Category: Informative

The next four months are boring

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 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 2018 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.

Revised from four years ago.

Redux post of the day

First posted here two years ago today.

The following begins a story at Scientific American:

Two penguins native to Antarctica met one spring day in 1998 in a tank at the Central Park Zoo in midtown Manhattan. They perched atop stones and took turns diving in and out of the clear water below. They entwined necks, called to each other and mated. They then built a nest together to prepare for an egg. But no egg was forthcoming: Roy and Silo were both male.

Robert Gramzay, a keeper at the zoo, watched the chinstrap penguin pair roll a rock into their nest and sit on it, according to newspaper reports. Gramzay found an egg from another pair of penguins that was having difficulty hatching it and slipped it into Roy and Silo’s nest. Roy and Silo took turns warming the egg with their blubbery underbellies until, after 34 days, a female chick pecked her way into the world. Roy and Silo kept the gray, fuzzy chick warm and regurgitated food into her tiny black beak.

Like most animal species, penguins tend to pair with the opposite sex, for the obvious reason. But researchers are finding that same-sex couplings are surprisingly widespread in the animal kingdom. Roy and Silo belong to one of as many as 1,500 species of wild and captive animals that have been observed engaging in homosexual activity. Researchers have seen such same-sex goings-on in both male and female, old and young, and social and solitary creatures and on branches of the evolutionary tree ranging from insects to mammals.

Drowning Doesn’t Look Like Drowning

Drowning is not the violent, splashing, call for help that most people expect. The captain was trained to recognize drowning by experts and years of experience. The father, on the other hand, had learned what drowning looks like by watching television. If you spend time on or near the water (hint: that’s all of us) then you should make sure that you and your crew knows what to look for whenever people enter the water. Until she cried a tearful, “Daddy,” she hadn’t made a sound. As a former Coast Guard rescue swimmer, I wasn’t surprised at all by this story. Drowning is almost always a deceptively quiet event. The waving, splashing, and yelling that dramatic conditioning (television) prepares us to look for, is rarely seen in real life.

To get an idea of just how quiet and undramatic from the surface drowning can be, consider this: It is the number two cause of accidental death in children, age 15 and under (just behind vehicle accidents) – of the approximately 750 children who will drown next year, about 375 of them will do so within 25 yards of a parent or other adult. In ten percent of those drownings, the adult will actually watch them do it, having no idea it is happening (source: CDC).

Drowning Doesn’t Look Like Drowning

Via kottke.

‘The reality is, there is no reality.’

Some high-level satire from The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs . You definitely should read it all, but here’s an excerpt:

Ask any psychologist what happens to people when they get confused. Their heart rate goes up. Their skin temperature rises. Adrenaline starts to flow.

They feel desperate, and scared, as if they’ve fallen out of a boat and now they’re getting tossed by waves and they’re maybe going to drown.

Now all you have to do is reach out with some kind of certainty, and no matter how obviously untrue it might be, people will latch onto it.

Every religion in the world knows this, from the Catholics to the Scientologists. It’s the oldest trick in the book. You create some uncertainty, you put people at risk — you tell them they’re going to hell, or whatever — and then you hold out the answer.

Factoid of the day

Did you know the United States was on daylight saving time year-round during World War II?

From February 9, 1942, until September 30, 1945, the entire country was on daylight time. It wasn’t called Daylight Time or Standard Time. It was Eastern, Central, Mountain or Pacific War Time.

‘Death, taxes and childbirth! There’s never any convenient time for any of them.’

In the 1950s and early 1960s the top tax rate — on taxable incomes over $400,000 — was 91%.

Ninety. One.

[Caveat: $400,000 in 1960 dollars would be about $3 million in 2009 dollars.]

The Revenue Act of 1964 reduced the top rate to 70%.

Today’s top rate is 35%.

The rate for death is still 100%.

The title of this post is a quotation attributed to Scarlett O’Hara in Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell.

