Even as the world was focused on the beauty of this morning's royal wedding at Westminster Abbey (where Isaac Newton and Charles Darwin, among others, are buried), I looked out at Western Bay from our house and saw this marriage of light, water, cloud and rock.
...and this.
...and this.
How would Louis Armstrong and Wynton Marsalis have fared if they had performed on trumpets fashioned from cucumbers and yellow bell peppers? Would James Galway have become a great flautist using a hollowed-out carrot? If Kenny G had gone to cooking school, would he today be blowing smooth jazz through broccoli florets?
The transformation of plants into instruments is a kitchen industry. Carvers who understand the science of sound make play-things out of edibles from A (asparagus) to Z (zucchini). The First Vienna Vegetable Orchestra performs concerts in a city that was once home to the likes of Mozart and Beethoven—or perhaps I should say beet-hoven.
At least one crudité band I've seen (on video) ends its concert by turning its instruments into vegetable soup for the audience. That's a more savory finale than the rock tradition of smashing an electric guitar, though I suppose there's a veggie-strumming Pete Townshend out there who might thrill the stadium crowd by dramatically dicing his cuke-ulele.
We're already looking ahead to the 2012 season at The Naturalist's Notebook and our plan to make music one ingredient in our strange nature-science-art-curiosity soup. It's not too early to start carving your carrot.
What Did the Blind Carpenter Bird Do? He Picked Up a Hammer and Saw
Sounds of all sorts are in the air, one day after the 226th birthday of artist and bird-documenting giant John James Audubon. Robert Krulwich of National Public Radio did a piece this morning about the lyrebird, the world's greatest avian mimic. Krulwich describes lyrebirds as accidental historians who record decades of past sounds.
Pamelia and I have been fascinated by lyrebirds since first encountering them on one of our trips to Australia back in the 1990s. Here is an Australian news video about Chook, a 30-year-old lyrebird at the Adelaide Zoo. You have to see—or hear—his sound imitations to believe them:
While we're on the subject of birds, I should note that red-breasted mergansers have arrived back at our bay in Maine. They're lovely ducks with long, thin bills and distinctively spiky head plumage that would have served them well in the punk music era. They've been diving underwater in front of our house to catch fish or other sea creatures—was that an urchin in the mouth of one surfacing merganser yesterday?
The red-breasted merganser
More of our punk band.
Film Note
The movie Waste Land is not be confused with The Waste Land, T.S. Eliot's masterpiece poem from 1922 that begins with the famous line, "April is the cruelest month..." Waste Land is a superb piece of art in itself—an Academy Award-nominated 2010 documentary about artist Vik Muniz spending parts of three years in the community of impoverished men, women and children who make their living by picking recyclable trash out of the world's largest landfill, in Rio de Janiero. Pamelia and I finally saw the movie last night and (like most of the reviewers) found it powerful and, strange as this may sound, uplifting.
This portrait—a floor-sized blowup of a photo by Vik Muniz of one of the Rio women—was turned into art by the trash-pickers themselves, using landfill junk to outline and, in a sense, paint the image.
The trash-pickers (who are paid by companies that recycle what the pickers collect) are experts on every type of recyclable and have a detective's skill for interpreting clues; they know almost instantly from a trash bag's contents what a person's life is like. One line that sticks with me from the film came from an older worker at the landfill. He described well-off people holding up a single bottle at home and asking what difference it really made if they threw the bottle away instead of recycling it. The man, who has stooped to pick up tens of thousands of discarded bottles, answered with this simple comment: "Ninety-nine is not one hundred."
Hard at Work:
Our Naturalist's Notebook preparations for this year are still top secret, but here's a shot of some of us at the shop last week. Artist Kathy Coe (far right in photo below), who'll be back teaching our children's art classes this summer, was up visiting. Along with a wonderful group—her two daughters, their two friends and three great College of the Atlantic students who are part of our team—she helped us create, shall we say, a new window on the universe.
Some of our creative team, not including Yours Truly, who tried to imitate some SI photographers I've seen by taking this shot from above, on a step ladder.
Answer to the Last Puzzler:
Q: Why did the fungus go to the party?
