(Roughly) Daily

Family lawyers said an addiction to text messages or emails has replaced “working late” at the office as the main tell tale signs of an extra-marital affair.

Andrew Newbury, partner at specialist law firm Pannone said: “We see the same features in so many of the marital disputes that we deal with.

“Broader social and business horizons, activities and technologies which may once have seemed fairly exotic are now frequent parts of the many divorces we handle.

“It’s important for couples to realise, however, that they represent how society and tastes are changing. Just because someone takes up salsa dancing or enjoys spending time with their friends doesn’t automatically mean that they’re having an extra-marital fling.

“Sometimes people cannot appreciate the unfortunate implications of what their partner may be up to – while others seem all too ready to suspect when the explanation is perfectly straightforward.”

He also said wives sudden desire for plastic surgery is often quoted as the factor which first tipped off their husbands. However, the firm warned there was no hard and fast link between a desire for breast enlargement and a roving eye.

Previous studies have suggested text messages have also become popular for ending relationships, with a fifth of young people having used it to dump a boyfriend or girlfriend.

from The (Daily) Telegraph (UK).

As we let our fingers do the walking, we might send a birthday text to Alma Maria Mahler-Werfel (nee Schindler), the daughter of Emil Schindler (the landscape painter), step-daughter of Carl Moll (co-founder of the Vienna Secession), wife and/or mistress of and/or muse to composer Gustav Mahler, painter Gustav Klimt, theater director Max Burckhard, composer Alexander von Zemlinsky, architect (and Bauhaus stalwart) Walter Gropius , artist Oskar Kokoschka, composer Alban Berg, and poet and writer Franz Werfel, among others, and a composer in her own right– she was born on this date in 1879.

Alma

RIP, Henri Cartan who has died at age 104. As Science News notes in its obituary:

In the 1930s, a group of young French mathematicians led an uprising that revolutionized mathematics. France had lost most of a generation in the First World War, so the emerging hotshots in mathematics had few elders to look up to. And when these radicals did look up, they didn’t like what they saw. The practice of mathematics at the time was dry, scattered and muddled, they believed, in need of reinvention and invigoration.

So they took up arms: pens and typewriters. Using the nom de plume “Nicolas Bourbaki” (after a dead Napoleonic general), they wrote a series of textbooks laying out mathematics the right way. Though the young mathematicians started out only intending to write a good textbook for analysis (essentially an advanced form of calculus), they ended up creating dozens of volumes which formed a manifesto for a new philosophy of mathematics.

Cartan was the last of the founders of Bourbaki; two of his students won the Fields medal, one won the Nobel Prize in physics and another won the economics Nobel.

Henri Cartan

Read Cartan’s full obituary here.

Each of the last eleven years, Beloit College has published a characterization of its new Freshmen’s mindset.  This year’s entering class, the Class of 2012, was born in 1990, so…

For these students, Sammy Davis Jr., Jim Henson, Ryan White, Stevie Ray Vaughan and Freddy Krueger have always been dead.

1. Harry Potter could be a classmate, playing on their Quidditch team.
2. Since they were in diapers, karaoke machines have been annoying people at parties.
3. They have always been looking for Carmen Sandiego.
4. GPS satellite navigation systems have always been available.
5. Coke and Pepsi have always used recycled plastic bottles.
6. Shampoo and conditioner have always been available in the same bottle.
7. Gas stations have never fixed flats, but most serve cappuccino.
8. Their parents may have dropped them in shock when they heard George Bush announce “tax revenue increases.”
9. Electronic filing of tax returns has always been an option.
10. Girls in head scarves have always been part of the school fashion scene.
11. All have had a relative–or known about a friend’s relative–who died comfortably at home with Hospice.
12. As a precursor to “whatever,” they have recognized that some people “just don’t get it.”
13. Universal Studios has always offered an alternative to Mickey in Orlando.
14. Grandma has always had wheels on her walker.
15. Martha Stewart Living has always been setting the style.
16. Haagen-Dazs ice cream has always come in quarts.
17. Club Med resorts have always been places to take the whole family.
18. WWW has never stood for World Wide Wrestling.
19. Films have never been X rated, only NC-17.
20. The Warsaw Pact is as hazy for them as the League of Nations was for their parents.
21. Students have always been “Rocking the Vote.”
22. Clarence Thomas has always sat on the Supreme Court.
23. Schools have always been concerned about multiculturalism.
24. We have always known that “All I Ever Really Needed to Know I Learned in Kindergarten.”
25. There have always been gay rabbis.
26. Wayne Newton has never had a mustache.
27. College grads have always been able to Teach for America.
28. IBM has never made typewriters.
29. Roseanne Barr has never been invited to sing the National Anthem again.
30. McDonald’s and Burger King have always used vegetable oil for cooking french fries.
31. They have never been able to color a tree using a raw umber Crayola.
32. There has always been Pearl Jam.
33. The Tonight Show has always been hosted by Jay Leno and started at 11:35 EST.
34. Pee-Wee has never been in his playhouse during the day.
35. They never tasted Benefit Cereal with psyllium.
36. They may have been given a Nintendo Game Boy to play with in the crib.
37. Authorities have always been building a wall across the Mexican border.
38. Lenin’s name has never been on a major city in Russia.
39. Employers have always been able to do credit checks on employees.
40. Balsamic vinegar has always been available in the U.S.
41. Macaulay Culkin has always been Home Alone.
42. Their parents may have watched The American Gladiators on TV the day they were born.
43. Personal privacy has always been threatened.
44. Caller ID has always been available on phones.
45. Living wills have always been asked for at hospital check-ins.
46. The Green Bay Packers (almost) always had the same starting quarterback.
47. They never heard an attendant ask “Want me to check under the hood?”
48. Iced tea has always come in cans and bottles.
49. Soft drink refills have always been free.
50. They have never known life without Seinfeld references from a show about “nothing.”
51. Windows 3.0 operating system made IBM PCs user-friendly the year they were born.
52. Muscovites have always been able to buy Big Macs.
53. The Royal New Zealand Navy has never been permitted a daily ration of rum.
54. The Hubble Space Telescope has always been eavesdropping on the heavens.
55. 98.6 F or otherwise has always been confirmed in the ear.
56. Michael Milken has always been a philanthropist promoting prostate cancer research.
57. Off-shore oil drilling in the United States has always been prohibited.
58. Radio stations have never been required to present both sides of public issues.
59. There have always been charter schools.
60. Students always had Goosebumps.

