Archive for March 2009
Actually, that’s not a new ring around Saturn; there’s a hair on the lens…
As the BBC has reported, German police have been searching for more than 15 years for a violent, erratic– and remarkably elusive– criminal who left traces of DNA at more than 40 crime scenes, including six murders. From the evidence, police knew the suspect was a woman of Eastern European descent, but nothing more. She became known as the “The Woman Without a Face” and “the Phantom of Heilbronn,” after the city in southern Germany where she allegedly killed a policewoman, and a $400,000 reward was posted for her capture.
But over time, some things didn’t add up. The variety of crimes, from execution-style shootings to petty thefts from garden sheds, defied profiling. A sketch drawn with the help of a witness at one scene looked distinctly masculine. Evidence that had shown traces of her DNA in one test showed none in another.
Now suspicion has shifted: authorities think they know where they’ll find their suspect: She’ll be working at one of the factories that make the cotton swabs that police use to gather DNA samples– a woman whose unknowing contamination during the manufacturing process turned her into the most hunted criminal in Germany. Police are now testing thousands of swabs and gathering DNA samples from workers. “It shouldn’t have happened,” said Ulrich Goll, justice minister for the state of Baden-Wuerttemberg. “The investigators are not to blame. They can’t tell if a cotton bud has DNA sticking to it.” Chagrined law enforcement officers believe they should have fingered their woman soon… But those open murder cases may take a while longer, thanks to the steady stream of red herrings.
(Danke, GMSV)
As we slip on our rubber gloves, we might tip the plumed birthday hat to Rene Descartes, the French philosopher and mathematician who thought and therefore was. He was born on this date in 1596.
Many contemporaries (perhaps most notably, Pascal) rejected his famous conclusion, the dualist separation of mind and body; more (Voltaire, et al.), since. But Descartes’ emphasis on method and analysis, his insistent integration of philosophy and physical science, his adamancy on the importance of consciousness in epistemology, and perhaps most fundamentally, his the questioning of tradition and authority had a transformative– and lasting– effect on Western thought (…though, perhaps, less obviously of late).
“In order to improve the mind, we ought less to learn than to contemplate.”
– Rene Descartes
Collect ’em all!…
From The Fifty Worst Album Covers Ever…
As we organize our record collections, we might recall that it was on this date in 1778, on his return to Paris from Ferney, at a performance of Irene (his last completed play), that Voltaire (aka François-Marie Arouet) was crowned with a laurel wreath.
Holy Holes!…
The Dutch design firm Spranq observed that casual printing was wasteful not only of paper but also of (expensive, ecologically-unfriendly) ink.. so they set out to see how much of a letter– in the end, each letter in the alphabet– one could remove and still retain legibility. The result:
Appealing ideas are often simple: how much of a letter can be removed while maintaining readability? After extensive testing with all kinds of shapes, the best results were achieved using small circles. After lots of late hours (and coffee) this resulted in a font that uses up to 20% less ink. Free to download [for all platforms], free to use.
Click here to see how less can be more.
As we refrain from filling in the holes, we might recall that it was on this date in 1795 that Beethoven, then a 24 year old who still had his hearing, made his debut as a pianist in Vienna… scholars are unclear whether he played his First or Second Piano Concerto. Later that same year he published the first of his compositions to which he assigned an opus number– the piano trios of Opus 1.
Alimentary, My Dear Watson…
The culinary curators at This is Why You’re Fat (“Where dreams become heart attacks”) have collected scores of calorie-laden, fat-laced dishes for the reader’s edification… if not, indeed, delectation. Consider, for example:
The Meatlog
A quarter pound hot dog with cheddar cheese and bacon wrapped in a mixture of beef and sausage.
The Elvis Donut
Peanut butter glazed donut topped with bananas and bacon.
More such delicacies– indeed, enough calories to nourish a small city in Burkina Faso for a couple of months– here.
As we loosen our belts and wonder at too much of a good thing, we might recall that on this date in 1979 the worst accident in the history of the U.S. nuclear power industry began when a pressure valve in the Unit-2 reactor at the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania failed to close.
President Carter leaving Three Mile Island (April 1, 1979)
A metaphor is like a simile…
In a July, 1957 column in The New Yorker, E.B. White reminisced warmly about one of his Cornell English professors, William Strunk, Jr., and about the pamphlet that Strunk had used to guide students’ use of English when White was student there in 1919. An editor at Macmillan, Jack Case, was charmed by the column and persuaded White to revise, expand and update Strunk’s work. (Strunk had died in 1946.)…
And so it was that, fifty years ago next month, in April of 1959, Macmillan published the first edition of that invaluable guide to plain and elegant English, The Elements of Style… or as readers surely know it, “Strunk and White.”
As we wrestle nouns and verbs into agreement, we might thank the Lord for Donald O’Connor, and seriously to consider his sage advice– “be a clown!”– as it was on this date in 1952 that Singin’ in the Rain was released.
You must be logged in to post a comment.