A: Because he was a fun guy.
Today's Puzzlers:
Two to test you today:
Can you identify these plants with the Justin Bieber haircuts? They popped up in our woods this week.
This second brain-teaser comes from the late puzzle guru Jim Fixx:
An electric train heads north at 80 miles per hour. The wind is blowing from the east at 20 mph. In what direction will the smoke from the engine point?
Birthdays:
As mentioned above, John James Audubon, the Haitian-born artist and birder, would have turned 226 on Tuesday. "Haitian-born" is a bit misleading; Audubon was the son of a French sea-captain and plantation owner and was raised in France before being sent to America at age 18 and living the rest of his life there. I'm looking forward to reading an upcoming essay on Audubon by my friend Bob Sullivan, the editor of Life books; I'll give you more on that when it's released.
John James Audubon
Charles Richter, the Ohio-born physicist and seismologist who invented the best-known measurement scale for earthquakes, would have turned 111 on Tuesday. It may register as a 7.0 on your personal Richter scale to learn that, besides being a pioneer in science, Charles was a "naturist"—that is, a nudist, who spent time at many clothing-free retreats.
Charles Richter
William Shakespeare, the English playwright, would have been 447 on Tuesday. Perhaps you've heard of him.
The Bard
Anne McLaren, the British biologist, geneticist and zoologist who helped develop in vitro fertilization, would have turned 84 today. McLaren (who died in a car crash in 2007) also worked for the welfare of children and was such a soccer fan that, according to the British newspaper The Guardian, "when any international match was on television it was a waste of time trying to talk to her."
Anne McLaren
Wallace Carothers, the Iowa-born inventor of nylon, would have turned 115 on Thursday. He was working for DuPont, doing research to create new materials that might or might not have any practical value, when he found a super-polymer from which he felt strands of fabrics could be made. Plagued by depression all his life, and convinced that he had accomplished little in his career, he eventually committed suicide.
Wallace Carothers
Walter Lantz, the New York-born auto mechanic-turned-animator who created Woody Woodpecker, would have been 111 on Thursday. Lantz's inspiration for his most famous cartoon character was a woodpecker who rat-a-tat-tatted on the roof of the building in which Lantz and his wife, Grace, were spending their honeymoon. Grace is the one who suggested turning the bird into a cartoon figure; her husband was skeptical that anyone would like it.
Walter Lantz and Woody Woodpecker
If you drilled a hole from Seal Harbor, Maine, straight through the planet, you'd come out in the Indian Ocean, off the southwestern corner of Australia (marked in the photo by a plus sign).
Before the ancient Greeks, many humans thought of the Earth as flat—perhaps pancake-shaped, with oceans, land, people and fluffy whipped-cream clouds sitting on top. You didn't want to flip that flapjack. The bottom side of it (some thought) was a fiery, hellish, blackened cinder of death.
Never mind that my homemade pancakes often fit that description. As we celebrate Earth Day Weekend (perhaps with waffles), we should think about the beautiful blue orb we call home. It's not a perfect sphere—our 4.5-billion-year-old mama has a bit of a bulge around her equatorial belly—but it's definitely not flat. That said, it's intriguing to think that even as we walk on one side of the Earth, people are walking on the exact opposite side, upside down to us. The soles of their shoes are facing the soles of ours.
How might we find the size-8 sole mate who is walking upside down in our footsteps? By digging a tunnel all the way through the Earth, of course. And we know, because it's the only place ever mentioned in discussions of tunnels through the Earth, that such a mega-hole would break through to the surface in China. We'd climb out, stand wrong-side up, shake our sole mate's hand and go visit the Great Wall together.
Or perhaps not. To reach China via a tunnel straight through the Earth's core, you'd need to start in either Chile or Argentina, because those are the only countries that are directly opposite from China on the globe. The hole would have to be nearly 8,000 miles deep. The deepest hole ever made by humans—the Kola Superdeep Borehole in Russia, drilled in the 1970s and '80s in the name of scientific research—goes into the ground only about 7.5 miles (40,230 feet, to be exact).
The Kola Superdeep Borehole. Perhaps you've encountered him at a cocktail party.