Thanks, SS…

As we stroll down memory lane, we might recall that it was on this date in 1901 that Hubert Cecil Booth, a British engineer who designed suspension bridges and Ferris Wheels in Blackpool, Paris, and Vienna, was awarded a patent for the first powered “vacuum” cleaner.  (The first manually-powered cleaner using vacuum principles, the “Whirlwind”, was invented in Chicago in 1868 by Ives W. McGaffney.)  Booth’s first model, known as “Puffing Billy,” was large and powered by an oil engine (later models, by an electric motor); it was drawn by horses and parked outside the building to be cleaned.  Booth built a successful business– the British Vacuum Cleaner Company– and refined his invention over the next several decades. Though his “Goblin” model lost out to competition from Hoover in the household vacuum market, his company successfully turned its focus to the industrial market, building ever-larger models for factories and warehouses. Booth’s company lives on today as a unit of pneumatic tube system maker Quirepace Ltd.

MRSA infection is caused by Staphylococcus aureus bacteria — often called “staph.” MRSA stands for methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus. It’s a strain of staph that’s resistant to the broad-spectrum antibiotics commonly used to treat it. MRSA can be fatal.

Most MRSA infections occur in hospitals or other health care settings, such as nursing homes and dialysis centers.

from The Mayo Clinic

The Journal of the American Medical Association reports that there were 94,360 cases of MRSA in the US in 2005, resulting in 18,650 deaths… which compares to 17,011 deaths from AIDS in the same period.

As we increase our apple intake from one to two apples a day, we might recall that it was on this date in 30 CE (as traditionally given) that John the Baptist was beheaded.

Caravaggio’s “The Beheading of John the Baptist”

(And according to the Alexandrian calendar, which survives in the Coptic and Ethiopian Churches, this is New Year’s Eve!)

From the San Francisco Chronicle, August 27:

The Stanford University School of Medicine, in a continuing re-examination of its relationship with industry, said it will no longer allow drug and medical device makers to control the content of continuing education programs they fund at the school.

Stanford will still accept industry funding…  they just will not any longer allow the funding companies to dictate the curriculum, topic by topic, choose the speakers, and set up exhibits in and around the classrooms [and ski resorts and other places that Stanford offers CME credits…  but that’s another story…]  …38% of Stanford’s Continuing Medical Education course expenses were covered by pharma and device companies in the 2006-7 school year… and lest this be misunderstood to be a unique relationship, industry spent over $1.2 Billion on CME courses nationwide that same year.

As we review the Hippocratic Oath, we might light a birthday Gitanes for Charles Boyer, the French star of such Hollywood classics as Gaslight, Lost Horizon, and Algiers; he was born on this date in 1897.  Boyer co-starred with Garbo, Dietrich, Bergman, and jump-started the U.S. career of Hedy Lamarr (infamous on her arrival in the States for her role in Ecstacy) by insisting on her as the foil for his Pepe le Moko character in Algiers.  Indeed, it was to her that Boyer did not in fact utter his most famous line, “Come with me to the Casbah”; like “Play it again, Sam,” the line that’s most widely associated with the film was never actually spoken.

Boyer and Lamarr in Algiers (source: Atlas Shrugs)

Depleted uranium in missiles warheads, fragmenting bombs– innovations like this don’t happen by accident.  Teams of weapons specialists spend months and years scheming, then realizing these dreams.  But innovation isn’t an exact science; sometimes good ideas simply don’t pan out.

Consider, for example, “the acoustic kitty.”  CIA scientists implanted a microphone, transmitter, and battery in a cat (with an embedded antenna running up its tail).  Who would pay any attention to an innocent feline wandering through?…  would have worked too, but after spending years (and several million dollars) in research, the CIA released their spy cat on its test run… and it was promptly run over by a taxi.

Read more about the tabby, and other tales of innovation on the dark side in “The 10 Most Bizarre Military Experiments.”

As we reconsider our R&D budgets, we might pause a moment to recall that it was on this date in 479 BCE (as traditionally rendered) that the ethicist Confucius (aka K’ung-fu-tzu,  Pinyin Kongfuzi), or “Master K’ung”)  died.  His teachings, as further interpreted and expanded (by, e.g., Meng Tzu), were adopted by the Hàn Dynasty as the official moral and political doctrine of the State; the Confucian tradition became so broad that “Scholar” or “Literatus” became essentially synonymous with “Confucian”– so that Confucianism could simply be called the “Ju Chia,” or “School of the Literati.”  As one of the “Three Ways,” together with Taoism and Buddhism, Confucianism grew into one of the traditional religions (though, of course, it’s not really a religion) of the Hàn Chinese, and is felt as an influence in China to this day.

Confucius