mortiz080

I went to a concert the other evening...  ... full of Baroque and Renaissance music, held in a lovely chapel late in the evening--the performers played shawms, traditional bagpipes, recorders, sackbutts, and a stray hurdy-gurdy.     As we walked in, the usher handed us a program that was illustrated with this strange and wonderful illustration (this is a scan from the program cover illustration).   It's clearly snipped from a larger illustration.  But it intrigues me.  Is this a real thing?  Or just some illustrator's imagination run wild?   Here's today's Challenge:  1.  Is this a real instrument?  Or is it just a made-up thing?  If it's real, what would you call it?  2.  Can you find the original source of this illustration?  When and where was it first published?   This isn't all that hard to do, but I had to poke around a bit to find the original.  Let us know how you found ...

This past week we had a harvest-time Challenge.   It's Thanksgiving in the US, so our questions about sudden increases in pine cone production (and therefore, the production of pine nuts , which are just about my favorite tree product ever)  seems relevant.  Remember that our Challenges were driven by seeing pine trees like this:  1.  Does dying (or nearly dying) lead to a sudden efflorescence in plants?     2.  If so, what causes this effect?  How does the plant "know" this, and respond?  3.  Is this "sudden efflorescence" from a near-death experience true for any other plants?   This was a tough set of Challenges, but we figured it out!   Here's what I did...  Like many of you, I started by searching for:       [ dying pine cone production ]  and variations on that query.         [ dying pine cone bumper crop ]      ...

There is a tide in the affairs of men, Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune; Omitted, all the voyage of their life Is bound in shallows and in miseries. On such a full sea are we now afloat… This is from Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, at the moment when Brutus is encouraging Caesar to act because the time is right, and there's no better time likely to come soon.   There's an equivalent moment in the life of plants that's equally propitious... Or is it?   I've noticed something as I wander around, looking at plants and trees:  Sometimes the pine trees that look to be in terrible shape often have the most pine cones.   Is there a connection here?  Do dying pine trees actually produce a last gasp of cone production?  And if that's true, should I worry about those pine trees that suddenly produce a bunch of pine cones?  I was also noticing this about the bougainvillea in my front yard.  As you can see, there are lots of flowers ...

As you probably noticed...  ... I've been traveling a bit--hence the slightly erratic SRS posts over the past month. This will probably continue for a bit more time as I keep moving around the planet.      Taveuni, Fiji Both the springtime and the end of the year tend to be a busy time for me.  In the last 3 months of 2017, I will have visited Taveuni, Fiji; San Diego, CA; Washington DC; Pensacola, FL; Chapel Hill, NC; Knoxville, TN; College Park, MD; Cairns, QLD; Brisbane, QLD; Poughkeepsie, NY; and New York City, NY. Pensacola, FL This is what comes from being an itinerant scholar.  Even now, in the Age of the Internet and high bandwidth connections with live streaming 360-degree video, there's still an ineluctable value in actually being present .   Why is that?  Couldn't I just phone (or video) it in?   Knoxville, TN As my friends Judy and Gary Olson wrote in 2000 paper, Distance Matters .  One of the more surprising f...

How many and how people die, .. it's complicated.   More to the point, just figuring out which data sources you can trust for this kind of information is trickier than I would have thought.   I asked you about your intuitions, and before I did any research on this, I wrote down a few of mine:       A. What fraction of people die from car accidents?        B. How many people die from other kinds of accidents?        C. How many people die of different medical conditions?        D. What are the leading causes of death?     My guesses, before having done any research:  A.  Car accidents:  15% of total deaths / year  B.  Other (non-car) accidents:  5% / year  C.  Medical conditions (not including old-age):  50%   D.  Leading causes of death (of any or all causes), in order:      ...