Here in Playa del Carmen, there are about a dozen abandoned Maya-era buildings that you can climb over and into, of course free of charge and at any time. Inside one of them, in a small room, I found interesting termite mud tunnels, which I had never seen in person before.
Deception is everywhere. I googled “chain link fence” and it turns out that Karl Rabitz has nothing to do with it, but instead relates to a different one, and the very first of the known documented images of the chain link fence was found in… a mattress patent. More precisely, in the US patent No. 124,286 “Wire Fabrics”, issued on March 5, 1872, to a certain Mr. Peters (J. W. C. Peters).
Look how they sell Ozempic, right along with sneakers and souvenirs. In the pharmacy here, they sell antibiotics and opioid pain relievers.
Not bad, thought of it a minute ago, and here’s the prototype already.
I’m listening to the second part of Faust and simultaneously googling translator Holodkovsky. It turns out that translating Faust was something of a hobby for the scholar-zoologist Holodkovsky, spanning 60 years. Holodkovsky has hardly any original writings—only translations, and from the translations, everything else, as they say, is minor details.
That is, Goethe wrote Faust for 60 years, and the entomologist-translator translated it for 40 years and spent another 20 catching bugs, imagine? What a scale of projects.
In fact, apart from being the author of probably the best translation of Faust, Holodkovsky is almost absent in literature. But as a zoologist, he left much more of a mark. True, it’s hard for non-entomologists to read without a smile, but here are his main works: “Male Genitalia of Diptera,” “Atlas of Human Helminths,” “On the Oral Organs of Some Insects Parasitizing Humans,” “Coexistence and Societies of Animals,” and others.
A rather useful thing was invented in the USA. How do you make sure that history is preserved for centuries? Books burn, the internet is obviously a temporary phenomenon. Across the entire US territory stand these signs called Historical Markers. There are already over 220,000 of them. They are practically indestructible — these are raised letters on a thick metal plate. Often there’s a quite wordy paragraph on them, and they are placed not only in recreational areas but often in places where you can neither drive up to them nor easily walk up. For example, you’re driving on a highway where you can’t go under 40 miles per hour, and there’s nowhere to stop, and somewhere off the road in the field there’s a marker for deer about some battle. Well, apparently, they believe that when they will be needed, there won’t be a problem in accessing them.
I walked with Yuki and he passed by a little deer less than a meter away without noticing. This is a dog that can smell a hare running past the house by scent. It turns out that fawns are born almost odorless, and this saves their lives.
It is precisely because of their nearly complete lack of smell that does leave their young alone for extended periods. Mothers leave fawns for several hours at a time during the first weeks after birth so that their own smell does not transfer to the babies. During this time, the mother returns several times a day to feed her young. Although she may not be continuously near the fawn, she is usually somewhere close by, and surely worried about seeing us around her baby.
However, it’s not only the lack of smell that helps fawns remain hidden from potential predators. The white spots on their fur are another protective measure. When a fawn walks, the spots may seem obvious, but when the mother leaves it to hide in tall grass or other covers, these spots mimic dappled sunlight falling on the forest floor, as noted by the Iowa Department of Natural Resources. Such spotted coloring, combined with the faint smell, makes it difficult for predators to find fawns. Typically, the spots disappear by winter when young deer are old enough to survive on their own.
It is said that fawns are born in late May-early June. Today is precisely June 4. They’re right on schedule!
Despite the fact that he is lying in the open sun in thirty-degree heat, overall, if necessary, he can move on his own. Fawns are born generally ready for life in the wild and are generally able to run immediately after birth (albeit poorly).
Forced to read a random book without translation in a foreign language
I’m currently re-reading A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson. An old book from 2003. For instance, the author celebrates that Pluto was finally recognized as a planet by the IAU. So, there’s this interesting story about scientific startups in the 17th century.
Everyone knows from school that Isaac Newton is the father of classical mechanics and gravity concepts, and authored a fundamental work that underpins all subsequent physical science: “Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy,” or simply “Principia.”
There was also Halley—the one after whom the comet was named, and then there was Hooke, who discovered the cell (and Hooke’s law of elasticity and loads of other stuff).
So in 1684, Halley, discussing the problem of planetary orbits with Robert Hooke and Christopher Wren, asked, “What force makes the planets move in elliptical orbits?” Hooke claimed it was a force inversely proportional to the square of the distance, but he could not prove it strictly. Halley went to Cambridge to ask Newton directly—and to his astonishment, Newton said that he had already proven it. Moreover, he promised to send a detailed account. Actually, he got a bit carried away and instead of simply answering the question, he wrote three volumes of “Principia” (and deliberately wrote it in a complicated way to discourage the uninitiated).
As the work on “Principia” was nearly complete, Newton and Hooke disputed over who first discovered the inverse-square law of force, and Newton refused to release the key third volume that made the first two volumes sensible. Thanks only to tense diplomacy and the most generous doses of flattery from Halley, the fussy professor eventually agreed to release the final volume. Without Halley’s interest and prodding, Newton probably would not have formalized his discoveries into a cohesive work.
The Royal Society had promised to publish the work but then declined, citing financial difficulties. The year before, the society had funded a costly flop called “History of Fishes,” and suspected that a book on mathematical principles would hardly stir market excitement.
Halley, whose financial situation was modest, paid for the publication from his own pocket. Newton, as was his habit, contributed nothing. To make matters worse, just then, Halley had taken a position as the society’s clerk, and was informed that the society could no longer pay him the promised salary of 50 pounds a year.
Instead, they decided to pay him with copies of the History of Fishes. The society handed him 50 copies of the same History of Fishes” (apparently intended for fireplace use).
About several hundred copies of “Principia” were released—a rather large print run for such an expensive book, yet the publication aroused no interest from the reading public. The book sold very poorly, and the publishing did not pay off at all. Even in 1739, 53 years after the publication, an inventory check found the Society still had 126 copies left, and these were being sold at huge discounts, given away, or virtually given away for free.
Ironically, one of the most influential texts in the history of humankind was considered virtually a commercial failure at the time.
And it’s funny that since its publication in 1687, there was a calculation error in the text that wasn’t noticed until 1987, 300 years later, by a student, Robert Garisto, a senior at the University of Chicago.
In sentence eight (the book used such numbering) Newton tried to confirm his theory by calculating the mass, the force of gravity at the surface, and the density of known planets. To calculate mass, he needed to know the angle between the line from the center of the Earth to the Sun and the line from a point on the Earth’s surface to the Sun.
Modern measurements give this value as about 8.8 arcseconds (one second is 1/3600 of a degree). Newton thought it was 10.5 seconds, but mysteriously used 11 seconds in the actual equation. This error was discovered by Garisto when he was redoing the calculations as part of a regular class assignment.
This Robert Garisto is now an editor of Physical Review Letters. He recently made headlines a second time when his journal published a scientific paper with 5,154 authors 🙂
Enthralled. When something is done successfully by professionals, it’s like balm for the soul. But when done by idiots, you experience second-hand embarrassment.
Hi, I'm Rauf Aliev. 