May 4
Quick Hits
Questions
Prior to the adoption of the Gregorian calendar in 1752, New Year’s Day in England occurred on March 25, not January 1. One relic of that practice still present today is that the tax year for the United Kingdom ends on April 5 - which is what March 25 became once the eleven-day adjustment needed to move from the Julian to Gregorian calendar occurred. March 25 is also an important date on the liturgical calendar, and the association with that feast day is how March 25 in the United Kingdom came to have another name - a kind of nickname - other than New Year’s Day. What is this two word alternative name for March 25? In another context, this phrase is a nickname that Lester Young gave to his long-time musical collaborator.
Moving forward one month - April 25, 1945 is known as “Elbe Day,” as on that date, just before noon, American soldiers crossed that river, shortly afterwards encountering a Soviet soldier patrolling on horseback. Later that day, additional American soldiers had a more intentional encounter with Soviet soldiers on the site of a destroyed bridge that crossed the Elbe (an almost certainly staged photo taken after that meeting is shown first). That bridge was located in what city, today recognized as the first meeting place between American and Soviet forces during World War II? A marker left by the Soviets to commemorate that meeting is shown second below. Outside of that event, this city in Saxony also is known for containing the grave of Katharina von Bora (Martin Luther’s wife) and for having a toy store, named for Carl Loebner, which claims to be the oldest store of that kind in the world.
This player was versatile in other ways as well, as he was capable of playing multiple positions on the pitch, but he is most famous for being one of the few football players truly to be ambipedal - that is, ambidextrous, but with his feet. So effective he was with that skill that his national team manager, Franz Beckenbauer, once said that he had known this player “for 20 years and I still don’t know if he is right or left-footed.” Little surprise, then, that this player also was a very effective taker of penalty kicks, as he most famously demonstrated in 1990. Who is this player, who converted such a penalty kick in the 85th minute to give West Germany a 1-0 win in that year’s FIFA World Cup final versus Argentina?
The “falling dominos guy” is itself a meme that goes back to Canadian physics professor Stephen Morris’s self-made video created to demonstrate the concept of geometric growth. Something of a meme within that meme is having the first domino be the 9/11 attack (as shown below), ending with any number of absurd occurrences nowhere near as momentous as that fateful event. In the image below, the “downfall of Ellen DeGeneres” was set in motion by a chain of prior events, with that “downfall” immediately being preceded by Dakota Johnson embarrassing DeGeneres on Ellen’s own show, which supposedly caused the public to turn on Ellen. That in turn was preceded by Johnson starring in Fifty Shades of Grey, which itself was preceded by E.L. James writing that popular novel. James originally wrote Fifty Shades as piece of erotic fan fiction titled Master of the Universe that was set in the Twilight universe. Before that, Stephenie Meyer wrote the Twilight series after being inspired by the music of a particular band. That band came into being because what frontman, working at the time as an intern for Cartoon Network, witnessed the 9/11 tragedy firsthand, with that experience triggering an epiphany that prompted his move into music? One specific work inspired by that attack was his song “Skylines and Turnstiles,” which would be featured on his band’s debut studio album, along with other songs like “Honey, This Mirror Isn’t Big Enough for the Two of Us” and (perhaps foreshadowing Ms. Meyer) “Vampires Will Never Hurt You.”
November 18, 1883 is the “Day of Two Noons,” as Canadian and American railroad companies came to an agreement to standardize the use of four time zones across the North American continent on the date. Part of the logistics needed to implement that change meant that many towns would experience 12:00 p.m. twice that day. Having to repeat just an hour probably would be met with amusement by Tara Selter, who is the protagonist of what novel series by author Solvej Balle? In those novels, Tara wakes up every morning to find out that she is repeating, yet again, the day of November 18 - in her situation, as an antiquarian bookseller living in France. Six of a total of seven planned novels have been published in Danish so far, with each expanding on the world that Tara discovers as she comes to term with having to live November 18 over and over again in perpetuity.
Though he painted during the Baroque era, aspects of this painter’s work do not fit easily in that era, including his emphasis of the “sublime” in nature - especially how he made those depictions of nature seem overbearing, even hostile to those humans that he depicted interacting with those landscapes. Over one hundred years after his death, interest in his work would revive and serve as an inspiration to painters in the Romantic movement. As an example of his style, Bandits on a Rocky Coast (1655) is shown first. As an example of the influence that he had on others, shown second is a work titled [This Man] Sketching the Banditi painted by Thomas Cole, followed by another work with that very same title, but painted by Thomas Moran. Who was this apparently quite influential Neapolitan artist?
What is the common term for cyclic esters? Shown below is the “γ” variety, named because three carbons (alpha, beta, and gamma) separate the hydroxyl group and the ester linkage on one side. Like their acyclic ester counterparts, they are known for their pleasant odors, with these compounds in particular often having smells likened to coconut or peaches.
A Belle Époque estate on the French Riviera is, according to some discussions, the most expensive private residence in Europe, with a value of at least $750 million - which may be why it persistently remains in the possession of the Edmond J. Safra Foundation, despite their best efforts to sell it. Featured in films like To Catch a Thief and The Red Shoes, the shown “Villa” gets its name from what monarch? This ruler did not build the current structure, but he did have the previous estate built on the property as a place where his mistress, Caroline Lacroix, could live. That original estate hardly was the most valuable piece of property once owned by this man, as at one point he personally held another property, over two million square kilometers in size, as his Domaine Privé.
One plant of this genus is sometimes referred to as an aloe, even though aloes have their own genus; that particular plant gets another one of its names because, being a monocarp, it flowers only once, in its case at the end of a long growing life. Another plant from this genus makes the product shown below, while decipiens, yet another plant from this genus, is known as the “false” variety of that previous plant. The heads of the murpheyi species of this genus historically have been cultivated by Hohokam to eat, while the roasted hearts of the shawii variety were used by people such as the Kumeyaay and the Tiipai as a food source. Probably the most famous member of this genus has a heavily cultivated cultivar that takes it name from its bluish hue and from the French botanist who classified it, Frédéric Albert Constantin Weber. The described plants all belong to what genus?
Clergyman John Michell designed one of these devices, but he died before he could use it. In the first third of the twentieth century, one of these devices named for Loránd von Eötvös was essential to oil and gas exploration, as such devices could be used to detect minute variations in a gravitational field - something that often suggested the presence of oil-containing salt domes. Prior to that, his namesake device of this sort was used in geodetics by other scientists, and by Eötvös himself (with the help of a mirror and a telescope) in an 1885 experiment that showed that inertial mass and gravitational mass were one and the same, thus confirming what is called the equivalence principle. However, that likely is not even the second-most famous use of this device in a physics experiment, as one of these would be used for an 1785 experiment, with the results reported in the paper “Premier mémoire sur l'électricité et le magnétisme,” while Michell’s model would be used by a friend of his in 1797 to perform one of the cornerstone experiments of classical physics. What device?
