Category: Informative

Why is it that four of the months have never been named for anything but a number, while the first eight months of the year are named for someone or something?

January is named for Janus (that two-faced guy); February after februa, a celebration of purification and forgiveness; March for Mars, the god of war. April comes from aperire, Latin for opening, as in the opening of buds in the spring (or possibly from Aphrodite); May is named for Maia, the goddess of plants; June for Juno, the goddess of marriage and well-being.

Then along comes Julius Caesar and he has the gall in 44 B.C.E. to rename Quintilis (for fifth month, as it was then) to Julius (July). Not to be outdone, Augustus renamed Sextilis (for sixth month) to Augustus (August) in 8 B.C.E.

So, why did it stop 2020 years ago? I mean, there are September (seven), October (eight), November (nine) and December (ten) just sitting out there like blank billboards waiting for a clever new name. (And the numbers are no longer even correct!)

Surely, Julius and Augustus can’t be the last two guys in Western culture with enough ego to rename a month after themselves.

Or more fit for our times, commercialize the names of the months; the rights could be purchased like bowl games. It’s not the Orange Bowl anymore, it’s the FedEx Orange Bowl. It’s not November anymore, it’s Toyota November; it’s Bud Light December. Just think, their logo on every calendar.

155.2 million
Number of people 16 and older in the nation’s labor force in June 2012.
Source: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics

85.0%
Percentage of full-time workers 18 to 64 covered by health insurance during all or part of 2010.
Source: Income, Poverty, and Health Insurance Coverage in the United States: 2010, derived from Table 8

26.3 million
Number of female workers 16 and older in management, business, science, and arts occupations in 2010. Among male workers, 16 and older, 23.7 million were employed in management, professional and related occupations.
Source: U.S. Census Bureau, 2010 American Community Survey, Table C24010

5.9 million
The number of people who worked from home in 2010.
Source: U.S. Census Bureau, 2010 American Community Survey, Table B08128

$47,715 and $36,931
The 2010 real median earnings for male and female full-time, year-round workers, respectively.
Source: Income, Poverty, and Health Insurance Coverage in the United States: 2010

Why do we have leap year anyway?

The regular calendar has 365 days, but it takes 365 days, five hours, 48 minutes and 45 seconds for the Earth to orbit the sun. That means the calendar falls behind the seasons 348.75 minutes every year.

Who cares if the calendar falls behind the seasons?

The people of Arizona and, until recently, parts of Indiana.

How does leap year fix it?

Every four years we are 1395 minutes behind (348.75 times four), so we add a day (1440 minutes).

Wait, 1395 doesn’t equal 1440, aren’t we adding 45 too many minutes?

You are wise beyond your years. Every 100 years (25 leap years times 45 minutes) there would be 1,125 minutes too many. Eliminating leap year every 100 years tips the balance back toward even. That’s why there wasn’t a leap day in 1700, 1800 or 1900 and won’t be in 2100. But we did have a leap year in 2000 (and will again in 2400) to tweak it back a bit the other way.

Does that do it?

No, even then the intelligent design is such that the calendar will be off by a day in a few thousand years. Nothing’s perfect.

As if being able to re-grow a tail isn’t cool enough, some species of whiptail lizards (genus Cnemidophorus) have another trick: They can clone themselves. These species actually consist completely of females able to reproduce by parthenogenesis.

The original sexless females, known as parthenogens, come from the hybridization of two separate lizard lines. The parthenogen has one copy of chromosomes from its mother, and one analogous but slightly different copy from its father. It can give rise to offspring that are their exact clones, without their two genetic copies recombining.

Some researchers hypothesize that the ability of sharks to reproduce via parthenogenesis is what allowed them to become one of the oldest species on the planet: When males were scarce, females could just make progressively younger copies of themselves to wait for Mr. Right Shark to come around.

DISCOVER Magazine has more.

When you have a few minutes (because there are a lot of them), Letterheady has a fascinating collection of letterheads from celebrities, companies and more.

Two tweets — Attenborough and the optical illusion — are really, really worthwhile links. Check them out — in the NewMexiKen on Twitter sidebar.

