Got a chance to read the book a few weeks ago and came across some amazing pictures and an explanation for a rather annoying problem on campus come springtime. The trees on campus tend to become infested with caterpillars hanging from the branches, getting in people’s way - the book details a phenomenon perhaps responsible for the goings-on, with a look at how an increase in temperature delays the hatching season of their main predators, birds,
from this:

to this, giving the caterpillars a few weeks of free reign.

and then a fascinating picture of the border between two nations with different logging regulations in effect:

I was at the North Face store when this caught my eye:. They had no idea what I was talking about when I asked them if they had any spare ones, but were nice enough to give me one off of another jacket… then of course there’s the convenient wind chill chart from the National Weather Service which indicates how long you have until you get frostbite - problem with both being they’re in Fahrenheit. Apparently above 40 MPH winds there’s no further chilling effect.

George Dantzig, professor at Stanford, was best known for inventing linear programming, and for a particular incident that’s worked its way into college lore:

from an interview with the College Mathematics Journal:

It happened because during my first year at Berkeley I arrived late one day at one of [Jerzy] Neyman’s classes. On the blackboard there were two problems that I assumed had been assigned for homework. I copied them down. A few days later I apologized to Neyman for taking so long to do the homework — the problems seemed to be a little harder than usual. I asked him if he still wanted it. He told me to throw it on his desk. I did so reluctantly because his desk was covered with such a heap of papers that I feared my homework would be lost there forever. About six weeks later, one Sunday morning about eight o’clock, [my wife] Anne and I were awakened by someone banging on our front door. It was Neyman. He rushed in with papers in hand, all excited: “I’ve just written an introduction to one of your papers. Read it so I can send it out right away for publication.” For a minute I had no idea what he was talking about. To make a long story short, the problems on the blackboard that I had solved thinking they were homework were in fact two famous unsolved problems in statistics. That was the first inkling I had that there was anything special about them.

I hear a professor or two at Caltech give students unsolved problems on their exams - but have yet to see a professor quite as sadistic as that here… though it’s certainly testament to what you can do if you’re not limited by pre-held assumptions.

‘Everything I Know’ is the title of a 42-hour lecture series given by Buckminster Fuller - text is available here. Bucky was kicked out of Harvard twice, and at age 27, bankrupt, jobless, having lost his daughter to polio, and on the verge of suicide, he deicded to embark on “an experiment, to find what a single individual can contribute to changing the world and benefiting all humanity.” Stanford Library incidentally has his entire collection of journals and works in a special collection.

Want to see if I can make some geodesic domes with my Zome kit. Picture is the Biosphere in Montreal from flickr…

Talking to my friend Trevor the other day about the Rothschild family when I mentioned how they controlled the news sources to the financial markets in the 1800s via carrier pigeons. Apparently it’s not carrier pigeons but homing pigeons which can fly over 1500 miles; they can’t be ‘trained’ to fly back to a particular place, but only fly back to their home. The outcome of the battle of Waterloo was apparently relayed through such means. This article at Ask Yahoo gives three theories on how we think they do it:

* Magnetic navigation
* Astronomical navigation
* Smell and or hearing