Kiratarjuniya relates the story of combat between a Hindu hero, Arjuna, and the Lord Shiva in disguise. It is told in eighteen cantos (chapters) comprising several verses each. The fifteenth canto contains several tricks unique to Sanskrit; among them is a verse called the sarvatobhadra, meaning ‘good from every direction’.

devakanini kavade
vahikasvasvakahi va
kakarebhabhare ka ka
nisvabhavyavyabhaasvani

The translation reads:

‘O man who desires war! This is that battlefield which excites even the gods, where the battle is not of words. Here people fight and stake their lives not for themselves but for others. This field is full of herds of maddened elephants. Here those who are eager for battle and even those who are not very eager, have to fight.’

There are more word games in the same canto, including a verse in which all four lines read the same, but with different meanings from one line to the next.

Very little is known about the creation of the Kiratarjuniya or its author, Bharavi, who is not known to have written any other poems.

Photo Credit: Illussion

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Triple Divide Peak, Glacier National Park, Montana

Water which trickles down into creeks and rivers flowing from Triple Divide Peak will travel across a vast expanse of North America before finding its way to the coast from Oregon right round to the Gulf of Mexico near New Orleans.

This gives Triple Divide Peak the rare distinction of being a hydrological apex. One other is known in North America: the evocatively named Snow Dome (3,456m or 11,339 feet) which borders Jasper and Banff National Parks in Canada. Waters from Snow Dome flow into the same Northern and Western river systems as waters from Triple Divide, as well as separately emptying into the Arctic Ocean via the Athabasca River.

There is apparently some disagreement about whether Triple Divide truly sends water to the Arctic Ocean. It channels water into the North Saskatchewan River and from there into Hudson Bay, which mostly sends water to the Atlantic Ocean. But the fact that water from one single elevated point can flow to the Atlantic via both Hudson Bay in the North-East and the Gulf of Mexico a long way to the South-East (not to mention the Western outflows to the Pacific) is simply incredible.

Snow Dome, Jasper National Park, Canada

To paraphrase a famous saying, the journey to three oceans begins at one mountain-top (ok, two).

Photo Credits:
Triple Divide Peak—Thomas Kriese
Snow Dome—John Johnston

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It’s a technique which was used on naval vessels in both World Wars, going by the unlikely name dazzle camouflage.

The SS Empress of Russia, in 1918. A striking display like this wasn't just about being fabulous.

The characteristic dark and light contrasting stripes, diagonal lines and curves of dazzle camouflage were meant to confuse the enemy by distorting the lines of a ship when viewed through a submarine’s periscope and making it harder to aim accurately for artillery attacks.

The idea of using camouflage in combat had some early supporters as World War I broke out, but at first there was limited interest from military and political leaders. However a British naval officer and marine painter called Norman Wilkinson developed dazzle camouflage layouts to paint on warships; painting of the first vessel was completed in 1917. The US and other countries adopted the flamboyant paint schemes for their naval vessels, but any value from dazzle camouflage became marginal by World War II with advances in technology for the accuracy of rangefinders and (in particular) radar.

So did dazzle camouflage really make a warship harder to hit with a submarine torpedo? It seems that no one has a clear answer, in part because the wide variation of colours and patterns used on the naval craft made it difficult to establish which dazzle painting schemes were the most effective.

Photo credit:
Copyright National Museums Liverpool (Stewart Bale Collection, Merseyside Maritime Museum)

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The evocatively named snapping shrimp or pistol shrimp can be found across a wide range of the world’s oceans and gives sperm and beluga whales stiff competition for the title of loudest marine animal. The noise comes from a claw snapping movement which is so powerful that it serves as a formidable blasting weapon.

Pistol shrimp, known to science as Alpheidae, are asymmetric: they have one small claw and one extra large claw which does the snapping (the enlarged claw reminds me of cowboy Woody’s overstuffed bicep after he is torn and repaired in Toy Story 2). The snapping claw closes forcefully, sending out a pulse strong enough to knock out the pistol shrimp’s prey. Wikipedia describes the claw snapping action in this way:

The animal snaps a specialized claw shut to create a cavitation bubble that generates acoustic pressures of up to 80 kPa at a distance of 4 cm from the claw. As it extends out from the claw, the bubble reaches speeds of 60 miles per hour (97 km/h) and releases a sound reaching 218 decibels. The pressure is strong enough to kill small fish.

As these bubbles collapse they grow very hot, briefly reaching a temperature which almost matches the surface of the sun and creating a tiny but intense flash of light which cannot be seen by the human eye. Not bad for a crustacean which is no more than 5cm long!

Photo credit:
Ria Tan www.wildsingapore.com/wildfacts/

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Discovery of a planet or celestial body must be a bittersweet experience. Unlike the Earth-bound explorers of history, space pioneers never get to visit the far-flung objects they’ve discovered in the seemingly endless darkness of the solar system and beyond.

However Clyde Tombaugh will come pretty close. Tombaugh first observed Pluto in 1930, when he was 24 years old and fortunate to have found work at the Lowell Observatory despite not having had the means to go to college. He died in 1997; nine years later NASA launched the New Horizons space probe bound for Pluto. On board is a sample of Clyde Tombaugh’s ashes.

New Horizons is scheduled to come closest to Pluto (less than 10,000km) in July 2015 before heading past and eventually travelling out of the solar system, giving Clyde Tombaugh the most far-reaching space burial to date.