… fear of Friday the 13th

Excerpted from Jon Bowen, writing at Slate:

So where does it come from — the fear of 13? Its origins can be traced to Norse mythology and a dinner party at Valhalla, home of the god Odin, where Odin and 11 of his closest god-friends were gathered one night to party. Everyone was having fun, but then Loki, the dastardly god of evil and turmoil, showed up uninvited, making it a crowd of 13. The beloved god Balder tried to boot Loki out of the house, the legend goes, and in the scuffle that followed he suffered a deathblow from a spear of mistletoe.

From that mythological start, the number 13 has plowed a path of devastation through history. There were 13 people at Christ’s Last Supper, including the double-crossing Judas Iscariot. The ill-fated Apollo 13 lunar mission left the launching pad at 13:13 hours and was aborted on April 13. Friday hasn’t been much kinder to us. Friday was execution day in ancient Rome — Jesus was crucified on a Friday. Put it all together, and Friday the 13th spells trouble for triskaidekaphobics. It’s a testament to the phobia’s prevalence that Hollywood was able to parlay our fear into a hugely successful series of slasher movies starring a hockey-masked guy named Jason.

But triskaidekaphobia isn’t an exclusively American affliction. Italians omit the number 13 from their national lottery. There is a hush-hush organization in France whose exclusive purpose is to provide last-minute guests for dinner parties, so that no party host ever has to suffer the curse of entertaining 13 guests.

More:

When a full moon and a lunar eclipse collide with Friday the 13th, do more accidents really happen? – Atul Gawande — Slate Magazine (1998)

About.com has pages of background on the superstition.

And Urban Legends has a lengthy page.

Coldwell Banker Real Estate LLC today released its 2011 College Home Listing Report (College HLR), which ranks college towns across the country in home affordability. The report provides the average home listing prices for three-bedroom, two-bathroom properties that were listed for sale on coldwellbanker.com between August 2010 and August 2011 in markets home to 117* of the 120 schools in the Football Bowl Subdivision.

Least expensive are Memphis and Muncie (Ball State). Most expensive are Westwood (UCLA) and Palo Alto (Stanford) — their average listing is over $1 million.

* Tucscaloosa is not included because of tornado damage. Bowling Green (the one in Ohio) and Bloomington (Indiana University) did not have enough listings to make the list.

Coldwell Banker Data

It is Daylight Saving Time.

Not Savings.

Saving is an adjective modifying time.

At the Institute for Marine Mammal Studies in Mississippi, Kelly the dolphin has built up quite a reputation. All the dolphins at the institute are trained to hold onto any litter that falls into their pools until they see a trainer, when they can trade the litter for fish. In this way, the dolphins help to keep their pools clean.

Kelly has taken this task one step further. When people drop paper into the water she hides it under a rock at the bottom of the pool. …

Go read about Kelly and see what she does.

“Mankind has always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much — the wheel, New York, wars, and so on — while all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man — for precisely the same reasons.”

Douglas Adams, The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

… died young on August 16th.

Robert Johnson in 1938 at age 27.

Babe Ruth in 1948 at age 53.

Margaret Mitchell in 1949 at age 48.

Elvis Presley in 1977 at age 42.

You Win 100 Internets if You Get This

How Does Google Make the Big Bucks? An Infographic Answer

And The Most Popular ‘Damn You Auto Correct’ Text Of All Time Is

Monroe or Einstein: Check If You Need Glasses at Your Computer

Freakonomics » For Economic Growth, Does Penis Size Matter More Than Political System?

Fascinating graphic.

“Unfortunately people do not yet understand this lighting transition, and mistakenly think they won’t be able to buy incandescent light bulbs. This misinformation has been promoted by a number of media outlets. Incandescent light bulbs are not being banned, and the new federal energy-efficiency standards for light bulbs do not mandate the use of CFLs. My hope is that the media can help the American people understand the energy-efficient lighting options available, as opposed to furthering misconceptions.”

Joseph Higbee, a spokesman for the electrical manufacturers association, quoted in an article in The Times — Fearing the Phase-Out of Incandescent Bulbs.

Wikipedia And The Death Of The Expert is an interesting and somewhat lengthy look at Wikipedia and expertise. I found it interesting mostly for its look at what Wikipedia is and does, including this from near the beginning of the essay:

It’s been over five years since the landmark study in Nature that showed “few differences in accuracy” between Wikipedia and the Encyclopedia Britannica. Though the honchos at Britannica threw a big hissy at the surprising results of that study, Nature stood by its methods and results, and a number of subsequent studies have confirmed its findings; so far as general accuracy of content is concerned, Wikipedia is comparable to conventionally compiled encyclopedias, including Britannica.