I'm skipping the part about the tunnel having to bore through rock, molten magma and, at the very center of the planet, a solid iron core that is nearly 10,000 degrees Fahrenheit, the same temperature as the surface of the Sun. There's probably a guy in Texas who could handle that. The bigger question is, what's actually on the opposite side of any particular place on Earth? Let's take Seal Harbor, Maine, home of The Naturalist's Notebook. As noted above, it's directly opposite a spot in the Indian Ocean off the southwestern corner of Australia. Turns out that pretty much the entire United States is directly opposite from...ocean. There are a couple of exceptions. One is far northern Alaska, which is exactly halfway around the world from Antarctica, at a spot directly south of Africa. The other is Hawaii, which is opposite from the African country of Botswana.
Because three-quarters of the Earth is covered with water, there aren't a lot of great tunneling options anywhere. If you dig a hole from certain portions of Portugal or Spain, you'll end up in New Zealand. If you're anywhere else in Europe, don't bother picking up a shovel—you're almost certain to come up in the Pacific Ocean. Colombia and Venezuela connect nicely by trans-global tunnel with Indonesia, as do far northern Russia and Antarctica. But that's about it. You can do your own opposite-side-of-the-Earth searching at: http://www.freemaptools.com/tunnel-to-other-side-of-the-earth.htm
If you stay above the surface of the ground this weekend, you might think about what's overhead. All of those gorgeous Earth Day photos of the planet that you've been seeing come from cameras in space. Below is an image of some of NASA's Earth Observing System (EOS) satellites, which take photos as they monitor weather and planetary changes. They're a crucial tool in environmental studies. In all, nearly 2,500 human-made satellites of all types and functions are currently circling the planet, connecting our communications systems and showing us what no human had ever seen until 50 years ago.
These NASA satellites are the eyes that watch how the Earth's surface is changing.
Return of the Blue Starfish This week's ultra-low tides have offered a great opportunity for exploring the Maine shoreline. I found a lot of the small blue starfish (or sea stars) that few other Mainers seem to find in their waters. I'm guessing that these starfish change color at some point later in the spring or summer, because we don't find them in this color for much of the year. At this point most of them are no more than an inch from tip to tip.
Not a Pamelia-quality photo, but you get the idea.
GISS and the Buffleheads Our hundreds of American black ducks and common eiders have moved on from Western Bay to their breeding grounds, but some beautiful bufflehead ducks have been hanging around lately. Buffleheads are very small (they often nest in holes in trees carved out by Northern flickers, a type of woodpecker) and they constantly dive underwater to feed. The males have distinctive wedges of white plumage radiating back from their eyes. Birders have a useful term called GISS, which is pronounced jizz and stands for general impression of size and shape. It's a tool for identifying species that the birder sees only momentarily, or from a distance. In trying to judge from afar whether the dark-and-white ducks we're looking at are buffleheads, eiders or goldeneyes (or something else), Pamelia and I make use of our general impressions of how they behave, how large they are and where on their bodies their white plumage seems to be. Buffleheads are easy to I.D. if they're close enough; their name is short for "buffalo head" because when the male puffs up his feathers his head looks gigantic. That's a jizz clue that's hard to miss.
A few of our buffleheads enjoying yesterday's weather.
Llama Font I've never written "llama font" before. But it's an actual type style that I learned about this week. You can go to llamafont.com and type any message you want in these unusual letters.
Answer to the Last Puzzlers:
1) What comes once in a minute, twice in a moment but never in a thousand years? The letter M.
2) What holds water yet is full of holes? A sponge.
3) The young tree that doesn't shed its dead leaves in the winter is a beech tree.
Today's Puzzler:
No puzzle, just a joke that a young visitor told me this week: Why did the fungus go to the party?
Birthday:
Ray Tomlinson, the New York-born electrical engineer who invented the first true e-mail system back in 1971, turns 70 on Saturday. Tomlinson is posed with the @ symbol in the photo below because he's the one who first used it in e-mail addresses. That symbol doesn't even have a name in English (the Germans call it a "monkey ear"), and no one is sure how or when it was invented. But Tomlinson found it perfect for e-mail needs.