2010 Pulitzer Prizes


Journalism

Public Service – Bristol (Va.) Herald Courier

Breaking News Reporting – The Seattle Times Staff

Investigative Reporting – Barbara Laker and Wendy Ruderman of the Philadelphia Daily News
and
Sheri Fink of ProPublica, in collaboration with The New York Times Magazine

Explanatory Reporting – Michael Moss and members of The New York Times Staff

Local Reporting – Raquel Rutledge of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

National Reporting – Matt Richtel and members of The New York Times Staff

International Reporting – Anthony Shadid of The Washington Post

Feature Writing – Gene Weingarten of The Washington Post

Commentary – Kathleen Parker of The Washington Post

Criticism – Sarah Kaufman of The Washington Post

Editorial Writing – Tod Robberson, Colleen McCain Nelson and William McKenzie of The Dallas Morning News

Editorial Cartooning – Mark Fiore, self syndicated, appearing on SFGate.com

Breaking News Photography – Mary Chind of The Des Moines Register

Feature Photography – Craig F. Walker of The Denver Post

Letters, Drama and Music

Fiction – Tinkers by Paul Harding (Bellevue Literary Press)

Drama – Next to Normal, music by Tom Kitt, book and lyrics by Brian Yorkey

History – Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World by Liaquat Ahamed (The Penguin Press)

Biography – The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt by T.J. Stiles (Alfred A. Knopf)

Poetry – Versed by Rae Armantrout (Wesleyan University Press)

General Nonfiction – The Dead Hand: The Untold Story of the Cold War Arms Race and Its Dangerous Legacy by David E. Hoffman (Doubleday)

Music – Violin Concerto by Jennifer Higdon (Lawdon Press)

Special Citations

Hank Williams

Clean up your act

Most of us learned how to use a washing machine or dishwasher in our parents’ house many years ago and haven’t really changed our methods, even though most appliances have evolved radically since then. We rarely, if ever, read the manuals when we buy a new one or glance through the instructions on the box of detergent or bottle of dishwashing liquid.

But because we’re probably using these appliances incorrectly, our dishes and clothes may not be coming out as clean as they could be. And we may also be damaging the machines.

When a Cap Full of Soap Is Not a Good Thing – NYTimes.com

Some money quotes:

“Most people use 10 to 15 times the amount of soap they need, and they’re pouring money down the drain.”

“If people see suds, they think their clothes are getting clean, but that’s wrong — it means you’re using a lot of extra detergent.”

“[P]rerinsing dishes before putting them in the dishwasher was not only unnecessary, it wasted thousands of gallons of water and could actually result in dirtier dishes.”

There’s more hints, including some for dryers and self-cleaning ovens.

And don’t forget to clean the vents at the base of your refrigerator!

The United States Department of the Interior

Department of the Interior… was established 161 years ago today. It is the fifth in seniority among cabinet departments after State, Treasury, Defense and Justice.

The idea of setting up a separate department to handle domestic matters was put forward on numerous occasions. It wasn’t until March 3, 1849, the last day of the 30th Congress, that a bill was passed to create the Department of the Interior to take charge of the Nation’s internal affairs.

The Interior Department had a wide range of responsibilities entrusted to it: the construction of the national capital’s water system, the colonization of freed slaves in Haiti, exploration of western wilderness, oversight of the District of Columbia jail, regulation of territorial governments, management of hospitals and universities, management of public parks,and the basic responsibilities for Indians, public lands, patents, and pensions. In one way or another all of these had to do with the internal development of the Nation or the welfare of its people.

U.S. Department of the Interior

Interior manages 507 million acres of surface land, or about one-fifth of the land in the United States, including:

  • 262 million acres managed by the Bureau of Land Management
  • 95 million acres managed by the Fish and Wildlife Service
  • 84 million acres managed by the National Park Service
  • 56 million acres managed by the Bureau of Indian Affairs
  • 8.6 million acres managed by the Bureau of Reclamation

Yours truly was a senior executive with Interior from January 1999 through January 2003.

Redux post of the day

This was posted here three years ago today. A sad prediction come true.

Although SeaWorld Adventure Park has done a good job of preparing its trainers to work with killer whales, it is “only a matter of time” before a whale kills one, state investigators have concluded after examining a November incident in which a trainer was dragged under water and nearly drowned.

“The trainers recognize this risk and train not for ‘if’ an attack will happen but ‘when,’ ” says a report by the state Department of Industrial Relations’ Division of Occupational Safety and Health.

Los Angeles Times

Factoid of the day

Guglielmo Marconi’s mother was Annie Jameson of the Jameson Irish Whiskey family.

Although Marconi’s invention of wireless telegraphy was an original and significant application of electromagnetic theory to commercial use, the family connection and money were instrumental in his early business success.