The Monty Python reunion: 10 things you didn't know by Paul Kendall
Article includes images and the story that in
1975, the comedy troupe sued ABC for airing a show which cut out all the
"rude bits" and rendered it unfunny.
In 2005, the troupe accused politician Chris Christie of using one of
their sketches in a campaign advertisement without permission. Within an hour, Christie took down the film. The Telegraph
Nov. 22, 2013
In today's world, the most widely used
numeral system is decimal (base 10), a system that probably originated because
it made it easy for humans to count using their fingers. The civilizations that first divided the day
into smaller parts, however, used different numeral systems, specifically
duodecimal (base 12) and sexagesimal (base 60).
Thanks to documented evidence of the Egyptians' use of sundials, most
historians credit them with being the first civilization to divide the day into
smaller parts. The first sundials were
simply stakes placed in the ground that indicated time by the length and
direction of the resulting shadow. As
early as 1500 B.C., the Egyptians had developed a more advanced sundial. A T-shaped bar placed in the ground, this
instrument was calibrated to divide the interval between sunrise and sunset
into 12 parts. This division reflected
Egypt's use of the duodecimal system--the importance of the number 12 is
typically attributed either to the fact that it equals the number of lunar
cycles in a year or the number of finger joints on each hand (three in each of
the four fingers, excluding the thumb), making it possible to count to 12 with
the thumb. The next-generation sundial
likely formed the first representation of what we now call the hour. Although the hours within a given day were
approximately equal, their lengths varied during the year, with summer hours
being much longer than winter hours. Once
both the light and dark hours were divided into 12 parts, the concept of a
24-hour day was in place. The concept of
fixed-length hours, however, did not originate until the Hellenistic period,
when Greek astronomers began using such a system for their theoretical
calculations. Hipparchus, whose work
primarily took place between 147 and 127 B.C., proposed dividing the day into
24 equinoctial hours, based on the 12 hours of daylight and 12 hours of
darkness observed on equinox days. Despite
this suggestion, laypeople continued to use seasonally varying hours for many
centuries. (Hours of fixed length became
commonplace only after mechanical clocks first appeared in Europe during the
14th century.) Hipparchus and other Greek astronomers employed astronomical techniques
that were previously developed by the Babylonians, who resided in Mesopotamia. The Babylonians made astronomical calculations
in the sexagesimal (base 60) system they inherited from the Sumerians, who
developed it around 2000 B.C. Although
it is unknown why 60 was chosen, it is notably convenient for expressing
fractions, since 60 is the smallest number divisible by the first six counting
numbers as well as by 10, 12, 15, 20 and 30. Although it is no longer used for general
computation, the sexagesimal system is still used to measure angles, geographic
coordinates and time. In fact, both the
circular face of a clock and the sphere of a globe owe their divisions to a
4,000-year-old numeric system of the Babylonians. The Greek astronomer Eratosthenes (who lived
circa 276 to 194 B.C.) used a sexagesimal system to divide a circle into 60
parts in order to devise an early geographic system of latitude, with the
horizontal lines running through well-known places on the earth at the time. A century later, Hipparchus normalized the
lines of latitude, making them parallel and obedient to the earth's geometry. He also devised a system of longitude lines
that encompassed 360 degrees and that ran north to south, from pole to
pole. Michael A. Lombardi http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=experts-time-division-days-hours-minutes
Salubrious comes from L. salus,
health. Lugubrious comes from L. lugubris, mournfulness. The suffix involved is –ious. It came through the French suffix –ieux,
which came from the Latin –iousus, full of or characterized by. http://verbmall.blogspot.com/2012/08/salubrious-lugubrious.html
Spacious and harmonius are included in a list of
132 words ending in ious at http://www.learnthat.org/word_lists/view/1324.
The myth and magic
behind that old book smell The smell of old books is something that people around the
world have found comforting and beautiful for centuries. I'll be the first to admit that there really
is something special about the smell of a library, it calms me. Maha's blog, ReAuthored Thanks, Paul.