Ray Tomlinson
It's not his birthday, but 86 years ago this week John Scopes allegedly taught evolution in a high-school biology class in Dayton, Tennessee. In hopes of challenging a state statute that banned the teaching of that subject, the American Civil Liberties Union had recruited Scopes to violate the law and get himself arrested. I say Scopes "allegedly" taught evolution because after his famous 1925 trial he told a newspaper reporter that he hadn't actually bothered to teach an evolution lesson. Scopes said that his side's lawyers had merely coached his students to testify that he had done so. That was but one of the many bizarre twists in his trial, in which he was found guilty and fined $100 before a higher court overturned the verdict on a technicality. Scopes went on to become a geologist and the Tennessee law stood, amazingly enough, until 1967. Even today, despite the overwhelming scientific evidence confirming the theory of evolution—a mountain of work done by tens of thousands of scientists around the world in fields from genetics to archaeology—25 percent of the Americans polled say they don't believe in evolution and 36 percent say they aren't sure.
John Scopes
As we reached the water, the first stars were just beginning to appear overhead.
What typical daylight activities have you tried after dark? Swimming? Running? Cross-country skiing? Eating breakfast? This week I took a night hike with a group at the Blue Horizon Preserve, a new Maine Coast Heritage Trust property off Indian Point Road on Mount Desert Island. The weather was too cold for any wood frogs to be singing, but under the illumination of a nearly full moon, our group enjoyed a one-mile round trip to the edge of Western Bay.
The buzz when I arrived was about a cattle egret. Various group members had seen one—hundreds of miles farther north than usual—the day before at the Babson Creek preserve a few miles away. Cattle egrets often hang around herds eating insects that would otherwise pester steers and cows. They're a cool-looking type of heron.
A cattle egret
As we began our walk, we talked about vernal pools and woodcocks (didn't see one) and studied the remnants of a bigtooth aspen that pileated woodpeckers had been dismantling. Humans have evolved to be extra alert—if not outright terrified—when exploring in the dark, but with 19 people in the group, this was a wonderfully relaxed stroll, with participants ranging in age from roughly five to eighty-five.
A sign at the trail head: To put it in golf terms, if your dog takes a drop, you must pull out your No. 2 iron—even if you consider what's in front of you an unplayable lie—hit INTO the woods.
After lingering on the shore of Western Bay, where we checked out the entrance to a fox den and watched stars come out, we headed back. We stopped to look at the moon through a spotting scope that made the crater-pocked surface especially dramatic. There was time to think about the vastness of the universe or the tininess of the spotted salamander eggs in a nearby water hole. Or just to let creative thoughts swirl through your head like a breeze through the trees. As Mad-Eye Moody growls in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, "Nothing like a nighttime stroll to give you ideas."
Cars and Stars
Lots of people in Maine drive Subarus. They're good in the snow. Maybe we'll buy one ourselves someday when one of our clunkers (currently ages 15 and 11), gives out. As our group looked up at the stars during our walk, someone mentioned that the Subaru logo is based on the Pleiades star cluster, which is part of the constellation Taurus. I'd never heard that. I looked it up and found that Subaru is in fact the Japanese word for the Pleiades cluster. The logo has six stars, which represent the merging of five smaller companies to create a large one, Fuji Heavy Industries, which manufactures Subarus. Seemingly every major culture since the Greeks has attached symbolic meaning to the Pleiades cluster, because it's so prominent in the sky. Here's a look:
Whether or not you like the cars, you've gotta love the stars.
The Pleiades. Usually 6 to 8 stars are easily visible. The ancient Greeks referred to them as the Seven Sisters.
Bird Watch:
A hermit thrush has been singing to us lately. Have a look and a listen:
Answers to Last Puzzlers:
Nature-word jumbles:
a) shark (khars)
b) jaguar (guraja)
c) mushroom (hommsour)
d) mosquito (oomuitsq)
e) wetland (lawnted)
Today's Puzzlers:
1) Riddle: What comes once in a minute, twice in a moment but never in a thousand years?
2) Another riddle: What holds water yet is full of holes?
