Archive for September 2013
Everything goes better with sharks…
Sharks!
Given the successes of “Shark Week” and Sharknado, it’s a sure bet that Hollywood will move to remake the classics to feature those creepily-cartilaginous predators. See what to expect at Sharks Make Movies Better.
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As we decide that it isn’t yet, perhaps, safe to go back into the water, we might might send carefully-calculated birthday greetings to Giovanni Girolamo Saccheri; he was born on this date in 1667. A Jesuit priest and Scholastic philosopher, Saccheri is probably best remembered for his attempt to disprove the fifth postulate of Euclid (“through any point not on a given line, one and only one line can be drawn that is parallel to the given line”). In fact, Saccheri’s thinking closely mirrored that of Omar Khayyám’s 11th Century Discussion of Difficulties in Euclid (Risâla fî sharh mâ ashkala min musâdarât Kitâb ‘Uglîdis)– though it’s not clear that Saccheri knew the earlier work.
In any case, Saccheri’s Euclides ab omni naevo vindicatus (Euclid Freed of Every Flaw, 1733) helped lay the foundation for what we now call Non-Euclidean Geometry.
Not quite ready for prime time?…
3D printing is an emerging technology of extraordinary promise. But like any new tool, it’s early use is largely about understanding how it works… which makes for piles of unsuccessfully-attempted constructs– as amusingly illustrated in the Flickr stream “The Art of 3D Print Failure.”
{Example above, via Flickr/MaX Fredroom]
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As we recheck our settings, we might send precisely-threaded birthday greetings to Cullen Whipple; he was born on this date in 1801. A machinist, Whipple invented and patented the first practical device for making pointed screws (a marked improvement on earlier screws, which were blunt-ended and required the drilling of “starter holes”). Cullen joined with partners to incorporate The New England Screw Co., then went on to invent and patent seven other machines that improved the manufacture of screws.
The Vice President will see you now…
A firearms instructor accidentally shot a student while teaching a gun-safety class on Saturday in Fairfield County [Ohio] to people seeking permits to carry concealed weapons.
Terry J. Dunlap Sr., who runs a shooting range and training center at 6995 Coonpath Rd. near Lancaster, was demonstrating a handgun when he fired a .38-caliber bullet that ricocheted off a desk and into student Michael Piemonte’s right arm.
Dunlap, 73, also is a long-time Violet Township trustee who is running for re-election in November.
Yesterday, Piemonte said he feels lucky, and it could have been worse.
He and his wife, Allison, both 26 and residents of Pataskala in Licking County, attended the daylong concealed-carry class together.
“My wife was sitting just inches away from me,” he said. “It could have easily hit her.”
Dunlap apparently didn’t know that the gun was loaded, Piemonte said — “That’s my guess”…
Read the full story in The Columbus Dispatch, and here (from whence, the photo above).
Oh, and as Gawker reports, a Republican state senator in Arkansas who is leading a legislative committee on the subject of giving guns to school teachers accidentally shot a teacher during an “active shooter” drill earlier this year.
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As we load and lock, we might recall that it was on this date in 1971 that John Lennon and Yoko Ono landed in New York City, having left London in the aftermath of the break-up of the Beatles. They took up residence at the Dakota, near what’s now known as “Strawberry Fields,” two years later.
Your web… Your web on drugs…
Spiders routinely spin the sort of web pictured above. When they are doing drugs, however, spiders’ webs become really interesting…
a web on marijuana
Cannabinoid receptors have been found in non-human mammals, birds, reptiles, fish and even some invertebrates, so there are plenty of animals that react to marijuana. Most of those reactions aren’t that surprising, or all that interesting, though. Dogs and cats act kind of funny and groggy after eating weed (please don’t feed them your stash, no matter how YouTube famous you want to be, though—the stuff can be toxic to them, especially dogs), and monkeys exposed to THC keep wanting more.
Spiders, though, are infinitely interesting when they get stoned because the effects of the drug are clear in the odd-looking webs they build afterwards.
Getting spiders high for science started in 1948, when German zoologist H.M. Peters got fed up with trying to study web-building behavior in spiders who wouldn’t do him the courtesy of working on his schedule. His garden spiders tended to build their webs between two and five a.m., and he asked his pharmacologist friend P.N. Witt if there might be some chemical stimulant that would coax the spiders into building their webs at a more reasonable time.
Witt tried giving the spiders some amphetamine and, while they kept building at their usual hour (to Peters’ dismay), the two scientists did notice that those webs were more haphazard than normal. Over the next few decades, Witt continued to dose spiders with a smorgasbord of psychoactive substances, including marijuana, LSD, caffeine and mescaline, to see how they reacted. Since spiders can’t use tiny bongs or drink from little mugs, Witt and his team either dissolved the drugs in sugar water or injected them into flies and then fed the spiders with them.
The drugs affected the size and shape of the spiders’ webs, the number of radii and spirals, the regularity of thread placement and other characteristics. By comparing photographs and measurements of normal and “drug webs,” Witt and other researchers could see how the different substances affected different aspects of the web and, by extension, the spiders’ motor skills and behavior.
Read the full story– and see webs spun on caffeine and chloral hydrate– at “What Does Marijuana Do to Spiders?”
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As we commune with our inner monkey, we might recall that it was on this date in 490 BCE – ironically, as this year it’s Labor Day – that Pheidippides of Athens set out on the run that inspired the Marathon. Pheidippides was on a mission seeking military support from Sparta in defense against the invading Persian army. Tradition (that’s to say, Herodotus) holds that he ran the ran 246 km (153 miles) between the two city-states in two days. The Spartans, constrained by religious law, were unwilling to help until the next full moon. So two days later, Phidippides ran the return leg alone.
Pheidippides then ran the 40 km (25+ miles) from the battlefield to Athens to announce the Greek victory over Persia in the Battle of Marathon; he uttered the word Nenikékamen (“We have won”), collapsed, and died on the spot from exhaustion.
Let me tell you a tale…
This map, by social realist artist William Gropper, was created to showcase the diversity of national myths and folk stories and was distributed abroad through the U.S. Department of State starting in 1946…
Gropper, born in New York City’s Lower East Side to a working-class family, deeply identified with labor movements and the Left throughout his life. He worked as a cartoonist for mainstream publications New York Tribune and Vanity Fair, as well as the leftist and radical newspapers Rebel Worker, New Masses, and Daily Worker. During the Depression, like many other out-of-work artists, Gropper designed murals for the Works Progress Administration.
The “folklore” on display in this richly illustrated map is a soup of history, music, myth, and literature. Frankie and Johnny are cheek-by-jowl with a wild-eyed John Brown; General Custer coexists with “Git Along Little Dogies.” Utah is simply host to a group of “Mormons,” in which a bearded man holds up stigmata-marked hands to a small group of wives and children, while a figure labeled “New England Witches” flies over New Hampshire, Massachusetts, and Vermont…
Click here (and again) to see the map in much larger format (or find it at the Library of Congress); read the full story at Vault.
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As we revel in regional differences, we might recall that it was on this date in 1938 that Theodor Geisel– Dr. Seuss– published The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins. Geisel had published And To Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street the prior year; 500 Hats was his second children’s book and the first of three (it was followed by The King’s Stilts and The Seven Lady Godivas in 1939), all of which were, atypically for him, in prose. He returned to the rhyming form for which he’s known with his fifth book, Horton Hatches the Egg.
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