“Lignin,
the stuff that prevents all trees from adopting the weeping habit, is a polymer
made up of units that are closely related to vanillin. When
made into paper and stored for years, it breaks down and smells good. Which is how divine providence has arranged
for secondhand bookstores to smell like good quality vanilla absolute,
subliminally stoking a hunger for knowledge in all of us." —From Luca
Turin and Tania Sanchez’s Perfumes:
the guide http://www.reauthored.com/blogs/news/6567465-the-myth-and-magic-behind-that-old-book-smell
How to smell like a used bookstore
Esteemed children’s book editor, publisher, and author Charlotte Zolotow, whose written works are lauded for
their warmth and their realistic portrayals of childhood emotion, died Nov. 19, 2013 at her home in Hastings-on-Hudson,
N.Y. She was 98. Zolotow was born Charlotte Shapiro in
Norfolk, Va., in 1915. As a shy and
awkward child whose family frequently moved, she has said that she found
writing easier than talking. She won her
first award for essay writing in the third grade, and seemed to have found a
lifelong calling. In the early 1930s, she
attended the University of Wisconsin-Madison on a writing scholarship, and met fellow student and aspiring writer Maurice
Zolotow. The couple married in 1938 and
settled in New York City where they had two children, son Stephen (Zee) and
daughter Ellen , who later changed her name to Crescent Dragonwagon and is also
an author. With children’s book editor
Ursula Nordstrom’s encouragement, Zolotow wrote her first picture book, The Park Book, illustrated by H.A. Rey, in 1944. She went on to create more than 90 titles for
children, including Mr. Rabbit and the Lovely Present, illustrated by Maurice Sendak, which was named a
Caldecott Honor Book in 1963; and William’s Doll, a 1972 book considered controversial because
it features a boy who wants a doll.
Read more at http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/childrens/childrens-industry-news/article/60082-children-s-author-and-editor-charlotte-zolotow-dies-at-98.html
An advertisement placed in The Seattle Times on Nov. 20, 2013 by a group hoping to
encourage Washington state to keep up its fight to secure the coveted work on
the new Boeing
777 includes a notable miscue. At the
top of the full-page ad, under the all-caps text "The Future of
Washington," is pictured not a Boeing
jet, but rather an A320 from archrival Airbus.
The ad, which prominently displays the logo of the Washington Aerospace
Partnership, a coalition of business, labor and
government groups championing the industry, urges state lawmakers to pass a
large-scale roads-and-transit tax package that Boeing executives have said
would make the state a more desirable venue for future projects. http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/11/21/us-usa-boeing-airbus-idUSBRE9AK03Q20131121
A computer program called the Never Ending
Image Learner (NEIL) is running 24 hours a day at Carnegie Mellon University,
searching the Web for images, doing its best to understand them on its own and,
as it builds a growing visual database, gathering common sense on a massive
scale. NEIL leverages recent advances in
computer vision that enable computer programs to identify and label objects in
images, to characterize scenes and to recognize attributes, such as colors,
lighting and materials, all with a minimum of human supervision. In turn, the data it generates will further
enhance the ability of computers to understand the visual world. But NEIL also makes associations between
these things to obtain common sense information that people just seem to know
without ever saying — that cars often are found on roads, that buildings tend
to be vertical and that ducks look sort of like geese. Based on text references, it might seem that
the color associated with sheep is black, but people — and NEIL — nevertheless
know that sheep typically are white. "Images
are the best way to learn visual properties," said Abhinav Gupta,
assistant research professor in Carnegie Mellon's Robotics Institute. "Images also include a lot of common
sense information about the world. People learn this by themselves and, with
NEIL, we hope that computers will do so as well." A computer cluster has been running the NEIL
program since late July and already has analyzed three million images,
identifying 1,500 types of objects in half a million images and 1,200 types of
scenes in hundreds of thousands of images. It has connected the dots to learn 2,500 associations
from thousands of instances. The public can now view NEIL's findings at the project website, http://www.neil-kb.com. http://www.sciencecodex.com/carnegie_mellon_computer_searches_web_247_to_analyze_images_and_teach_itself_common_sense-123388
Too often we hold fast to the cliches of our
forebears. We subject all facts to a
prefabricated set of interpretations. We
enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought. Yale
University Commencement (June 11, 1962) John Fitzgerald Kennedy http://millercenter.org/president/speeches/detail/3370
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