In a Word

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Barnacle_Geese_Fac_simile_of_an_Engraving_on_Wood_from_the_Cosmographie_Universelle_of_Munster_folio_Basle_1552.png

anatiferous
adj. producing ducks or geese

A deservedly rare word; it arises from the medieval belief that the barnacle goose (Branta leucopsis) grew underwater, emerging from barnacles that fell from trees. In his Topographia Hibernica of 1188, Welsh monk Giraldus Cambrensis wrote:

There are likewise here many birds called barnacles,(barnacle geese) which nature produces in a wonderful manner, out of her ordinary course. They resemble the marsh-geese, but are smaller. Being at first, gummy excrescenses from pine-beams floating on the waters, and then enclosed in shells to secure their free growth, they hang by their beaks, like seaweeds attached to the timber. Being in progress of time well covered with feathers, they either fall into the water or take their flight in the free air, their nourishment and growth being supplied, while they are bred in this very unaccountable and curious manner, from the juices of the wood in the sea-water. I have often seen with my own eyes more than a thousand minute embryos of birds of this species on the seashore, hanging from one piece of timber, covered with shells, and, already formed.

Apparently the belief arose because these geese were never seen to nest like other birds; it was not yet understood that birds migrate.

| Language · Oddities

Grass Hoppers

https://www.google.com/patents/US1402263

George and May Southgate patented these rather alarming “jumping shoes” in 1922. Each is a giant replica of Schistocerca americana made of spring steel and secured by a strap over a child’s shoe.

“He will spring or jump much farther than he would be able to without our improved device; and furthermore, the shock upon the system when alighting will be greatly reduced, thus enabling the user to cover considerable ground with a minimum effort.”

This will all end in litigation, but in the meantime “the flapping of the wings will greatly increase the enjoyment of the users.”

| Technology

Tree Mountain

http://www.flickr.com/photos/amymyou/518300581/
Image: Flickr

Twenty years ago, 11,000 people planted 11,000 trees on an artificial mountain near Ylöjärvi, Finland. The trees were planted in a mathematical pattern based on the golden section; in time they will grow into a virgin forest each tree of which has a designated custodian. The trees can change ownership, but they can never be removed from the forest, and the mountain itself can never be owned or sold.

Artist Agnes Denes conceived the project in 1982, and the Finnish government undertook it 10 years later. The site is legally protected for the next 400 years.

| Art

Lifeboats for All

In 1993, I attended a technology and art conference, ‘Ars Electronica,’ in Linz, Austria, where my former postdoctoral student Pattie Maes gave a talk titled ‘Why Immortality Is a Dead Idea.’ She took as many people as she could find who had publicly predicted downloading of consciousness into silicon, and plotted the dates of their predictions, along with when they themselves would turn seventy years old. Not too surprisingly, the years matched up for each of them. Three score and ten years from their individual births, technology would be ripe for them to download their consciousness into a computer. Just in the nick of time! They were each, in their own minds, going to be remarkably lucky, to be in just the right place at the right time.

— MIT roboticist Rodney Brooks, Flesh and Machines, 2003

| Technology

The Halkett Boat

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Halkett_Boat_Cloak.jpg

Royal Navy officer Peter Halkett designed this lightweight “boat cloak” in 1844. When deflated, its hull could be worn as a cloak, the oar used as a walking stick, and the sail as an umbrella, but a portable bellows could inflate it in four minutes into a craft that could carry eight people.

Explorer John Richardson, who had nearly died of hypothermia trying to cross an arctic river during John Franklin’s disastrous Coppermine Expedition of 1819, wrote that “Had we been possessed of such a contrivance in our first expedition, I have little doubt of our having brought the whole party in safely.” But the navy saw no use for Halkett’s boats, and his efforts to promote them to outdoorsmen similarly failed. The two remaining specimens reside in museums.

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Halkett_Boat_Cloak_in_use_cropped.jpg

| Technology

Bootstrap Percolation

grid infection puzzle

On a 12 × 12 grid, some squares are infected and some are healthy. On each turn, a healthy square becomes infected if it has two or more infected orthogonal neighbors. (In the example above, the black squares are infected, the white squares are healthy, and the gray squares will be infected next turn.) What’s the smallest number of initially infected squares that can spread an infection over the whole board?

Click for Answer
| Puzzles

Naturally

Steven Bartlett and Peter Suber’s Self-Reference: Reflections on Reflexivity contains a bibliography of works on reflexivity.

It includes an entry for Steven Bartlett and Peter Suber’s Self-Reference: Reflections on Reflexivity.

| Science & Math

Unquote

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Redrosedust_wright_f2000.jpg

“Whether you can observe a thing or not depends on the theory which you use. It is the theory which decides what can be observed.” — Albert Einstein

“When we observe nature, and especially the ordering of nature, it is always ourselves alone we are observing.” — G.C. Lichtenberg

| Quotations