TIL that Isa Lake, in Yellowstone Park, is right on the Continental Divide. And water from the lake flows to both the Gulf of Mexico and the Pacific Ocean. (How, I don’t know.)
Isa Lake is located between Yellowstone Lake and Old Faithful.
Constantly fighting with each other?
Ah, OK, I was trying to think of ways in which a string would be non-ideal, and the change in length due to deflection was the most obvious one, but of course stiffness would also be non-ideal.
Oh, no, not again.
I’ve been there. “Lake” is generous. It’s on the small side for a pond, and the drainage on both sides is a trickle you could step over and keep your feet dry. But yes, it drains both ways.
Today I learned that Joseph Merrick AKA “The Elephant Man” likely suffered from Proteus syndrome.
(They can’t prove it, though, because the museum bleached his bones so much, they destroyed the DNA.)
If you’d like a supremely depressing rabbit hole to fall into, you can’t do worse than Joseph Merrick.
I’ve been to Lake Itasca in northern Minnesota. There’s a small stream that flows out of the lake and can be crossed on stepping stones. It’s the Mississippi River.
(I’ve seen that cited as the source of the Mississippi, but I think that’s just for PR. There are streams that flow into Lake Itasca.)
Fair enough. Still, it’s pretty cool that the different ends of a puddle are at different sides of the continental divide.
If you start at New Orleans and follow the river upstream, you end up in Pittsburgh and beyond. If you miss that and follow the other river upstream, you end up in Montana and maybe eventually Wyoming. It’s only if you take the wrong turn twice that you can end up in Minnesota.
It also has the fortunate effect that a vampire can’t travel under his own power from Mexico to the northern US.
The difference is that, when measured, all the streams going into the lake, were doing so at the same rate so one was not dominant over the others. Therefore, the lake is considered the start of the river and not a specific stream. It is the rate of water flow that is used to determine the “source” or path of the river. At the time it was measured, the major flow lead up to Minnesota, not Montana or Ohio.
I … what? Can you 'splain, please?
I think there’s some part of vampire lore that says they can not cross flowing water.
Depending on how tightly the rules are enforced, there may be a spot in the middle of that pond that one could cross. A couple heads of garlic in the right place would take care of that.
Or would it? Are we sure that water flows from that pond all the way to both coasts? If the western side flows to the Great Basin, or into the Colorado River, then there might be places that allow passage (most of the time).
Since 1943, radio station WTIC (1080 AM) in Hartford, Connecticut has played the Morse code letter “V” (dot-dot-dot-dash), originally as “V for victory”, to mark the top of each hour.
The diagnosis keeps changing. When Bernard Pomerance’s play came out it was thought to be neurofibromatosis, AKA Von Reckilinghausen’s disease. There was even an ad in the Playbill for the National Neurofibromatosis organization. Then that was disproven, and several other diagnoses came along. It’s not certain that he had Proteus syndrome (and at least one has suggested Proteus syndrome AND neurofibromatosis.) They traced members of his family, but DNA testing on them hasn’t provided conclusive results.
I first learned about Merrick from Ashley Montagu’s book The Elephant Man: A Study in Human Dignity, and thought it’d make for a dynamite play. But Pomerance beat me to it. Lynch’s film is worth watching, too, but takes quite a few liberties with the facts. The most interesting book on him I’ve read is Michael Howard and Peter Halls The True History of the Elephant Man from 1980, which has been reprinted numerous times, but is now getting dated. There have been more recent books on him, I see from the Wikipedia article. I’ll have to look them up.
During WWII, the US Army Air Force was famous for, among other things, the nose decorating their planes. Ranging from simple names of sweethearts, to cartoon characters (DIsney was popular) to racy pinups, nose art was tolerated by AAF commanders as it was thought to boost morale. In the US Navy, however, nose art was discouraged if not outright banned. Very few Navy planes had any kind of unofficial decoration.
The 1928 Olympic Women’s 800m final was a disaster for women’s athletics:
It’s one of those stories that gets told over and over. When the women’s 800 meters was included in the Olympic Games for the first time at Amsterdam in 1928, several runners collapsed at the finish. Shocked at the public spectacle of women in such distress, the all-male Olympic establishment cut the event…
…“Below us on the cinder path were 11 wretched women, 5 of whom dropped out before the finish, while 5 collapsed after reaching the tape,” wrote John Tunis of the New York Evening Post.
- and, of course, it was all lies. And it was a story that persisted for many decades, it would appear. The quote is taken from the article which finally debunked the myth - 84 years after the events.
What actually happened? Nine women, not eleven, took part in the race, and all were recorded as finishing, with one runner falling as she crossed the line, being promptly helped to her feet, and in no particular distress. Nothing to see here, folks.
The debunking was in the 2012 Runner’s World article that I took the quote from:
From the same article (bolding mine)::
It was luridly falsified versions, not the reality of what happened at the finish line in 1928, that enabled the IOC to keep the women’s 800 meters off the program until 1960.
Sheesh.
j
They could just play the first four notes of Beethoven’s Fifth.
truth is, women didn’t have the financial means then to bribe the IOC to allow them in again
If you are interested in anthropology and you know German, it may have occurred to you that the name Neander, as in Neandertal doesn’t seem at all like a typical German toponym. In fact, the letter sequence “ea” doesn’t exist in native German words.
It turns out Joachim Neumann, a 17th century pastor, poet, and composer of hymns, made this valley a favorite location in which to unwind. Like many educated Germans of the time, he adopted a classical translation of his name, in his case Greek: Neander = neuer Mann = “new man”. So his graeicized name was given to his favorite place.
Why bother with the scalloped edges? Just baking in a rectangular pan would do it, for any even number of pieces. Just divide the long edges into equal parts and voila! You’d wind up with a polygon, not a circle. For a regular polygon with perfect isosceles triangles, the points on each side would have to be staggered, and you’d have half-pieces on each end.
Another option would be to use right triangles, as in a diagonal of a rectangle. But then the edge wouldn’t be perfectly regular.
But I suppose people might complain that the pizza was smaller without the scalloped edges and they were being overcharged.
Why haven’t they done this already? Who knows? It’s easier to cut squares in a rectangular pan, I guess. Or people prefer circular pies.
The problem with rectangular pies is that the corners will burn before the sides. Round pizzas eliminate that problem.
I, too, see no benefit to scalloped edges.