3) Below is a photo of a common tree that (at least when young) holds onto its dead leaves through the winter. We saw one in the dark, and its leaves almost glowed. Do you know what type of tree it is?
What's the tree that won't let go of its leaves?
Birthdays:
John Muir, the Scottish-born naturalist, would have turned 173 years old on Thursday. He didn't do much in his wilderness-loving life, other than inspire millions with his nature writings, save the Yosemite Valley and the great sequoias, earn the nickname "the Father of the National Parks" and co-found the Sierra Club. He summed up a lot in one of his most famous quotes: "In every walk with nature one receives far more than he seeks."
John Muir
Glenn Seaborg, the Michigan-born nuclear chemist who won the 1951 Nobel Prize for discovering or co-discovering 10 elements, including seaborgium, would have been 99 on Tuesday. Seaborg was the first person to produce the elements plutonium, americium, curium, berkelium and californium—most of which no longer exist on Earth because they have vanished through radioactive decay—in a lab. Even though he made major contributions to developing the atomic bomb, launching nuclear power, furthering the cause of nuclear disarmament and advancing nuclear medicine, he is less well-known to today's general public than a run-of-the-mill jilted celebrity girlfriend.
Glenn Seaborg
If The Naturalist's Notebook had a Mount Rushmore-inspired frieze out front, causing drivers to slow to a crawl as they passed through tiny Seal Harbor, one of the inspiring figures on it would be Leonardo da Vinci, who was born 559 years ago today. Leonardo combined science, nature, art and a curiosity about everything, just as we try to. The difference, of course, is that unlike us, he was a genius.
Leonardo might hold the record for most impressive list of pursuits: painting, sculpting, architecture, music, science, mathematics, engineering, inventing, anatomy, geology, map-making, botany and writing. I might add "notebook-keeping." History's greatest left-hander (sorry, Ben Franklin, Julius Caesar, Sandy Koufax and Kermit the Frog), he filled journals with a prodigious and beautiful output of ideas, words, numbers and sketches. For reasons that have never been known (to prevent others from stealing his scientific ideas? to hide his potentially heretical thoughts on man and nature from the Catholic Church? to avoid staining his sleeve with ink as his left hand went across the page?) wrote right-to-left in reversed lettering that could only be read in a mirror.
One of da Vinci's journals, from about 1505.
His oil-on-poplar-panel Mona Lisa—of a woman from Florence named Lisa del Giocondo, then about 24, in a work commissioned by her husband—may be the most famous painting ever. By contrast, details of da Vinci's personal life are, if you will, sketchy: Vegetarian, never married, possibly/probably gay, religious views uncertain, allegedly so caring about animals that he would buy caged birds just to release them. Generally thought to be a man of high integrity and sensitivity to moral and ethical issues. In the end, of course, his work and ideas speak for themselves.
So who would join Leonardo in The Naturalist's Notebook's Mount Rushmore quartet? First, we would have to expand the group to five people. Five is a Fibonacci number; four isn't. The Fibonacci sequence—which starts 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34...can you guess the next one?—matches numbers found in flowers, pineapples, pine cones and other objects in nature. We like those numbers and the link between math and nature. So five it is.
Off the top of my head, I'll add Charles Darwin, Rachel Carson, Jane Goodall and E.O. Wilson to da Vinci on our Rushmore frieze.
Of these guys, only Teddy Roosevelt (second from right), the greatest conservation figure among U.S. presidents, might have a shot at our Rushmore.
But wait. No Isaac Newton? No Einstein? No Michelangelo? No Galileo? No Pamelia Markwood? Maybe we can do a second frieze out back, hanging above the natural-history deck. Any suggestions for other people we should consider?
Think about that as you go sketch something or write an observation in a naturalist's notebook. And those of you who live in the U.S., remember, don't think of April 15 as Tax Day anymore. Think of it as Da Vinci Day. It's a lot more inspiring.
Animal Caption Contest
The World Wildlife Fund, of which we're happy to be a member, has been running a contest asking people to create a caption for a photo. Below are last month's winner and this month's waiting-to-be-captioned picture:
Winning caption: I'll give you a hint, I have stripes.
Write a caption and we'll pass it on to the WWF for you.
