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I've just watched this marvellous lecture, given tonight at the Royal Institution. The speaker was Andrew Szydlo, who is an engaging mix of educator, scholar of the history of science, subject enthusiast, and showman.

The beautiful image above (flames not ghosts!) is one of the many demonstrations in the lecture. This one illustrates how compounds of different chemical elements produce characteristic colours in flames. The lecture made the point, which I'd never thought about before, that this must have been observed for possibly thousands of years, although the substances behind these colours were not understood in terms of elements in the modern sense. That idea has only been around for a couple of hundred years.

To give you an idea of the lecture's scope, it covered, amongst other things: the discovery and recognition of hydrogen as a gas, distinct from air; its connection with water, which gives it its name "Water producer"; ways of producing hydrogen; its use in ballooning and how then R101 disaster destroyed that dream; its use in rocketry that sends satellites up into orbit; its explosive properties when mix with oxygen; the discovery of gaseous diffusion; the role of hydrogen in the revelling of spectral lines; its seminal role in the beginning of quantum physics is; pH and acidity of fruits; and the fact that 78% of the universe is Hydrogen, first discovered by the brilliant Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin.

To find the YouTube video, just Google The Explosive History of Hydrogen Royal Institution.

F. D. C. Williard was a cat whose scientific papers were published internationally. 

Williard was a Siamese  owned by Jack H. Hetherington. Hetherington wanted to publish some of his work, but discovered that his journal of choice had a policy that papers with single authors must write in the first person singular, "i" , and not research to the author as "we".

This was in 1975 and the task of retyping the manuscripts would have been formidable at that time.So Hetherington decided to add his cat Chester as co-author, under the nom de plume F. D. C. Williard. The paper was published and F. D. C. Williard became quite celebrated, publishing a paper as sole author, and often being mentioned by other scientists in footnote, where they thanked please invaluable contributions to the discussion etc etc.

You can read all about this notable cat here.

This is something I read a long time ago, I can’t remember where. Someone spotted a sign that read 

Loose Alsatians

and wondered did it mean

1. Alsatians roaming freely.

2. Sexually incontinent outstations.

3. Alsatians with poor bowel control.

4. A demand that Alsatians be released from captivity.

5. Alsatians for sale in arbitrary numbers, not pre-bagged.

And I suppose we might add

6. Floppy Alsatians.

“That’s a whole Pandora’s box of worms you’ve opened up.”

SPEECH! How Language Made Us Human, by Simon Prentis. 

I've only just started but finding it very interesting. As a professional translator he provides many examples of how other languages may do something is a way that seems strange or unnatural so English speakers, only to flip the perspective and show us that from the others point of view we English speakers are the strange ones.

On Page 53 I found this wonderful joke. I don't know where it came from originally and it pops up in several places on the internet. I've reproduced it from memory, this is no a direct quote.

A mother mouse and her baby mouse were going for a stroll when they were suddenly attacked by a cat. The mother mouse shouted "BARK, BARK!" and the cat ran away scared. "See" says the mother, "how useful it is to learn foreign languages."

“Learning is the power that lets us discover our ignorance.”  

Translated from Erne of Armingford, probably writing ca 700 CE.

What day comes after Fry-up day?

Fatter day!

Given an equilateral triangle LMN, let X lie on ML extended, and Y lie on MN, such that LX = NY.

Show that the point P where XY and LN intersect is the midpoint of XY.