Pape’ete Tahiti April 2019
28 days on the Star Princess. April 2019. Hawaii, Kauai, Oahu, Maui, Samoa, Tahiti, Mo’orea, Bora Bora. Bucket list. Check.
Classic Comb-over
Completed 1000 piece jigsaw puzzle
One my fav cartoons ever.
How do I turn off retweets to my Twitter timeline?
Step by step”
- Go to your Twitter settings.
- Choose “Muted words” (direct link)
- Click “Add”
- Add “RT @” as a phrase.
- Add “Retweeted” as a phrase.
- Uncheck “Notifications” so you know when someone retweets something that you have Tweeted. Or not.
- Click “Add” to save it.
The Eclipse That Made Einstein Famous
Before 1919, cosmology was as subjective as art history. A solar eclipse and a patent clerk’s equations (Albert Einstein) changed everything.
The Eddington experiment was an observational test of General Relativity, organized by the British astronomers Frank Watson Dyson and Arthur Stanley Eddington in 1919. The observations were of the total solar eclipse of 29 May 1919 and were carried out by two expeditions, one to the West African island of Príncipe, and the other to the Brazilian town of Sobral. The aim of the expeditions was to measure the gravitational deflection of starlight passing near the Sun. The value of this deflection had been predicted by Albert Einstein in a 1911 paper and was one of the tests proposed for his 1915 theory of General Relativity. Following the return of the expeditions, the results were presented by Eddington to the Royal Society of London, and, after some deliberation, were accepted. Widespread newspaper coverage of the results led to worldwide fame for Einstein and his theories.
I carry within me these shards and fragments of memories
“I carry within me these shards and fragments of memories, some of which I would like to forget. These pieces of a life are finally incomprehensible. We are not the sum of events, although those on the outside sometimes use events to define us. We are not our titles or positions or accomplishments. We are distinct from these. We puzzle over ourselves as time, with its ruthless and swift gait, sweeps our lives into the past. The lives that went before mine, the lives that will come after mine, seem sometimes to merge, bound together by common rituals, the physical and spiritual wanderings that come with human existence and the strangeness of it all.”
— Chris Hedges, Losing Moses on the Freeway
Martin Gardner: Mathematical Games : A Cipher that Defeated Poe
Peter Bakke : I solved this cipher in 1987.
“Ge Jeasgdxv,
Zij gl mw, laam. xzy zmlwhfzek
ejlvdxw kwke tx lbr atgh lbmx aanu
bai Vsmukkss pwn vlwk agh gnumk
wdlnzweg jnbxw oaeg enwb zwmgy
mo mlw wnbx mw al pnfdcfpkh wzkex
hssf xkiyahul. Mk num yexdm wbxy
sbc hv wyx Phwkgnamcuk?”
In 1839, in a regular column Edgar Allan Poe contributed to a Philadelphia periodical, Alexander’s Weekly Messenger, Poe challenged readers to send him {cryptograms (monoalphabetic substitution ciphers), asserting that he would solve them all “forthwith.” One G. W. Kulp submitted a ciphertext in longhand. It was printed as shown above in the issue of February 26, 1840. Poe “proved ” in a subsequent column that the cipher as a hoax—”a jargon of random characters having no meaning whatsoever.” In 1975 Brian J.Winkel, a mathematician at Albion College, and Mark Lyster, a chemistry major in Winkel’s cryptology class, cracked Kulp’s cipher. It is not a simple substitution — Poe was right — but neither is it nonsense. Poe can hardly be blamed for his opinion. In addition to a major error by Kulp there are 15 minor errors, probably printer’s mistakes in reading the longhand. Winkel is an editor of a new quarterly, Cryptologia, available from Albion College, Albion, Mich. 49224, at $16 per year. The magazine stresses the mathematical and computational aspects of cryptology. The first issue (January, 1977) tells the story of Kulp’s cipher and gives it as a challenge to readers. So far only three readers have broken it.
Louis Pasteur: Describing in simple detail one of the great discoveries (and experiments) of mankind
“Here is an infusion of organic matter, as limpid as distilled water, and extremely alterable. It has been prepared to-day. To-morrow it will contain animalculae, little infusories, or flakes of mouldiness. I place a portion of that infusion into a flask with a long neck, like this one. Suppose I boil the liquid and leave it to cool. After a few days, mouldiness or animalculae will develop in the liquid. By boiling, I destroyed any germs contained in the liquid or against the glass ; but that infusion being again in contact with air, it becomes altered, as all infusions do. Now suppose I repeat this experiment, but that, before boiling the liquid, I draw (by means of an enameller’s lamp) the neck of the flask into a point, leaving however, its extremity open. This being done, I boil the liquid in the flask, and leave it to cool. Now the liquid of this second flask will remain pure not only two days, a month, a year, but three or four years — for the experiment I am telling you about is already four years old, and the liquid remains as limpid as distilled water. What difference is there, then, between those two vases ? They contain the same liquid, they both contain air, both are open ! Why does one decay and the other remain pure? The only difference between them is this : in the first case, the dusts suspended in air and their germs can fall into the neck of the flask and arrive into contact with the liquid, where they find appropriate food and develop; thence microscopic beings. In the second flask, on the contrary, it is impossible, or at least extremely difficult, unless air is violently shaken, that dusts suspended in air should enter the vase; they fall on its curved neck. When air goes in and out of the vase through diffusions or variations of temperature, the latter never being sudden, the air comes in slowly enough to drop the dusts and germs that it carries at the opening of the neck or in the first curves. This experiment is full of instruction ; for this must be noted, that everything in air save its dusts can easily enter the vase and come into contact with the liquid. Imagine what you choose in the air — electricity, magnetism, ozone, unknown forces even, all can reach the infusion. Only one thing cannot enter easily, and that is dust, suspended in air. And the proof of this is that if I shake the vase violently two or three times, in a few days it contains animalculae or mouldiness. Why? because air has come in violently enough to carry dust with it. And, therefore, gentlemen, I could point to that liquid and say to you, I have taken my drop of water from the immensity of creation, and I have taken it full of the elements appropriated to the development of inferior beings. And I wait, I watch, I question it, begging it to recommence for me the beautiful spectacle of the first creation. But it is dumb, dumb since these experiments were begun several years ago; it is dumb because I have kept it from the only thing man cannot produce, from the germs which float in the air, from Life, for Life is a germ and a germ is Life. Never will the doctrine of spontaneous generation recover from the mortal blow of this simple experiment.”