They used to call chickens beedys

There is some place in England where during the medieval period, the word for chicken was beedy. They called the flower we know as pansies, "beedys eyes. "

Roadshow appraisers

It's not that the young do not grasp aging

It is also that the old do not think the young will age, either.

Unnamed Hero

The New York Times mentioned another vignette regarding Flight 1549 on January 15, 2009. The plane which crash landed into the Hudson with an impact so harsh that both engine were ripped off the plane, was evacuated in such an orderly atmosphere that one lady was trying to get her luggage out of the overhead bins. Fortunately one of the other passengers picked her up and threw her into a life raft.

There are no black cats

There are no black (domestic small) cats. You may think so, but if you
check carefully your cats coat, you will find at least a few white
hairs. According to Desmond Morris, a leading zoologist, this fact,
of no black cats, is because of the witchcraft trials of a few
centuries ago. They put cats to death, but only if the cat was all
black, did these Renaissance prosecutors consider the cat a
participant in witchcraft.

a new state of matter discovered

I am quoting here from scienceblog.com.  I dare not paraphrase  something I so totally do not have a clue about  I guess 'new state of matter' is not a label physicists throw around..?.. Anyway this work was done at McGill University.


"Working with one of the purest semiconductor materials ever made, they discovered the quasi-three-dimensional electron crystal in a device cooled at ultra-low temperatures roughly 100 times colder than intergalactic space. The material was then exposed to the most powerful continuous magnetic fields generated on Earth. Their results were published in the October issue of the journal Nature Physics.

Two-dimensional electron crystals were discovered in the laboratory in the 1990s, and were predicted as far back as 1934 by renowned Hungarian physicist Eugene Wigner.

"Picture a sandwich, and the ham in the middle is your electrons," explained Dr. Guillaume Gervais, director of McGill's Ultra-Low Temperature Condensed Matter Experiment Lab. "In a 2D electron crystal, the electrons are squeezed between two materials and they're very two dimensional. They can move on a plane, like billiard balls on a pool table, but there's no up and down motion. There's a thickness, but they're stuck."

Until an accidental discovery during one of Gervais's earliest ultra-low temperature experiments in 2005, however, no one predicted the existence of quasi-three-dimensional electron crystals.

"We decided to tweak the two-dimensionality by applying a very large magnetic field, using the largest magnet in the world at the Magnet Lab in Florida," he said. "You only have access to it for about five days a year, and on the third day, something totally unexpected popped."

Gervais's "pop" was the startling transformation of a two-dimensional electron system inside the semiconducting material into a quasi-three-dimensional system, something existing theory did not predict.

"It's actually not quite 3-D, it's an in-between state, a totally new phenomenon," he said. "This is the kind of thing the theoreticians love. Now they're scratching their heads and trying to fine-tune their models."

The importance of this discovery to micro-electronics and computing could be profound."

Halloween and Academe hauntings

We think of Bram Stoker around Halloween since about 100 years he
became famous as the author of "Dracula." Less well known is the fact
that earlier, at Trinity College, in Dublin, Bram Stoker presided
over the university historical society and also the university
philosophical society.