Photo credit:
Wikimedia Commons

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Whale Fishing Woodcut, 1574

Surprisingly, this really did exist. Whalers from the Basque region of south-western France based themselves in Iceland from the beginning of the 17th century. Despite some conflict (including a massacre of 32 Basques by Icelanders in 1615) a pidgin emerged when their language encountered Icelandic.

Some efforts were made to record the vocabulary of the visiting Basques at the time. Two documents were discovered in 1905 in the University of Copenhagen, listing a collection of words commonly used by the group. It’s not known who the authors were, or why they created the glossaries, which date from the late 17th and early 18th centuries.

Eventually research on the pidgin was presented in a 1937 doctoral thesis by N. G. H. Deen, a Dutch linguist who complicated matters by publishing his thesis in Latin!

Why were the Basques in Iceland?

The Basques were the first community to develop a substantial and far-reaching industry from whaling. Historians record that they crossed the Atlantic to hunt Right Whales in Labrador and Newfoundland in the 16th century, before arriving in Iceland by 1605.

Image Credit:
Wikimedia Commons

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Amundsen’s South Pole expedition placed him at the forefront of the grandly named ‘Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration’, a 25 year period in which there was a flurry of expeditions to the southern-most continent. But he had previously spent years in Canada’s Arctic zone, carving a name for himself out of the ice-covered Northwest Passage.

The Northwest Passage had been a highly sought prize among ocean-bound explorers for centuries: a fabled northern sea route between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans which, it was believed, would expand trade between Europe and Asia. Interest in finding the Northwest Passage dated back to the days when Christopher Colombus was crossing the Atlantic. Many attempts were made to find the Northwest Passage, and stories abounded of ‘ghost ships’ trapped in the Arctic ice for years, their crews frozen where they sat or slept.

Roald Amundsen set off on his attempt to navigate the Northwest Passage in 1903, finally reaching the Pacific ocean in 1906. Incredibly, part of his route across the top of North America took his ship through waters only 90cm deep (in Rae Strait).

Dramatic Changes in a Century

If Amundsen made his pioneering journey today, it would be less arduous. Satellite imaging has tracked a reduction in sea ice covering the Northwest Passage in the last few years, potentially making the waters navigable to more than just ice-breakers. The satellite image shows the 30-year average minimum ice coverage of the Arctic as a yellow line, and the Northwest Passage shipping route in red, along with the actual ice coverage in September 2011.

*At the time of writing: December 13, 2011. Amundsen reached the South Pole on December 14, 1911.

Image credits:
Roald Amundsen photo (1910): National Library of Norway
Satellite photo: NASA Goddard’s Scientific Visualisation Studio

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Deep Purple knows how to rock hard, and loud. Very loud. The band was listed as ‘Loudest Pop Group’ in the 1975 edition of the Guinness Book of Records with this citation:

The amplification for Deep Purple on their 10,000 watt Marshall P.A. system attains 117 decibels. This was sufficient in the Rainbow Theatre, London, in 1972, to render three members of their audience unconscious.

117 decibels is comparable to the magnitude of noise produced by a sandblaster or an emergency siren. Rock concerts have become louder since 1972. But Deep Purple’s reputation lives on.

Not that you’d know it from the origins of the band’s name. Originally formed as Roundabout, the band adopted Deep Purple as a name at the suggestion of guitarist Ritchie Blackmore. The book Rock Formations: Categorical Answers to How Bands Got Their Names states that the name came from an early 1960s song by Nino Tempo and April Stevens, which was a favourite song of Blackmore’s grandmother. A lovely gesture, but not very rock ‘n’ roll!

If you watch the video you’ll see what a departure the original song is from the hard rock territory that Deep Purple are part of. But in its early days the band had more of a progressive rock style and only began branching out into hard rock after a couple of years of touring and recording.

If you’re not familiar with Deep Purple, check out one of their better known songs here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pkg0xJj2A4w

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Blockbuster is a fairly young word whose meaning evolved almost as soon as it was coined. In film jargon, a blockbuster is a movie produced on a grand scale and earning a massive following. Queues of film-goers snaking out of the cinema are associated with blockbusters. The earliest films to be branded this way were in the 1970s: Jaws and Star Wars are among the first examples.

Previously, blockbuster was used in the theatre, describing a play with a very successful season: a smash hit, which indicates the true origin of the word. The earliest known use of the word blockbuster dates back to the 1940s and is a colloquial reference to a bomb. Wikipedia states:

The term began to appear in the American press in the early 1940s, at first describing the largest of aerial bombs, and later–by extension–referring to anything making a (figurative) public impact

This means that in a few short decades, the word blockbuster (literally, a bomb) has evolved to meaning the opposite of itself (a cinematic bomb).

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Erdős was a Hungarian mathematician who published more than 1,500 research papers in his lifetime (1913—1996), more than anyone else in his field. He collaborated with other researchers on several hundred of these papers, and it is this high volume of collaborative works that provides the foundation for the six degrees game known as the Erdős Number.

A person’s Erdős Number is determined by whether they co-wrote a paper with him, or with someone else who collaborated with him. Paul Erdős has an Erdős Number of 0. His co-authors have an Erdős Number of 1. Anyone who has collaborated with one of his co-authors has an Erdős Number of 2, and so on.

Helpfully, an online calculator has been created to look up someone’s Erdős Number (or their degree of separation away from any other mathematician).

Update

Spyros Heniadis has alerted me (in the comments below) to a great Radio Lab podcast which talks about the Erdős Number and Paul Erdős in more detail. It’s worth catching to hear about this extraordinary character, his unconventional life, upbringing and introduction to mathematics. The section on Erdős starts about halfway through the podcast.

Photo credit: Robbie Sproule

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