There were a few dust-ups in the wake of the Nature affair, notably Middlebury College history department’s banning of Wikipedia citations in student papers in 2007. The resulting debate turned out to be quite helpful as a number of librarians finally popped out of the woodwork to say hey, now wait one minute, no undergraduate paper should be citing any encyclopedia whatsoever, which, doy, and it ought to have been pointed out a lot sooner.

Enough about the D.S.K. business, but I found this quick look at hotel procedures interesting.

Interesting look at the origins and purpose of the skull and crossbones. An excerpt from near the beginning of the report:

If you were 65 in 1940 (in other words, born in 1875), your life expectancy was 77.7 for men and 79.7 for women.

If you are 65 today (born in 1946), your life expectancy is 83.1 for men and 85.1 for women.

While overall life expectancy is much longer, for adults it hasn’t changed all that much.

What has changed is that a lot more people get to be adults. They don’t die of whooping cough and scarlet fever and pneumonia as so many children once did. Because so many children died young in the past, the average age at death was always much lower then the age at which most adults actually died.

This is an important and widely misunderstood fact.

(The first 10 presidents lived to an average age of 77.5.)

Researchers have found a fractal pattern underlying everyday math. In the process, they’ve discovered a way to calculate partition numbers, a challenge that’s stymied mathematicians for centuries.

Partition numbers track the different ways an integer can be divvied up. The number 3, for example, has three unique partitions: 3, 2 + 1, and 1 + 1 + 1. Partition numbers grow so fast that mathematicians have a hard time predicting them.

“The number 10 has 42 partitions, but with 100 you have 190,569,292 partitions. They get impossibly huge to add up,” said mathematician Ken Ono of Emory University.

Since the 18th century, generations of mathematicians have tried to find a way of predicting large partition numbers. Srinivasa Ramanujan, a self-taught prodigy from a remote Indian village, found a way to approximate partition numbers in 1919. Yet before he could expand on the work, and convert it to a clean equation, he died in 1920 at the age of 32. Mathematicians ever since have puzzled over Ramanujan’s manuscripts, which tie the primes 5, 7 and 11 to partition numbers.

Inspired by Ramanujan’s work and that of the late mathematician A.O.L. Atkin, Emory mathematicians Amanda Folsom and Zachary Kent joined Ono to discover an infinite, fractal-like pattern to the series. It is described in a paper hosted by the American Mathematical Institute.

Hidden Fractals Suggest Answer to Ancient Math Problem | Wired Science

I was only an equation or two away from solving this myself.

Time loves lists — here’s 50 of them: The Top 10 Everything of 2010.

Monkeys may possess cognitive abilities once thought unique to humans, raising questions about the nature of animal awareness and our ability to measure it.

In the lab of University of Wisconsin neuroscientist Luis Populin, five rhesus macaques seem to recognize their own reflections in a mirror. Monkeys weren’t supposed to do this

. . .

It was once thought that only humans could pass the mark test. Then chimpanzees did, followed by dolphins and elephants. These successes challenged the notions that humans were alone on one side of a cognitive divide. Many researchers think the notion of a divide is itself mistaken. Instead, they propose a gradual spectrum of cognitive powers, a spectrum crudely measured by mirrors.

Wired Science has the details.

Hey, maybe less than an infinite number of monkeys with less than an infinite number of keyboards could duplicate Shakespeare. Or at least write their own memoirs.

Malcolm Gladwell writes about Twitter, Facebook, and social activism.

And Richard Brody writes about The Social Network, Mark Zuckerberg, Aaron Sorkin and social networking.

Wonderful, provocative looks at social media, both; the kinds of essays that make you re-think — Krugman is that way today, too.

Good stuff.

I think I knew this somewhere deep in the recesses of an old and ossifying brain, but it only re-dawned on me today.

Roma is the term we use now for what were called Gypsies when I was a kid.

(The term Gypsy probably originated with the Greek word for Egyptian, though the Roma/Romani/Gypsies most likely came from India into Europe 1000± years ago.)