Magni Formica Laboris

http://www.princeton.edu/WebMedia/flash/lectures/20110920_david_simon.shtml

An incident in Central California last week was so bizarre that the headlines it generated wouldn't be out of place in a supermarket tabloid next to tales of alien babies and Elvis sightings: "Man Killed by Rooster." More specifically, one of the feathered contestants in an illegal cockfight in Tulare County, armed with a blade attached to its leg, apparently stabbed 35-year-old Jose Luis Ochoa in the calf, and Ochoa was declared dead of "sharp force injury" two hours later. This isn't the first time someone has died in what is supposed to be blood sport for birds; last summer in Merced, two men got into an argument over a $10 bet, one pulled out a gun and killed the other, and the victim's brother and another man allegedly beat the shooter to death. But aside from the question of whether cockfights are humane for humans, they raise serious concerns about whether the state of California is doing enough to discourage them.

The doctoral dissertation (1799) of Gauss contained a proof of the ”fundamental theorem of algebra” which states that every complex non-constant polynomial in one variable has at least one complex root. In 1807 Gauss became a professor at Gottingen University. When planetoid Ceres was discovered on January 1st, 1801, Gauss was able to compute its orbit from only a few observations. On December 31st of the same year, Ceres showed up again, exactly where Gauss had predicted. Gauss had used ”least-squares” prediction which is based on the assumption that the observation errors were normally distributed. Gauss invented modular arithmetic in 1801, and in 1831 introduced the term ”complex number”. Together with Wilhelm Weber, Gauss constructed the electromagnetic telegraph in 1834.

From a list I've been compiling little by little for the past 4 years (mostly from two different Word of the Day sources: dictionary.com and mirriam-webster online) Chatoyant's poetic origin lies in the French chatoyer , "to gleam like a cat's eyes," from the French chat , "cat." Before the standardization of writing from left to right, ancient Greek inscribers once used a style called " boustrophedon ," a word meaning literally "turning like oxen in plowing." When they came to the end of a line, the ancient Greeks simply started the next line immediately below the last letter, writing the letters and words in the opposite direction, and thus following the analogy of oxen plowing left to right, then right to left. "Reverse boustrophedon" writing has also been found in which the inscribers turned the document 180 degrees before starting a new line so that the words are always read left to right with every half tur...

1. Myth of Universality - there is, as far as we can tell, no universal language. Maybe at some point of the distant past there was, but today it's almost impossible. e.g. - Republic of Georgia, mama means father and deda means mother . The ultimate nail in the coffin of the myth of universality. 2. Myth of simplicity - No language is harder or easier for its own speech community to learn. A six-year-old in any culture has the same relative ability to master their language as any other. 3. Myth of teleology - language does not move towards a goal, nor evolve, nor change at a steady rate. 4. Myth of gradualism - language changes in fits and starts. See the Great Vowel Shift .

Heath tells us that "the Caliph al-Mansur (754-775) sent a mission to the Byzantine Emperor as the result of which he obtained from him a copy of Euclid among other Greek books, and again that the Caliph al-Ma'mun (813-833) obtained manuscripts of Euclid, among others, from the Byzantines." Most of the Greek learning that was preserved in the Library at Alexandria must have ended up in Rome before the Christians and Arabs gradually destroyed it. It is reasonable to think that copies of pagan books then made their way from Rome, the capital of the old, western Roman Empire, to Constantinople, the capital of the new, eastern Roman Empire, before Rome was sacked in the 5th Century. Constantinople did not fall until 1203, leaving plenty of time for Greek science to migrate into the Islamic empire. The first Arabic translation that we know of was made by Al-Hajjaj j. b. Yusuf b. Matar (Al-Hajjaj) in the 8th Century. A manuscript copy of this version still ex...

Despite their heavy-bodied appearance, groundhogs are accomplished swimmers and excellent tree climbers when escaping predators or when they want to survey their surroundings. [ 6 ] They prefer to retreat to their burrows when threatened; if the burrow is invaded, the groundhog tenaciously defends itself with its two large incisors and front claws. Groundhogs are generally agonistic and territorial among their own species, and may skirmish to establish dominance. General Beauregard Lee is a groundhog that resides at the Yellow River Game Ranch in Lilburn, Georgia just outside of Atlanta . He has received honorary doctorates from the University of Georgia - "DWP, Doctor of Weather Prognostication" and Georgia State University - "Doctor of Southern Groundology." He has been predicting early springs or late winters for fourteen years and the Game Ranch claims a 94% accuracy rate. However, he did have one major miss: in 1993 he predicted an early Spring ...