May 15, 2011 - Paraguay's Independence Day

This landlocked nation lies in the center of South America. 

The Guarani people fought against the Spanish and won their independence from Spain in 1811, but they continued to fight against their stronger neighbors. The War of the Triple Alliance, fought between Paraguay and the joined forces of Uruguay, Brazil, and Argentina, was the worst war in South American history and decimated the Guarani population—about half the population died during the war—and especially the adult males. Paraguay later fought against Bolivia for a hunk of land.

According to Wikipedia,  the history of Paraguay is even more contested than that of most nations. The “authentic” version of historical events depends on whether it was written in Paraguay, Argentina, Bolivia, Uruguay, Brazil, Europe, or North America. Even the two main political parties of Paraguay have different official versions of history!

There are actually truths to be known about history. Specific events did happen, on specific dates and times, and particular people did and said certain things. In theory, we could wade through various different versions of history, find evidence and eye-witness reports, and discovery what really happened. However, as a practical matter, it is hard to know what actually happened! It's best to find histories written by disinterested people—not the winners or the losers of a war, but outsiders who don't have an axe to grind as they write down accounts of events.

Check out Paraguay.

This tourism video is cheesy and oriented on attracting tourists from the U.S. and Europe—but it shows some interesting and beautiful sites.  

May 14, 2011 - Happy Birthday, John C. Fields

As a college professor and math researcher in the late 1800s, John C. Fields was disappointed in the state of math research in North America (he was Canadian and was teaching in the U.S.). So he went to Europe to hang out with some math greats and to make some math discoveries.

When he returned to Canada in 1902, Fields worked hard to raise the reputation of mathematicians in North America. One way that society honors people is to award prizes and especially to award prize money. So Fields started an award for younger mathematicians to give recognition of their contributions to mathematics, and also to help support their work with a monetary prize of $15,000.

The Fields Medal is very prestigious and is considered the Nobel Prize of Mathematics. (But Nobel Prize winners get a million dollars!!) One thing that makes this award different from most is that it has to be awarded to a person who is less than forty years old.

Wonder about math...

When I read about mathematicians, I often see words like research and discovery – and somehow that still manages to surprise me. In my world of helping little kids with arithmetic, math is something to be learned and used—something very, very practical as we deal with counting things, money, time, measuring lengths and weights and volumes... Math seems like something to be used in professional research or scientific inquiry--rather than to be the subject of it. And using a word like discovery makes me feel like there must be some magical math land that mathematicians visit—and that they come back and tell the rest of us about their latest findings...

But those musings are short-lived, and getting shorter, as I read and hear more about all the fascinating areas of math research and exploration. The TV show NUMB3RS was a fun way to hear about higher math and to learn how even very esoteric-seeming topics can be used in practical fields such as detective work.

Enjoy math!

If you like the idea of Mathematics Land, be sure to check out The Phantom Tollbooth, by Norton Juster, and A Gebra Named Al, by Wendy Isdell.

If you like the idea of math being all around us and very useful, check out the book The Math Curse, by Jon Scieszka.

And of course, there's always that wonderful Disney film Donald in Mathmagic Land! Love it!

May 13, 2011 - Celebrating Georges Cuvier

Important Note: Blogger has been down for about a day, which is why yesterday's post disappeared for a while and today's post was hugely delayed. I am sure the programmers at Google worked hard to get it back up ASAP, and I am sorry that this post came out so late...

Georges Cuvier named the pterodactyl and the mosasaurus. He opposed the idea of evolution. He proved that species of animals have gone extinct. He believed that the “original people” were white (Caucasian). He established the fields of comparative anatomy and paleontology.

Like so many scientists who lived and worked a long time ago, Cuvier had some really good ideas that established or revolutionized branches of science—but he also had some ideas that, since his death, have been shown to be utterly wrong. When you look at the work of Cuvier, a French biologist and paleontologist who died on this day in 1832, you can't help thinking that he would have changed many of his incorrect views if he could've seen the evidence we humans have gathered since his time.

For example, in opposing evolution—the idea that populations of animals change over time—Cuvier was opposing the theories of his contemporaries, Lamarck and Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire. And, we now know, those theories were incorrect. Charles Darwin's theories of common descent and of evolution driven by natural selection—which have been added to, now that we know about genes and DNA, but which TONS of evidence show are essentially correct—wouldn't be published until more than 20 years after Cuvier died.

