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austin_dern) wrote2006-03-28 12:21 am
Put a chain around my neck and lead me anywhere
I didn't realize the teddy bear had been immature all these years. But a promotion at Centrepoint mall is based on the notion ``The Teddy Bear Has Finally Come Of Age,'' a point it proves with a rather cute picture of a teddy bear, with glasses and bathrobe on, sitting in bed while a kid sleeps nearby, reading The Origin of Species. The book has the title imprinted in the back cover, in a fashion I haven't seen for books published this side of the Second World War.
I missed the ``Bear's Day Out,'' in which one could treat your bear to tea and biscuits at Marks and Spencer's Café Revive by being the first 200 to bring him and your receipt to the customer service counter. I also couldn't find the place to vote for your favourite amongst all the bears displayed in the shop windows for a chance to win a bear hamper worth $300. They can't mean hamper the way I know the word. I'm pretty sure they were in the mall somewhere, but I have a cognitive disorder that makes me unable to see the kinds of stores that have teddy bear displays or silk-based window displays, to the endless frustration of my mother when she sends me out to buy a new pair of gloves or something like that. I'm going to guess they were the sorts of teddy bears you look at from a distance while they're elaborately overdressed and posed in alarmingly ornate settings, not the sorts of teddy bears that you hit your little brother on the head with daily until you're seven, then your mom hides to put on her dresser after you leave for college.
They also offered a ``Bear With Me Writing Contest'': Write a story about your own teddy bear and you may win a Sasha's Bear worth $22.90. I hope the readers for the contest are getting danger pay. I have to imagine a collection of teddy bear stories would run very high levels of twee interrupted by the occasional piece of AAAAAAAUGH. Maybe there'll be a sequel to the Voyager fanfic classic ``I Am Chakotay's Bed Pillow'' in there. More, the posters said one could win a trip to England with every $50 spent, but what they meant was you had to do a specifically lucky fifty dollars of spending. Overall, it reminds us all that there are such things as teddy bears.
Trivia: Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, co-inventor of calculus, urged his patron, the Duke of Braunschweig-Lüneburg, to make a commemorative coin or medallion which showed the binary integers from zero through seventeen. Source: The Historical Roots of Elementary Mathematics, Lucas NH Bunt, Phillip S Jones, Jack D Bedient.
Currently Reading: The Evolution of Useful Things, Henry Petroski.
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Well, now, that's a tough call, but with the popularity of supernatural romance a vampire teddy bear could just be ready for the big pop culture wave.
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I've got no idea what the deadline is. I didn't bring my camera, so I just took notes of one of the poster while passers-by looked curiously at me, and I didn't think to register dates. I'll check when I get back to the place, though.
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Probably used in the English sense, what an American would call a picnic basket. A basket with a hinged lid, basically.
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All right, but even so, there's an upper limit to how well hamped a basket can be.
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I tend to favor Leibniz's claim, but I am biased. (This is one of those points of pride tenaciously claimed by academic philosophers, like the Kant-Laplace theory which, I'm told, scientists generally just associate with Laplace, though Kant actually had it first, gosh darn it.)
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I don't really know any good way to describe two people who independently discover something pretty near simultaneously; I just wanted to have it clear that the Leibniz I meant here was the same Leibniz famous for calculus. Charles Darwin and Alfred Wallace is maybe better confused; John Couch Adams and Urbain Jean-Joseph Leverrier are similarly tangled. For what it's worth, in higher mathematics the fact that Leibniz's form of calculus is the kind that people can actually use is mentioned rather a lot, with Newton's form being written off as ``something with fluxions''.
I wasn't aware Kant was perceived as getting short shrift. Admittedly I'm more alert to scientific history than most math and science majors, but I don't read more than what amount to popularizations of math and science history. Kant I remember being given credit for the nebular hypothesis for solar system formation, that tidal forces may well be slowing the Earth's rotation, the idea that the Milky Way might be just one galaxy (or island universe, I guess they said back then), and for pointing out that the fact gravity between two objects falls off as the inverse square of the distance between them implies a three-dimensional space (and, more generally, that physical laws are constrained by the geometry of the universe, and vice-versa). I have the nagging feeling I'm overlooking something else obvious, but I don't want to cheat by looking stuff up.
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Years ago, my dad bought from eBay a set of Russian prints with portraits of notable people on them. One of the depicted people was Kant. Dad had that picture framed, gave it to me as a present, and then asked me to sell the rest of the set off for him (I know it seems awful to break up a set, but I should point out that the set was already incomplete when we got it).
In order to sell the set, I thought I would need to be able to provide a list of who was in it. Some of the people I could recognize, but most I couldn't, and their names were in Cyrillic letters. So I found a transliteration of the Russian alphabet and with that I was able to figure out who the rest of the people were. What Dad thought was just a set of "famous people" turned out to be comprised entirely of astronomers and mathematicians (presumably mathematicians who had made some contribution to astronomy). Looking closely over the folder the pictures came in, I figured out that it came from the Moscow Observatory and was apparently issued as a commemorative set on the occasion of the Observatory's centennial. So I really prize my Russian Kant portrait because I think it's really neat to see him being celebrated as an astronomer.
In my recollection (and you probably know more about it than I), Newton invented calculus first in his private notes without publishing it. A few years later, Leibniz invented it in his private notes. Leibniz than published his version, and Newton took his sweet time and waited twenty more years to publish his (I don't know why it took him so long). At that point people noticed the similarity between them, and egged on by their respective colleagues, Leibniz and Newton entered into a feud about who was the rightful inventor.
Personally, I think "first to publish" should be the winner.
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Unfortunately, everybody a person might admire has some horrible side aspect that makes that person repulsive too. The only exception I've found is Charles Schulz, who doesn't seem to have a nasty side.
That does sound like a neat set, and it is always neat to see people commemorated for the things they're not always first-renowned for. (Come to think of it, I'm not sure how I've picked up as much trivia about Kant as physicist/mathematician as I have; I suspect knowing you has primed me to remember mentions I see.)
The Newton-Leibniz controversy gets really hairy because while Newton was certainly first with differential calculus, and Leibniz was first to publish, it's known that they corresponded during the 1670s, when both were developing and refining their ideas, and they talked mathematics as you might expect. At some point Leibniz did read a manuscript from Newton that contained critically important ideas from which you could at least get a huge step forward; we know this because there's a copy of it in Leibniz's handwriting. But there's no evidence of just when he did copy it. He could have seen it while visiting England in the mid-1670s, before publishing his memoirs (1684); he could have seen it anytime from 1687 (Newton publishes) till his death. Leibniz either didn't remember seeing the manuscript or tried covering up having seen it, depending on how you want to view Leibniz's motives.
What the truth is just can't be determined here. Leibniz certainly published first; but Newton did have the fundamentals first, and there's evidence consistent with Leibniz either plagiarizing Newton or getting important aid from him. I don't think he did, at least not past the benefit that any two intelligent people get from talking out their work, but that's just my hunch and my guess that people are generally honorable and decent, a philosophy which may have lead me wrong occasionally but which I stick to anyway.