Isaac Newton's Date of Birth

Well, I'll be snookered!

Remember when I made posts about how J.S. Bach's birthday was incorrectly recorded?

Well, let's review the facts, this time using some convenient terminology.  (Truly, language helps us clarify an absolute host of obscure ideas.)

Basically, our Earth year is not an exact number of days.  Little kids are taught that a year is 365 days long.  But most of us learn later, that it's about 365-and-a-quarter days.  We let the quarters pile up, and every 4 years or so, we add in Feb 29.  (You realize that February usually only has 28 days.)

Unfortunately, a year is a tiny bit less than 365 and a quarter days.  So, the Feb 29th Leap Day is advancing the calendar too fast.  Over several centuries, the Equinox landed almost a month too late.

By the time the papal astronomers got up the guts to make a move on this problem, it was the papacy of one Pope Gregory (Pope Gregory XIII, 1572–1585), a millennium and a half after Julius Ceasar.  Luckily for everybody, the shortfall is, I believe, in the order of a few minutes.  But over so many years, these minutes certainly added up.

I certain parts of Germany in the 1600s, people hated the Pope with a passion.  (Remember: Martin Luther was from Saxony, the very region in which Bach was born.)  They stuck with the outdated Julian Calendar.  The dates recorded for births in Thuringia, for instance, were according to the Julian Calendar.  Some time later, everybody realized that calendars had little to do with religion, and using the new Gregorian Calendar had huge advantages.  The Gregorian dates were called New Style Dates, and the older dates were called Old Style Dates.  Bach's Old Style Birthday was March 21.

I celebrate his birthday on that date, because it's the Equinox, which is cool.  Also, if Bach were somehow raised from the dead, he would give his DOB as March 21.

Well, guess who else had an axe to grind about the calendar?  The English!  At the time of Isaac Newton, England, too, used the Old Style Julian dates.  Isaac's birthday had been celebrated for a Century or two as Christmas Day!  But then, British astronomers saw the light, and Isaac's birthday was revised to be January 4th.

You might not realize that the divergence between Old Style and New Style dates grows steadily, as those minutes add up.  In 1643/1642, Newton's birth year, the difference was just about 10 days; in Bach's it was a little greater.  Today, if anyone aspires to use the Old Style Calendar, the divergence would be crazy.  (I should be able to tell you exactly how much, but I'm too unmotivated to figure out out; after all, I'm retired.  Or just plain tired.)

Well, Happy Wednesday, as the man said!

Arch 

Deeply Ashamed

Since I made my last post, 

(1) Trump has made a kidnapping run into Caracas, and abducted the Venezuelan PM, Nicholas Maduro (and his wife), and brought them to the USA.  Oil company executives were informed, but not Congress. 

(2) A woman was killed by an ICE agent in Minneapolis (?) with a gunshot to her head through a car window.  As far a I know, the woman was unarmed—though ICE is trying to put together a case against the deceased woman as having attempted vehicular homicide. 

Well, that's the background.  Most of us are convinced that all this excitement and government lawlessness is intended to distract from the Epstein files, which are strongly believed to indicate that Trump was connected to a pedophile ring. 

MAGA is at this time sufficiently morally discredited that having a pedophile as head of the USA is not a notable embarrassment.  The degree to which Trump exerted himself to avoid being connected with Epstein suggests that Trump is uncomfortable being accused of pedophilia.  He isn't too upset about sexual harassing adult women. 

Ever since Trump entered the White House in 2017, one thing has been on the rise: the gradual A$$#olification of US men, and some women.

Most of us do a minimum of certain actions: returning shopping carts to their collecting areas; allowing pedestrians to finish crossing the street; making allowances for those carrying infants, especially mothers; being polite to checkout clerks in supermarkets.  Gradually, over the last few years, these acts of common decency seem to be in the wane.  Sometimes I wonder how different this society is, from the one I knew before Trump.

Trump can hardly say a word about President Obama without declaring how terrible he was!  If you compare side-by-side statistics of work done, laws passed, hours taken off for recreational activities, money spent recklessly in supposed improvement of the White House, by President Obama and Trump, I can't believe that Trump would even consider competing with Obama.

Testosterone is fully unleashed.  Hegseth declares that the 'new' armed forces is going to be vicious and muscular. 

And is not going to abide by the law.  Abiding by the law, it appears, is what made the US weak and ineffective. 

Arch. 

Getting inside Another's Head

It's not uncommon to ask ourselves: What was he/she thinking?

People often do inexplicable things.  What we have to do is to get inside their head(s), and try to follow the reasoning they must have gone through.  We've heard the advice that we should not condemn someone until we have walked a mile in their shoes.  That's a slightly different thing: to imagine what they've experienced.

It's my belief that education makes this activity—of imagining what someone else is thinking—a little easier.  It's never truly easy; if it seems easy, you're probably not doing it with enough enthusiasm. 

