Samuel Pierpont Langley was an American astronomer, physicist, inventor of the bolometer and pioneer of aviation. Langley devised and built several heavier-than-air flying machines two decades before th Wright Brothers, but none flew successfully.
_(&%^&^&&(**) jtur!!!
Philip Cary Plait, also known as The Bad Astronomer, is an American astronomer, skeptic, writer and popular science blogger. Plait has worked as part of the Hubble Space Telescope team, images and spectra of astronomical objects, as well as engaging in public outreach advocacy for NASA missions.
*I have met the BA and heard him speak; I recommend if you ever have the chance you do too.
Nm
Missed edit window to add the diagram.
The Edwin Hubble Space Telescope is a Cassegrain reflector type of telescope. A Cassegrain reflector telescope uses a combination of a large primary concave parabolic mirror with a smaller secondary convex hyperbolic mirror centered and aligned along the long axis of the telescope. There are small holes in the middle of both mirrors, and these holes describe the aiming vector used to sight in on a distant object. These mirrors, thus aligned, put the focal point at a convenient location behind the primary mirror. The convex secondary mirror adds a telephoto effect that creates a much longer focal length for the telescope overall, in a mechanically short system.
“Combine” is a word unique in English, in that it is an antonym of itself when accented on a different syllable. To “com-BINE” means to put multiple elements into a single unit. To “COM-bine” is an agricultural term that means to separate a field commodity from the unusable parts by using a special piece of equipment called a combine (COM-bine), which is a vernacular shortened form of “combination harvester”.
In 200 years, from roughly 1800 to 2000, combination harvesters and other automated farming equipment revolutionized America in that in 1800 about 90% of the entire US population worked the land, while by 2000 only about 2% of the entire US population worked the land.
Fort Langley, British Columbia, was established by Hudson Bay Company on the south bank of the Fraser River, tu guard against the USA attrmpting to claim all land south of the Fraser. It was the first permanent settloement in what is now British Columbia. Of the 24 men who worked on the construjction in the wilderness, two of them were native Hawaiian Islanders.
( I had this one ready to go for Langley, but it works for “worked”.)
The jurisdiction of British Columbia and the Oregon Territory, disputed by the US, Britain, Russia, and Spain, was ultimately settled by Russia and Spain withdrawing their claims, and the US and Britain agreeing to extend the 49th Parallel border to the Pacific. It was a campaign issue in the US in 1844, with many Democratic supporters of James Knox Polk demanding that the US control the area right up to the latitude of what is now the southern tip of the Alaska Panhandle, with the slogan “Fifty-four Forty or Fight!”
The Oregon Trail stretched westward some 1,800 miles from Independence MO to Oregon City OR. It went westward near or through (in present-day states) Chimney Rock NE, Fort Laramie WY, Fort Bridger WY. Fort Boise ID, and The Dalles OR. Today in Guernsey WY you can view wagon wheel ruts along the Oregon Trail, at the Guernsey Ruts National Historic Site.
Chimney Rock appears to have been a popular name; there are natural sites in ten US states that bear the name Chimney Rock (New Jersey, Montana, California, Utah, Minnesota, Idaho, Washington, Colorado, North Carolina and Nebraska).
Commercial grade copper ore is still mined at Chimney Rock, New Jersey, although most of the mining activity in the area now is marble and granite rock. A cannon used in the siege of Yorktown was cast from copper mined at Chimney Rock.
Chris Christie’s public-approval ratings as Governor of New Jersey have now reached their lowest level ever. The Republican former U.S. Attorney has endorsed Donald Trump for President.
Prosecutors in Canada are formally Crown Attorneys or Crown Prosecutor, depending on the Province, but informally are just referred to as “the Crown”, as in “The Crown argued for a sentence of more than two years.”
The grandfather of famed aviator Charles Lindbergh was a dentist named Charles Land who, in 1903, invented the first porcelain jacket crown (or, PJC). Before PJCs, crowns were of gold, and they were expensive. PJCs slowly replaced gold crowns once the stigma of their being the cheaper and less superior crown was overcome.
Porcelain derives its present name from the old Italian porcellana (cowrie shell) because of its resemblance to the translucent surface of the shell. However, the term porcelain lacks a universal definition and has been applied in a very unsystematic fashion to substances of diverse kinds which have only certain surface-qualities in common.
Vomiting has acquired a very long list of amusing euphemisms. My favorite is “driving the porcelain bus”, which IIRC was used in one episode by ALF…
Aircraft nicknamed “Weightless Wonders” have been operated by NASA’s Reduced Gravity Research Program. For astronaut training and other needs, aircraft follow a parabolic flight path relative to the center of the earth to experience weightlessness in free fall for up to several minutes at a time. In 1959 when the seven Project Mercury astronauts were training in the twin prop C-131 Samaritan, they nicknamed it the “vomit comet.”
Tom Hanks encountered the “vomit comet” as a passenger while filming Apollo 13 and later used it while producing the HBO miniseries From the Earth to the Moon. He said it definitely earns it’s nickname: nobody made it through without a heave.
Tom Hanks is a third cousin, four times removed of Abraham Lincoln; they are related through Lincoln’s mother, Nancy Hanks.