As the saying goes, in science we stand on the shoulders of giants. Today's average 11 year old kid knows more science than the most brilliant Ancient Greek natural philosopher, and a college freshman pre-med student knows more Bio, probably, than Cuvier! Still, Cuvier is one of those giants of intellect and endeavor upon whose work biology is built.

Cuvier believed in catastrophism...

Cuvier studied fossils of animals that no longer exist today, such as the wooly rhinoceros and the mammoth, and he came to believe that they went extinct due to some sort of natural catastrophe. Geologists who put forth the theory of catastrophism explained geological formations through catastrophes, too; for example, the carving of canyons and valleys might be explained by mighty floods.

The opposite of catastrophism is uniformitarianism. This is the theory that geological features can be explained by forces we can see today, acting gradually over years, decades, centuries, millennia. Under this theory, valleys and canyons (for example) are carved slowly and gradually by many rainstorms and erosion events.

Today geology is based on uniformitarianism and catastrophism, together. Earthquakes and volcanoes seem like natural catastrophes to us, but to a geologist, these and other tectonic forces are constant enough to be an important, almost continuous, part of land formation and shaping. Erosion tends to be almost continuous, too. Catastrophes such as super-volcanoes, major storms and floods, and of course huge meteors (perhaps asteroids or comets) that impact the Earth all happen occasionally and sculpt the land as well. Biologists and geologists have worked out together that (almost certainly) at least some animal extinctions have been caused by huge tectonic or impact events.

May 12, 2011 -- International Nurses Day

This is the birthday of Florence Nightingale, a famous English nurse (born on this day in 1820). That's the reason that the International Council of Nurses chose this day to honor all nurses everywhere. Note that May 6 was National Nurses Day, and the whole week from May 6 to May 12 is Nurses Week.

Last chance to reach out to the nurses you and your family know and say a big THANK YOU! Give a card, flowers, or pie to your favorite nurse.

Learn about “The Lady with the Lamp”

Florence Nightingale tended to wounded soldiers during the Crimean War. Later she started the first secular nursing school in the world, in London, England. She was a gifted mathematician, and she was a pioneer in presenting statistics through pie charts and other diagrams. She made a comprehensive statistical study of sanitation in Indian rural life, and she successfully lobbied to improve the situation in India. She was elected the first female member of the Royal Statistical Society and contributed to the women's movement.

This remarkable woman has been honored, not just with a special Nurses Day, but also with her name memorialized in schools of nursing, hospitals, and foundations. There are statues and monuments of Nightingale, and there is even a remarkable stained glass window. Two different Florence Nightingale Museums have exhibits about her life and her legacy.

For more...

...including a jigsaw puzzle, crosswords and other puzzles, quizzes, info, and pictures, go to Garden of Praise. 

May 11, 2011 -- First Printed Book (?)

 – 868 CE

Sometimes people wonder when the first book was printed. They might vaguely remember something about the Gutenberg Bible, which was first printed around 1450. But there were printed books earlier than that in Asia.

The problem is, not only is the question tricky because we have to define the word printed, but it is also almost certainly impossible to answer. We have some very old books that have survived until modern times—but isn't it possible that the very FIRST printed book has fallen into ruin or otherwise been destroyed? Not only is it possible, it seems incredibly probably. Another problem is that we have some very, very old books that may be older than the first book that is dated—but those very old books are not dated, so we don't know which is oldest.

So, today's anniversary is of the first surviving, dated printed book. The honor goes to the Diamond Sutra, which was made with a 16-foot scroll with six large “pages” or sheets of text, plus one picture, and it was printed from laboriously carved wood blocks. The sheets measured 12 inches by 30 inches!

The scroll was dated “the fifteenth of the fourth moon of the ninth year of Xian Long” – which is the equivalent of May 11, 868 CE (or AD)--almost 600 years before the Gutenberg Bible! 

The Diamond Sutra is a Buddhist scripture. Even though Buddhism started in India, this scripture is written in Chinese and was discovered in a cave in Northern China. By the way, the discovery was made by a Hungarian archeologist, and the scroll is now located in the British Museum!

If you are wondering about the picture, it is thought to be an illustration of the Buddha surrounded by his disciples and two cats.