In these days, I try to imagine what it's like being a follower of Trump.  Bear in mind, though, that there are a number of different sorts of Trump followers.  There are those who (1) have followed Trump for years, and feel that they know exactly what Trump is thinking.  I have to believe that, having done that, they're ready with good reasons why he says things, promises things that he couldn't possibly deliver.  They probably don't take those promises seriously; they probably think: that's just politics; only just a fraction of election promises will be made good!

Then there are (2) people who have made a calculated decision to take Trump as their man because of some aspect of his character: perhaps he looks just like some family member who was uncannily sharp about political outcomes.  Maybe it's the way he talks.  Maybe it's his blonde hair and blue eyes, or how tall he is. 

Maybe there are some (3) who cling to him in the hope that he can do something tangible for them.  There are a lot of people (4) who dislike Democrats and Congress with a passion, and just want to make life as difficult for them as possible.  And of course, there are those who think that there are just too many Federal Regulations.  They don't feel that this is a free country anymore.

Given all this, (a) what do we think that Trump followers are thinking?  Can we get inside their heads?  And (b) what do these Trump followers think we're thinking?  Some writing by Trumpees (about what anti-Trumpers are thinking) are totally off the wall.  Well, at any given moment, people hostile to Trump and his followers could be thinking a lot of different things, that's true.  But I think the proportion of anti-Trumpers thinking to make the Trumpees angry are probably very few!  (Making ICE angry is different.  Also making Lindsey Graham angry could be a lot of fun.)  I, for one, am totally occupied with very different matters, and baiting Trumpees are very far from my mind. 

Thinking what's going on inside the heads of Trumpees 

Quiet! Quiet, Piggy

This whole country appears to be going to Hell in a Handbasket.

There used to be some doubt whether Trump had some psychological condition which made him insensitive to social norms.  But he seems to have surrounded himself with similar people, all of whom are perfectly happy to throw the entire USA under the bus, to stretch the meaning of that phrase.

I've contemplated responding to the flood of terrible administrative actions taken by the White House over the last few months, but being retired, I don't any longer have the necessary vigor to address the problems.  The election of Mr. Mamdani to the mayorship of New York City seems to be one happy thing to celebrate.  Mamdani is due to meet with the prez soon.  I sincerely wish we vould securely archive Mr. Mamdani to the Cloud, anticipating a hostile environment at this meeting, but better heads than mine are probably working on the security problem.

Arch 

Correlation Between Trump's Presidency and Drug Use

I think that there is some suspicion that the current administration might be causing a lot of headaches.  [This idea was first introduced by Andy Borowitz.]  Of course, we know that correlation is not causation; I mean, they teach that in Sunday School.  But if they do a study about the use of painkillers before vs after the inauguration, they might find that use has dramatically increased.  And we can draw the obvious conclusions. 

Arch 

Guns

The Republicans often float outrageous intentions, with the objective of getting a rise out of us.  The paving over of the Rose garden.  The plans to put in a ballroom in the White House.  The idea of leaving the body of the latest victim of gun crimes to lie in state in the Capitol.

These all seem calculated to generally annoy those who oppose guns and oppose the MAGA crowd.

Well, I haven't been on these shores long enough to acquire any feelings of ownership of the various buildings in the vicinity of the Mall, so I'm less insulted than most others.  They must regard this as retribution for the affront of having Martin L. King lie in state in the Capitol.

Arch 

A General Post About Cookware

Some years ago, nonstick cookware was all the rage.  It continues to be popular among people stuck with cooking duties with which they're unfamiliar!

After all, nobody wants to be stuck cleaning burnt-on food off the bottom of a fry pan.  (Unfortunately, non-stick coatings are made out of a type of plastic that does not react with anything, which is why it is nonstick.  But they're impossible to destroy—well, hard to, anyway—which means they stay in landfills for hundreds of years, which is an alarming thing, and considered a biohazard.  Dupont is vilified for inventing Teflon, and justly so.)  There are ways to avoid burnt-on food, and with modern equipment, and with a little knowhow, you can avoid the need for Teflon coatings. 

• Avoid very high cooking temperatures.  Only a very few cooking procedures actually need super-hot pans, and only for a brief period of time—searing a steak, for instance.  Even boiling water can be done with moderate heat; using the highest available temperature does not boil the water faster. 
• Using low temperatures makes the pan heat more uniformly across the base, which makes super-hot 'hot spots' less likely.  Those hot-spots are the places where food burns. 
• Cooking newbies (or 'noobs' which are usually guys) are often in a hurry, and so use super high temperatures, to get food cooked quickly!  That often gets food burned, which in turn gets the frustrated cook interested in nonstick.  If the cook uses low temperatures, then cast iron or ceramic-coated cookware works perfectly well. 
• If you do use cast-iron cookware, many of the recipes you use—but not all—can be completed in the oven.  That's an expert-level procedure. 

ARch