Book List
On April 19 one of our favorite environmental writers, Carl Safina (whose fine lecture on commercial fishing, ocean trash and the state of the albatross we attended at the College of the Atlantic in Bar Harbor a few years ago), will release A Sea In Flames: The Deepwater Horizon Blowout. An early review from Publishers Weekly: “Safina’s impassioned account achieves a broad, reasoned perspective that frames events against the more insidious damage that farm and industrial runoff, canal-digging, levee-building, and rising sea level have wrought on the Gulf and its wetlands.”
Safina's organization, the Blue Ocean Institute, has a rating system for buying sustainable seafood that is as valuable as the one published by the Monterey Bay Aquarium. We'll continue to highlight both at The Naturalist's Notebook.
Ever heard someone exuberantly singing opera in the shower? Well, neither have I, but it must sound as happy, loud and rich as the wood thrush now holding court along our dirt road. Other birds are in the chorus too, but I figured I'd share this one song today.
Answer to the Last Puzzler:
All right, so puzzle designer Henry Dudeney went a bit British on us with his 5'10"-man-digging-a-hole puzzle. Here is Dudeney's answer, which makes a distinction between saying you're going "twice as deep" with a hole or "twice as deep again" with a hole:
The man digging the hole said, "I am going twice as deep," not "as deep again." That is to say, he was still going twice as deep as he had gone already, that when finished, the hole would be three times its present depth. Then the answer is that at present the hole is 3 ft. 6 in. deep and the man 2 ft. 4 in. above ground. When completed the hole will be 10 ft. 6 in. deep, and therefore the man will then be 4 ft. 8 in. below the surface, or twice the distance that he is now above ground.
If you figured that one out, we may need to add you to our Mount Rushmore frieze.
Today's Puzzler:
More nature-word jumbles:
a) khars
b) guraja
c) hommsour
d) oomuitsq
e) lawnted
Birthdays:
Hans Sloane, the Scottish-Northern Irish physician who donated a vast collection of books, manuscripts and specimens that helped launch the British Museum and who—more important—may have invented milk chocolate (and chocolate milk?), would have turned 351 on Saturday. He came up with his landmark creation after he tasted chocolate in Jamaica, didn't like it, and decided to see if it was better mixed with milk. Milk and chocolate aren't a bad combo in either solid or liquid form, of course. Earlier chocolate aficionados such as the Aztecs and Mayans had consumed chocolate as a drink, but they had made theirs by grinding cocoa seeds into a paste and adding water, cornmeal, chile peppers, and other ingredients. Both Sloane and a 19th century Swiss chocolatier named Daniel Peter have been credited with inventing milk chocolate, but it seems to me if Sloane lived more than 200 years earlier, he deserves the nod.
Hans Sloane
Karen Blixen—or, to use her pen name, Isek Dinesen—the Danish author who wrote Out of Africa and Babette's Feast, would have turned 126 on Sunday. Blixen, part of an aristocratic family, married a Swedish baron who was her second cousin and moved with him to Kenya, where they ran a coffee plantation. There she learned about cheating husbands, syphilis, handsome British big-game hunters, accidental shootings and the difficulties of growing coffee in droughts and poor soil, among other things. Meryl Streep played her in the film version of Out of Africa, which won the Best Picture Oscar but was based more on two biographies of her than on the book. The movie version of Babette's Feast won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film and gave us a memorable line from Babette, who has just spent all her money to cook a masterpiece of a meal. When she is told that she now faces a life of poverty, she offers a more profound answer: "An artist is never poor."
Karen Blixen
Vincent (the Wiggler) Wigglesworth, the British insect researcher who found that a growth hormone secreted by the brain controls the amazing process of metamorphosis, would have turned 112 on Sunday. He made that crucial discovery while studying (but not making out with) the South American kissing bug. The Wiggler's memorable name is preserved forever in Latinized label for another of his discoveries, a bacterium that lives in the gut of a tsetse fly. It's called Wigglesworthia glossinidia brevipalpis.
South American kissing bugs
Vincent Wigglesworth
There I was, trying to do some serious Sports Illustrated work, when I saw these two squirrels out the window. They were leaping straight up, as if electrically jolted. I grabbed a camera and shot this brief video. I'm guessing the squirrels were young ones.
