggests an Ancient Greek and an even earlier person wrote a formula for it. I’ll have to read it again.
“Carl Friedrich Gauss is said to have found this relationship in his early youth, by multiplying (n/2)
pairs of numbers in the sum by the values of each pair n + 1.[3] However, regardless of the truth of this story, Gauss was not the first to discover this formula, and some find it likely that its origin goes back to the Pythagoreans 5th century BC.[4] The two formulae were described by the Irish monk Dicuil in about 816 in his Computus.[5]”
Source : Wikipedia article in triangular numbers
It looks like if n is odd, there’s an odd number of even terms, and when n is even, there’s an even number of odd terms, explaining the generality? That is, dividing by 2 is never leaving a remainder.
Yes. You are always multiplying n and (n + 1) so you are guaranteed a factor of 2 in numerator.
Supposedly he did it by writing the numbers forwards and backwards
1 2 3 …
100 99 98 …
My source is the wonderful _Journey Through Genius_ by W. Dunham.
Heading to the library to get it
OK, so there’s 100 numbers, evenly progressing, and their average (right in the middle) is going to be 50 1/2. So that’s 50.5 x 100 = 5050.
cr
Oh, I see – in the middle. yes. That’s a clever, intuitive way of getting the answer!… I wonder if it is general…
ONe of the many things I love about Walt Disney World is that they have four steam locomotives there at the Magic Kingdom Railroad. These are real 4-4-0 Americans, unlike the fakes at Disneyland. The one concession to modernity is that they run on oil, not coal. I love being in the Magic Kingdom, and hearing the whistle in the distance (as well as riding them, of course).
So they’re all Baldwins, built for narrow gauge (3 foot) in Mexico (Yucatan).
Two 4-6-0’s, a 4-4-0 and a Mogul, so that’s a nice bit of variety, but they all have the classic American look.
And top marks to Disney for using (and restoring) real steam locomotives (rather than the diesel-motor-in-a-‘steam’-shaped-box favoured by some amusement park railways).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walt_Disney_World_Railroad
Though it is currently (?) closed due to construction of a roller coaster nearby.
cr
Umm, I wouldn’t call the two 4-4-0’s at the Disneyland Railroad ‘fakes’. They’re proper live steam replicas, built 1955. (Disneyland also has a couple of ex-Forney-type 2-4-4’s and a 2-4-0, all built by Baldwin but much modified since.)
If the Magic Kingdom 4-4-0’s are ‘fakes’ then so must be Tornado https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LNER_Peppercorn_Class_A1_60163_Tornado – that idea would cause much surprise (and some indignation) to British main line steam fans who (so far as I can tell) accept Tornado and Duke of Gloucester on an equal footing with preserved locos.
I’d also note that many ‘preserved’ locomotives by now incorporate much new construction and that probably includes the Baldwins at Magic Kingdom. There’s nothing wrong with that, it’s what would have happened to steam locos in regular service in their day.
cr
Umm, I mis-spoke, should read “If the Disneyland 4-4-0’s are ‘fakes’ then… ”
cr
VIDEOS re the 3D printed zoetrope:
It was designed & built by media artist Akinori Goto in 2016 & has won awards.
HOW IT WORKS is not the traditional dozen or so images each in 2D, but ONE rotating 3D doughnut object, printed in a 3D printer as a net, that melds the 2D images into a continuously changing flowing 3D representation. This doughnut is selectively illuminated by a blade of light [‘slicing’ the doughnut] or by as many blades of light as desired. Each slice reveals the continuously cycling 2D image. The artist has arranged his blades of light to rotate independently of the rotating 3D printed net.
HERE IS the artist’s design workflow.
Gonzalo Bergara is a modern guitarist in the tradition of Django Reinhardt.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uz86zdqO5Vw&list=RDsTibsyK7psk&index=2
oh man, what’s with this stuff – I could listen all day, it’s so good!
I heard this Django-style group a while ago, I could listen all day: NPR Field Recordings Django Festival All-Stars https://youtu.be/lZX6QTtyoJs
sorry – the good stuff starts about 0:55
I tried a playlist that was offered on the side https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3WHQ0twHQgo&list=RDlZX6QTtyoJs&index=2
there is some insane playing on this – accordion – it is amazing – apparently I can play this all day
As a youngster I was a great fan of Django Reinhardt and Stéphan Grapelli.
My favourite song was “Blue Drag”, for unknown reasons.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a5ahaXnO_tE
On the same you tube ‘line’ I found a young Yuhudi Menuhin and young David Oistrakh playing Bach’s double violin concerto. All of it before my time, but so brilliant.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DJh6i-t_I1Q
It moves me to tears.
Note, I found the trick to link to YouTube without embedding!
And i haven’t.
You simply leave the http(s):// out. WordPress recovers it automatically.
Thanks.
Those trained cats are great. Much better than the “nonperforming Acro Cats” that WEIT profiled in “Caturday Felids” on Nov. 21, 2015 https://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/?s=acro+cats&searchsubmit=Find+%C2%BB. They’re coming to San Francisco in May and are supposed to skate board, jump through hoops, play the drums, keyboards, cymbals, tambourine, and chimes. Sure hope they’ve improved over what was described in the 2015 profile.
Cat organizer? Isn’t that an oxymoron?
A E Houseman died in 1936.
Re the photo of the Russian soldiers at the Reichstag ,on some photos the second watch on the soldier holding on to the flag waver has been airbrushed out .
Airbrush? Not in 1945 – the offending watch was scratched off the negative with a needle. The version above also shows the actual sky, whereas other versions have been printed with a second negative showing dramatic smoke in the sky sandwiched in the enlarger alongside the first to make the sky more impressive. The things we did before Photoshop!
The photo was staged rather than spontaneous, rather like the famous flag raising photo on Iwo Jima.
The Leica III used by Khaldei sold at auction for HK$1,500,000 in 2014. Many times what the photographer earned from his work. Something odd there.
You are right ,i was dubious about saying it was airbrushed ,didn’t know how they did it .
But the term airbrushed is now used for anything that disappears from view .
Didn’t know that about the camera .Back in the 1990s when the British newspaper “The Independent ” was ,(Independent ) and was still printed ,they ran an article on the photographer in their Sunday magazine .
The cat organizer is also a beautiful illustration of genetics: a female tortoiseshell heterozygote between a black and a ginger homo- or hemizygotes.
For those non-USians unaware: the French territory of Louisiana comprised not just most of the present state of Louisiana, but also Arkansas, half of Oklahoma, nearly all of Kansas, all of Missouri and Iowa, half of Minnesota and half of North Dakota, all of South Dakota, Nebraska, and most of Montana and Wyoming, not to mention half of Colorado.
Note that if the US would sell it back again to France, the Senate might be more equitable. 🙂
I have often wondered what would have happened if France had not sold off their bit of America ,same goes for Russia /Alaska .
Would America and France gone to war over it ?
And what would have happened if Russia had sold Alaska to Canada instead .
Should be Big Boy 4014 being overhauled in Cheyenne? Scheduled to be done and moving out on May 4th.
Here’s another steam locomotive with a not-so-distant whistle going down the freeway.