Biologist Robin Kolnicki, whose flowing red hair has luxuriated near a waterfall in Madagascar, has just joined the Luxuriant Flowing Hair Club for Scientists (LFHCfS). So, too, have the wife&husband team of condensed matter researchers Raquel Ribero and Marcos Avila.
Month: September 2005
Hand — er, no… not hand — of God?
Many patterns recur again and again in nature. Here is a fresh example: a National Weather Service National Hurricane Center map of "Cumulative Wind Distribution" in tropical depression Rita (which was soon to become known as "Hurricane Rita") on Saturday, September 24, 2005 at 21:36:12 MDT. (Thanks to Phyllis Borkland for bringing this to our […]
New math, new trig
First came New Math, now comes New Trig. The former was best celebrated by Tom Lehrer. The latter was invented by Norman Wildberger.
Exploding toads and the dream team
The mysterious case of the exploding toads of Hamburg burst upon a shocked public earlier this year. Now comes some clarity, perhaps. The report "Exploding Toads: The Storied Remains" — written by the investigative dream team of forensic entomologist Mark Benecke and Ig Nobel Prize winners C.W. Moeliker, Richard Wassersug — appears in the September/October […]
Knuth on Potrzebie
Wikipedia reports a not-all-that-widely-known fact about Donald Knuth (Knuth wrote what many consider to be the bible of computer programming; he is also, in many ways, the father of much of what is now commonplace in the technology of displaying fonts on computer screens): In issue 33, Mad published a partial table of the "Potrzebie […]
September mini-AIR
The September issue of mini-AIR just went out. It has brief discussions of: Kims, Lees, and Chois; omes; shower-shocking shampoo bottles; and a few other things.
The rise of the Strategic Jesus author
The author of the U.S. Army War College study "Jesus the Strategic Leader" is enjoying a rapid rise in rank. Gregg F. Martin was a lieutenant colonel when he wrote the paper in the year 2000. Martin went on to command the 130th Engineer Brigade of the Army’s 5th Corps, leading the U.S. Army combat […]
Sea, space and hair
Oceanographers Diana Engle, Valerie Franck, DeDe Toole, Erika McPhee-Chaw and Sarah Stone, and astronomer Jason Ybarra, have just joined the Luxuriant Flowing Hair Club for Scientists (LFHCfS).
From an Edgerly/Shaftesbury scholar
Investigator Alfred Armstrong of oddbooks writes: Somehow I missed your Guardian column about Edgerly back in June, but I just found it online. Where you refer to the "12th edition" (1929) of Instantaneous Personal Magnetism, and then say "It is unclear whether there were any editions of the book prior to the 12th." Edgerly’s use […]
Five-Patel runners-up
The winner of the Five-Patel Limerick Competition will be announced in the September, 2005 issue of mini-AIR. The competition was announced in the August issue, which said: Thecompetition involves a five-Patel paper that was spotted by investigator Frederic Glasser. (The paper is also now part of our Multiplicity of Monikers Collection). Please submit an original […]