September 14th is
Cream-Filled Donut Day
∞
Eat a Hoagie Day
∞
Galactic Space-Time Ripple Day *
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MORE! Handel’s Messiah, Mork and Mindy and OPEC, click
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WORLD FESTIVALS AND NATIONAL HOLIDAYS
Bolivia – Día de Cochabamba
(Cochabamba uprising)
Greece – Finding of the True Cross *
India – Kerala:
Onam (Mahabali Harvest Festival)
Japan – Kyoto:
Hirano Shrine Manto (Lantern) Festival
Korea – Chusok
(Harvest Moon Festival)
Nicaragua – San Jacinto Day
(National War battle)
United Kingdom – Liverpool
Psych Fest 2016
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On This Day in HISTORY
326 – Helena of Constantinople discovers * the ‘True Cross’ and ‘Holy Sepulchre’ in Jerusalem
1682 – Founding of Bishop Gore School, one of the oldest in Wales
1741 – George Friedrich Handel completes Messiah for an orphan’s charity concert
1752 – First day in the British Empire under the Gregorian calendar
1812 – As Napoleon’s army occupies the city, Moscow blazes for four days, destroying almost 75% of the buildings. Cause is disputed, but French say incendiarists under interrogation declared Russian officers ordered them to burn “everything”
1866 – George K. Anderson patents the typewriter ribbon
1901 – U.S. President William McKinley dies of assassination gunshot wounds, and Vice President Theodore Roosevelt is sworn in as President
1915 – Carl Muench patents the first sound-absorbing material, made from cellulose fibers, for use as wall board
1917 – Russia is declared a republic
1938 – First flight of the VS-300, its design based on Igor Sikorsky patents
1940 – Congress passes Selective Service Act, the first U.S. peacetime draft
1948 – Groundbreaking ceremony in NYC for United Nations world headquarters
1959 – Soviet space probe Luna II is first man-made object on the moon when it crashes
1960 – OPEC founded by agreement between core members Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and Venezuela
1972 – TV series The Waltons premieres on CBS
1975 – Pope Paul VI declares Mother Seton a saint, the first saint born in the U.S.
1978 – Mork and Mindy premieres on ABC-TV
1983 – Metallica’s first public performance of “Disposable Heroes” at German festival
1984 – Joe Kittenger completes first solo balloon flight across the Atlantic Ocean
1985 – The longest bridge in Malaysia, Penang Bridge opens, connecting the island to the mainland
2000 – Microsoft releases Windows ME (millennium edition)
2015 – In Livingston, LA, and Hanford, WA, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO) detected gravitational waves, ‘ripples in the fabric of spacetime’ * for the first time
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Visuals
- Cream-filled donut
- International flags
- 1812 Moscow Fire, painting by Johann Heinrich Schmidt
- Theodore Roosevelt sworn in as president, electing not to use a bible
- Vought-Sikorsky VS-300, first flight
- Groundbreaking ceremony for U.N. world headquarters in NYC
- Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO) diagram
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Nicole Plyler Fisk
Gene Howington
FFS Guest Blogger
Joy of Fishes
Chuck Stanley
shortfinals
Terry Welshans
ann li-summers
wordcloud9
Flowers For Socrates 
I wonder how many other space time ripple days there are that we don’t know about.
My first computer was a Windows ME with an 8 gig hard drive. At one point I had an mp3 player with twice the storage of my pc.
I’m sure space time ripples happen all the time, but this was the first time all that scientific hardware paid off, and physicists were able to “see” them.
My husband’s first serious computer was a Compac portable we dubbed the “lugtop” because it looked like a portable sewing machine and weighed about 30 pounds. The tiny view screen came with a choice or green or amber characters in black, no graphics – today, cell phones have many more times memory than it did. We had to take out a loan to buy it because it cost as much as a mid-range new car did then.
I remember the Compaq lugtops, but I started really young. A portable computer when I started was but a dream. My first computer I had free access to was a Radio Shack TRS-80 Model I with 4K RAM and a cassette tape player as the storage mechanism that belonged to our school’s G&T program. I was hot stuff when we got 16K RAM, let me tell ya. I wrote a text adventure based on the Michael Crichton film “Westworld”. Chicks were just throwing themselves at me.
What made the poultry behave that way I’ll never know.
Yay cream-filled donuts
Yummy, but I was more excited about Chocolate Day.
When I was working on my dissertation, we used part of our grant money to buy a desktop calculator. It was about the same size as most bookkeepers use, except no paper tape roll. It did the usual adding, subtracting and dividing, but it had a fourth function! It would do square roots! Considering that I was using statistics requiring a lot of square root extractions, it saved a lot of time. Before that, I was using a Monroe that weighed only slightly less than a Buick, and must have had thirty thousand gears in it.
Our brand new four-function digital calculator, with a desk footprint smaller than a cigar box cost $1,200. Allowing for inflation, that would be $7,443 in 2016 dollars. Calculators with those functions are now on the dollar aisle at the supermarket.
It’s good to remember that some things are better than they used to be!
When I was in grad school, the IBM mainframe computer in the engineering department cost over a million dollars. It was huge, and they had to keep the temperature in the room controlled carefully. It had a “massive” 24K of core memory.
I believe my digital thermostat in the living room has more computing power than that IBM monster.
There were a lot of peripherals, including a disk drive in a clear plastic case, with a stack of six or eight Winchester drive disks about the size of LP records. Also lots of tapes running in panels on the wall. The printer was huge. It had a chain, like a bicycle chain, running horizontally. It had the letters and numbers along the outside of the chain, and solenoids would hit the symbols from behind, forcing them to strike a carbonized ribbon, like a typewriter ribbon. It printed an entire line of type at once. Noisy and required a lot of attention. Here is a cool video of one being adjusted and printing. I guess this dates me, because this is a museum exhibit.
When they took my Hollerith cards and ran my final calculations, it overloaded the computer, forcing it to shut down overnight. I used a multiple regression equation. An engineering grad student had to rewrite my program so it would run in segments rather than all at once. Took an extra week to get the printout of my results. I still have that stack of punch cards.
Our Celtic Lassie loved creme filled donuts. She considered Krispy Creme to be one of the basic food groups. As a testament to her monumental will power, she gave them up when she went on a diet to lose some weight before going to work for the ambulance service.