Archive for June 2015
“It isn’t running away they’re afraid of”*…
On the sad occasion of the passing of Don Featherstone…
When animals escape zoos, as when humans escape prisons, they’re usually caught pretty quickly. Whether there’s a mass break out, connected to some more devastating event—as in Tbilisi, Georgia, where a heavy flood recently let loose lions, wolves and a hippopotamus onto city streets—or a lone run-away, like the Smithsonian Zoo’s red panda or the Bronx Zoo Cobra, the animals rarely taste freedom for long.
Unless, that is, they’re flamingos…
“Why flamingos succeed at escaping the zoo while all other animals fail.”
* Margaret Atwood, The Handmaiden’s Tale
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As we hop the fence, we might recall that it was on this date in 1994 that the first live specimen of the Saola– AKA Vu Quang ox or Asian biocorn, also, infrequently, Vu Quang bovid (Pseudoryx nghetinhensis)– was captured. An extremely rare species, its existence was first discovered in 1992 via remains in hunters’ villages, the first discovery of new large mammal species since the Okapi (Okapia johnstoni) in 1910.
“Design is so simple, that’s why it is so complicated”*…
Picnic season is upon us. One might wonder whither the ubiquitous design, illustrated above, adorning paper cups and plates in parks and backyards across the nation– Solo’s highest-grossing design ever… In fact, many did wonder, and took to the web to investigate. The crowd made some headway– they discovered it was created by a designer named “Gina”– but it took an intrepid reporter, Thomas Gounley of the Springfield (MO) News-Leader, to get the whole (and fascinating) story.
Read it at “The Internet is looking for who designed this cup. What does Springfield have to do with it?”
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As we have some more potato salad, we might recall that it was on this date in 1880 that O Canada, the song that would become our northern neighbor’s national anthem (de facto by 1939; officially in 1980) was first performed, in French, at the the Congrès national des Canadiens-Français. Commissioned by Lieutenant Governor of Quebec Théodore Robitaille for the Saint-Jean-Baptiste Day ceremony, Calixa Lavallée composed the music, after which words were written by the poet and judge Sir Adolphe-Basile Routhier. English lyrics were created in 1906; but the second English version, created in 1908 by Robert Stanley Weir, were more popular and became the official English lyrics.
“The camera is an instrument of detection. We photograph not only what we know, but also what we don’t know”*…
When top chemists and engineers at Harvard and MIT are preparing to reveal new research in the world’s premier journals, they call Felice Frankel. For over two decades, Frankel has had a front-row seat at some of the biggest discoveries emerging from both ends of Cambridge, photographing experiments within the labs that created them.
Read her extraordinary story in “Photographer has front-row seat for big scientific discoveries“; and check out her work– from daisy-colored yeast colonies through rainbow-colored quantum dots to soft. flexible electronics that can be tattooed onto the skin– on her site.
* Lisette Model
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As we find focus, we might remark that today is the birthday of not one but two extraordinary mathematicians: Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646; variants on his date of birth are due to calendar changes), the German philosopher, scientist, mathematician, diplomat, librarian, lawyer, co-inventor, with Newton, of The Calculus, and “hero” (well, one hero) of Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Trilogy… and Alan Turing (1912), British mathematician, computer science pioneer (inventor of the Turing Machine, creator of “the Turing Test” and inspiration for “The Turing Prize”), and cryptographer (leading member of the team that cracked the Enigma code during WWII).
Go figure…
Turing (source: Univ. of Birmingham)
“The score never interested me, only the game”*…
The story of the exotic Belgian import that is the most mystical, magical sport on Earth… and of the Detroit lifer who became its King… and of an art heist: “Believe in Featherbowling.”
* Mae West
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As we take our seats, we might recall that it was on this date in 1947 that Holt, Missouri set the world’s record for the fastest accumulation of rainfall: 12 inches (300 mm) of rainfall in 42 minutes.
“I keep saying the sexy job in the next ten years will be statisticians”*…
Nathan Yau, the force behind the fabulous Flowing Data, was lamenting the loss of a classic resource, when he decided to take on the challenge himself:
Ever since I found out about the Statistical Atlas of the United States, historically produced by the Census Bureau, it annoyed me that there wasn’t one in the works for the 2010 Census due to cuts in funding. The last one was for 2000. Actually, the 2000 edition was called the Census Atlas, but whatever. With more data than ever, it seems like there should be one.
Maybe that’s why there’s isn’t one. Too much data, too much of an undertaking, and too many bureaucratic decisions to make.
The first Atlas, by Francis A. Walker, was published in 1874 using the data from the prior 1870 Census. Counting cover, credits, and all that, it was 56 pages.
I got to thinking, hey, I could do that. And if I did, I wouldn’t have to be annoyed anymore. So I recreated the original Statistical Atlas of the United States with current data. I used similar styling, and had one main rule for myself. All the data had to be publicly available and come from government sites…
See the stunning– and stunningly useful– results (with larger versions of each chart) at “Reviving the Statistical Atlas of the United States with New Data.”
* “I keep saying the sexy job in the next ten years will be statisticians. People think I’m joking, but who would’ve guessed that computer engineers would’ve been the sexy job of the 1990s?” – Hal Varian, The McKinsey Quarterly, January 2009
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As we discriminate between the median and the mean, we might spare a thought for Sir D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson; he died on this date in 1948. A classics scholar who was also an accomplished biologist and mathematician, Thompson is best remembered for On Growth and Form (1917, new ed. 1942), a profound consideration of the shapes of living things, starting from the simple premise that “everything is the way it is because it got that way.” Thus one must study not only finished forms, but also the forces that molded them: “the form of an object is a ‘diagram of forces’, in this sense, at least, that from it we can judge of or deduce the forces that are acting or have acted upon it.”
The book paved the way for the scientific explanation of morphogenesis, the process by which patterns are formed in plants and animals. Thompson’s description of the mathematical beauty of nature inspired thinkers as diverse as Alan Turing and Claude Levi-Strauss, and artists including Henry Moore, Salvador Dali, and Jackson Pollock. Peter Medawar, the 1960 Nobel Laureate in Medicine, called On Growth and Form “the finest work of literature in all the annals of science that have been recorded in the English tongue.”
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