Just north of Quito stands a grand and glowing tribute to one of Ecuador’s proudest features: the Equator. The Mitad del Mundo—“Middle of the World.” is a nearly 100-foot-tall brick-and-mortar monument with a yellow painted stripe representing the line of zero degrees latitude. However, the Equator is actually several hundred feet to the north, as determined by modern GPS technology that wasn’t available to the earlier surveyors of the region.
FYI: I have been to that site, it is impressive, but there is now another, less impressive site that is in the right place.
Yellow is the color the human eye sees when it looks at light within the wavelengths of 570 and 590 nanometers, the wavelength of light between green and orange.
In the language of optics, yellow is the evoked by light that stimulates both the L and M (long and medium wavelength) cone cells of the retina about equally, with no significant stimulation of the S (short-wavelength) cone cells. Light with a wavelength of 570–590 nm is yellow, as is light with a suitable mixture of red and green. Yellow’s traditional RYB complementary color is purple, violet, or indigo, while its colorimetrically defined complementary color in both RGB and CMYK color spaces is blue.
In 2009, media reports came out saying that Four Corners, USA (where AZ CO NM & UT meet), was inaccurately located and its true location was over 2 miles away. These reports also erroneously attributed the discovery of this supposed error to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) National Geodetic Survey (NGS).
The NGS did not, in fact, make any claim or pronouncement that the monument is incorrectly located or suggest that it should be relocated. NGS has stated, and – as affirmed by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) – the existing monument does indeed correctly mark the four-state-intersection point.
<FYI>
*In the late 1960s as a small child, I visited the marker. It was a simple, humble stone marker and survey control point in the ground, and nothing else was in the area.
In March this year - almost 50 years later - I returned to Four Corners. It is now gated, and since it was after 5pm, the gates were closed and locked.
Four Corners was closed for the day(!)
The following week I returned when it was open and was saddened to learn:
you have to pay (about $10 per car, IIRC), to enter
the Four Corners Monument (not a National Monument) is controlled by the Navajo, and surrounding the much larger and much more grandiose stone monument and survey controll point and stairs and ramps and overlook…, are makeshift store fronts surrounding the entire monument - a makeshift flea market, of sorts
it’s a veritable strip mall, in the middle of the desert!
But after leaving I accepted that the locals have every right to make a living off of the visiting tourists
The red roofs of the flea market are easily seen in Google Maps satellite view: Google Maps*
</FYI>
Maybe the locals influenced the reports saying the monument is accurately located. Hmm… :dubious:
ETA - ninja’d, but it still works (‘red’)
Americans eat over 300,000 tons of yogurt each year. With a population of 319 million, that works out to an average of half a pound per person per year in the USA.
Many countries around the world used the shilling or schilling as a unit of currency, including the UK and many British Commonwealth countries. Austria used the schilling, which was replaced by the Euro. Due to decimalization, the shilling (which in the UK and most of Commonwealth was worth 12 pennies) was abolished. One country which still uses the shilling is Somalia; however, it is a decimal unit divided into 100 cents.
The egg-laying females or the diamondback moth have been reported to recognize certain chemicals in the host plants, glucosinolates and isothiocyanates, that are characteristic of the Brassicaceae family (but also occur in some related families). These chemicals were found to stimulate oviposition, even when applied to a piece of paper. One plant species that contains the egg-laying cues is wintercress, Barbarea vulgaris. Indeed, diamondback moth females lay eggs on this plant species, but the newly hatched larvae die due to the effects of additional natural plant chemicals called saponins.
Only four franchises are undefeated in World Series play. The Florida Marlins and the Toronto Blue Jays are both 2-0, and the California Angels and Arizona Diamondbacks are both 1-0.
The motherFlopping Angels beat the San Francisco Giants in 2002, and game 6, the 7th inning when the Giants were only 8 outs away from the championship, still hurts.
A Pacific blue Marlin weighing 1,805 pounds was caught in 1970 by a party of anglers fishing out of Oahu, Hawaii, aboard the charter boat Coreene C skippered by Capt. Cornelius Choy which still stands as the largest marlin caught on rod and reel.
In the original Star Trek, each command (ship, starbase, etc.) had its own insignia. When the movie rolled around the Enterprise’s insignia had become the insignia for all of Star Fleet.
Although humans are the most-often-seen crew members onscreen, Starfleet is shown to be composed of individuals from over 150 races, with Vulcans perhaps being the most common aliens seen.
Already in TOS, the USS Enterprise and other ships have a mixed-species crew, although this does not appear to be an absolute rule; the USS Intrepid is shown with an all-Vulcan crew in the episode “The Immunity Syndrome”. In a later series, there is another all-Vulcan crew, from the USS T’Kumbra, featured in the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine episode “Take Me Out to the Holosuite”.
The STAR TREK (TOS) line, “to boldly go where no man has gone before” was inspired by a 1958 White House pamphlet for President Eisenhower. Eisenhower made its contents public. The pamphlet included (emphasis mine),
STAR TREK: TNG revised the line back to its original roots, making it more politically correct:
After golf, oil painting was Eisenhower’s second hobby. While at Columbia University, Eisenhower began the art after watching Thomas E. Stephens paint Mamie’s portrait. Eisenhower painted about 260 oils during the last 20 years of his life to relax, mostly landscapes but also portraits of subjects such as Mamie, their grandchildren, General Montgomery, George Washington, and Abraham Lincoln. Wendy Beckett stated that Eisenhower’s work, “simple and earnest, rather cause us to wonder at the hidden depths of this reticent president”. A conservative in both art and politics, he in a 1962 speech denounced modern art as “a piece of canvas that looks like a broken-down Tin Lizzie, loaded with paint, has been driven over it.”
After a 1960 White House performance by Leonard Bernstein, President Eisenhower declared, “I like music with a theme, not all those arias and barcarolles.” Snagging his title from Eisenhower’s remark, Bernstein composed the song cycle “Arias and Barcarolles”, which veers from dodecaphony to scat singing to klezmer. But the texts, mostly written by Bernstein, assuredly do have a theme: love. The song cycle was premiered in 1988 in a version for four voices and piano duet; within a year, Bernstein had reduced the vocal requirement to one mezzo-soprano and one baritone. In 1989, Bright Sheng expanded the piano part to strings and percussion, and by 1993, Bruce Coughlin had made a full orchestration.
Eisenhower was the first president to ride in a helicopter. At Eisenhower’s suggestion, the Secret Service approved of the use of helicopters as a more efficient and safer means of travel than limousines for short trips to and from the White House. On July 12, 1957, Eisenhower became the first president to employ the new aviation technology when he rode in a two-passenger Bell H-13J helicopter to Camp David as part of a test of White House evacuation procedures. During his second term, he regularly used helicopters to fly to Camp David and his farm in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania.
First known as Hi-Catoctin, Camp David was built as a camp for federal government agents and their families by the WPA. Construction started in 1935 and was completed in 1938. In 1942, Franklin D. Roosevelt converted it to a presidential retreat and renamed it “Shangri-La” (for the fictional Himalayan paradise in the 1933 novel Lost Horizon by British author James Hilton). Camp David received its present name from Dwight D. Eisenhower, in honor of his father and grandson, both named David.