Depending on what source you consult, you'll read that a baby squirrel is called either a kit, a kitten, a pup, a Jake (male), a Jenny (female) or simply a baby squirrel. I'm not sure all of those are legit terms. Nevertheless, and even though males and females are indistinguishable without a close underbody inspection (you want to try?), I'm going to call our video star Jake. May we all have as much fun today as he did.
Out of This World
Fifty years ago today Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first person to travel in space. Small in stature—he stood only 5'2"—and flashing what became known as the smile "that lit up the Cold War," Gagarin spent less than two hours outside the Earth's atmosphere and completed one 108-minute orbit of the the planet. He died in a suspicious training-flight jet crash at age 34. Here's a quick look at his historic flight:
If you want to watch a nearly two-our recreation of what Gagarin saw on his first orbit, reconstructed using footage from the International Space Station, check out this YouTube movie. Keep in mind that before Gagarin, no human being had ever seen what the Earth looks like. As you ponder the history of humankind, that is serious food for thought.
Gobbled Up
It's perhaps inappropriate to show this, but really, you don't see anything. Here is a photo of the act of procreation of two wild turkeys in our driveway. Yes, this looks much more comfortable for the male than for the squashed female beneath him.
Turkey love
Answer to Last Puzzlers:
1) Word scramble:
a) magpie (egipam)
b) albatross (broslatas)
c) tsunami (mintaus)
d) octopus (spootuc)
e) tortoise (erotosit)
2) The check was for $31.63. The cashier mistakenly gave him $63.31 instead, and after he spent a nickel he had $63.26 left—exactly twice as much as the original check.
Today's Puzzler:
Let's try another math/logic challenge from the late master, Henry Dudeney. This one seems apt, now that the ground has thawed enough to put a shovel in it:
During one of his rambles, Professor Rackbrane chanced to come across a man digging a deep hole.
“Good morning”, said the professor. “How deep is that hole?”
“Guess”, replied the laborer. “My height is exactly 5 feet 10 inches”.“How much deeper are you going?” asked the professor. “I am going twice as deep,” was the answer, “and then my head will be twice as far below ground as it is now above ground.”
How deep would that hole be when it was finished?
Birthdays:
Thomas Jefferson, the Virginia-born President, would have turned 268 years old on Wednesday. Never mind his other, minor accomplishments, such as writing the Declaration of Independence, or his glaring hypocrisy in keeping slaves after loftily pronouncing that "all men are created equal." Jefferson saw himself first and foremost as a farmer. He was constantly experimenting with plants and agricultural methods, and on his estate at Monticello, he grew 170 types of fruits and 330 varieties of vegetables and herbs. His terraced gardens have been restored and are another reason to put Monticello on your list of places to visit (or re-visit).
Part of Jefferson's kitchen garden
Mervyn Cowie, the Kenyan-born conservationist who was the driving force in establishing the first national parks in East Africa, would have been 102. An accountant by trade, Cowie was appalled at the decline of Kenya's large mammals in the 1930s and began promoting the idea of a park system. Ignored, he manipulated public opinion by writing a letter to a newspaper under a false name arguing that all of Kenya's wild animals must be killed. The outraged response forced the government to set up the first national park board, overseen by Cowie, who eventually became the father of eco-tourism in Africa.
One of several books written by Cowie.
Alfred Butts, the Poughkeepsie, N.Y.-born architect and amateur artist who invented Scrabble, would have been 112 on Wednesday. Butts was unemployed and living in Jackson Heights, Queens, when he decided to create a board game to try to make money. In designing a game that combined anagrams and crossword puzzles, he studied the front page of The New York Times to determine how often each letter was used. That's how he figured out how many of each letter tile to include. His initial version of the game, which he first called Lexiko and then called Criss-Cross Words, was rejected by game publishers for two decades. Eventually game buff and entrepreneur James Brunot bought it and renamed it Scrabble, a word that means "to grope frantically." Butts himself could appreciate that sense of grasping in vain: He could never beat his wife, Nina, at the game he invented.
Alfred Butts