Make Prints!

Printmaking is a very interesting art form. For little kids, try string block printing or roller printing. 

Kinder Art has a variety of fascinating projects in printmaking! It would be fun to try several and compare. 

May 10, 2011 - Happy Birthday, Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin

Don't you love it when someone reveals a whole new understanding of the universe?

And when that “someone” is a woman, you'd think she was unusual enough that we would have all heard of her! But I don't ever recall seeing this English-American astronomer's name before, ever!

Born on this day in 1900, Cecilia Payne studied botany, physics, and chemistry at Cambridge, in England. She completed her studies but didn't get a degree. You've probably already figured out it was because she was a woman—yep, Cambridge did not award degrees to women, back then!

While at Cambridge, Payne became fascinated by astronomy, and she went to the U.S. to study astronomy at Radcliffe (now part of Harvard). She was the first person to earn a PhD in astronomy at the college—and her paper (doctoral dissertation) was considered brilliant by at least some readers.

What Payne did was relate the type (spectral class) of stars to their actual temperatures, and she showed that the variation of the placement of the lines in a star's spectrum was caused by different temperatures, not just different amounts of the various elements.

At the time, people were sure that the Sun and other stars was made up of the same stuff as the Earth. That was what is called “the accepted wisdom” of the time. However, Payne's analysis indicated that the Sun had a lot more helium and a MILLION times more hydrogen than the Earth!

Unfortunately, Payne was just a student, and a more well-established astronomer named Henry Norris Russell persuaded her not to put forth that conclusion. Later, other evidence emerged showing that Payne, not “accepted wisdom,” was right.

And here's where science shines: Russell looked at the evidence, accepted the evidence, and changed his mind.

Here's where science doesn't always shine: once Russell, the older, more famous, astronomer, changed his mind and accepted Payne's conclusion, many other scientists gave HIM, not her, the credit!

Aack!

Anyway, I have heard of Russell, because of the famous Hertzsprung-Russell diagram showing the different types of stars. I have never—until now—heard of Cecilia Payne.

(By the way, Payne later married and became Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin).

For more...

Read about the life and death of an average star. 

Learn about different types of stars using Astrobiology's Teacher or Student Guide. 

Here and here are worksheet activities you can use to compare various types of stars. 

May 9, 2011 - First Cartoon in Franklin's Newspaper

– 1754

What is a cartoon? I bet you already know that answer...

….Or do you?

The word cartoon comes from Italian and Dutch words for heavy paper. A cartoon used to be a preparatory drawing made (on heavy paper) before starting a tapestry, fresco, stained glass window, or painting.

The term evolved to mean humorous illustrations printed in newspapers and magazines. (We more commonly call them comics now.)

The word cartoon is most used these days to mean animated television shows.

Many early newspaper cartoons were not meant to be funny. Instead, they were meant to make a point—often a political point. We call these sorts of illustrations political cartoons. That's the case with this first American cartoon, published on this day in 1754 in Benjamin Franklin's newspaper The Pennsylvania Gazette. It showed a snake that was divided into eight pieces, and the caption read “JOIN, or DIE.” Can you imagine what the cartoon meant?

Hint: notice the initials next to each snake “bit.”

Second hint: Remember, there was no such thing as the United States in 1754. Instead, there was a series of British colonies up and down the coast of North America.

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I think Franklin was warning people that the British colonies should unite together under one government, or they will not be strong enough to survive. The eight sections of the snake were (in order from the head to the tail) New England, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, and South Carolina. Notice that there were four colonies (Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, and New Hampshire) in New England, and Franklin left Delaware and Georgia out of the cartoon! Didn't see any details on why he made those decisions...

At the time that Franklin ran the cartoon in his newspaper, the colonies were in danger from French colonists to the north and from Indians. Franklin had proposed a union under the Albany Plan—and this cartoon was a quick visual argument for why others should go along with his plan. The cut-up snake became quite popular and was re-used and re-drawn many times. As a matter of fact, it's still current: A punk rock group named Sons of Liberty used the picture and caption for an album called “Join or Die,” and The Late Late Show host Craig Ferguson has the cartoon tattooed on the inside of one of his forearms!

Check out some more historical political cartoons at Harp Week, and current cartoons at Daryl Cagle's website.