The Inchworm

A young inchworm struggles to get ahead, while being annoyed by a party of ants.

3.14159etc

I was listening to Talk of the Nation Science Friday on NPR today as I did my three-mile walk. Today is Pi-day (March 14 = 3.14...).

It is also Albert Einstein's birthday. Here's the link to some interesting happenings:

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=88239845#share

Tristan und Isolde - Liebestod

The lovely Waltraub Meier sings this classic love aria

Daylight Saving

Daylight Saving returned while we were asleep last night, and it's good that these days our computer through some magical internal procedure recognizes the change. So to check the correct time and reset all the clocks in the house we now look at the clock on the bottom right-hand side of the screen.

In the old days you would pick up the phone, call P.O.P.C.O.R.N. and a woman's voice, pleasant enough though a bit robotic, would say the correct time at ten second intervals: 'At the tone, Pacific Daylight Time will be nine-thirty-five and fifty seconds.' No more. Either the phone company has decided that this useful resource is no longer needed by the populace at large who care about the correct time, or it has found that there is no pay-out for the cost of tying up their resources in the face of increasing competition.

Adjusting all the clocks in the house is a chore, especially since we have a few older clock radios with digital readouts that can go only forward. So if you make a mistake and go past the time you were trying to set, you have to cycle through another twelve (or sometimes twenty-four) hours in order to get it right. On newer clocks you get buttons that allow backward as well as forward adjustments, and you can also easily toggle between A.M. and P.M.

The older hand-wound clocks and watches made life easier still – you just moved the hour hand a complete cycle forward in the spring, and backward in the fall.

And please, people, it's Daylight Saving, not Savings. (It ain't a bank.)

Sad

The death last night of a friend and business associate makes us sadly aware of how fragile life is. Three months ago he was the very image of good health; at age sixty-seven he was active and fit and full of joie de vivre. Then he developed what he thought was a case of bronchitis that affected his breathing. A series of tests over the past two or three weeks traced the source of his breathing problem to cancer. Only two days ago his family was notified that the disease was terminal. And today he is gone.