View from my perch

2.500 grams for your thoughts?

A penny for your thoughts? How much does that penny weigh? The US Mint has the answer at this web-page, along with more specifications for the penny as well as for other coinage. The web-page gives the weight of the penny as 2.500 grams. That must of course be the target-weight for manufacturing or "minting" pennies, with the actual weights having a Gaussian distribution about the target weight. It would be interesting to know how the average weights of coins trends over their lifetimes (30 years). My guess is that the effects of wear and of accretion and oxidation combine to greatly spread the distribution of weights, but the net effect is probably slight.

A few trivial tidbits from the US Mint web-page:

• The penny is copper-plated Zinc, not pure copper. In fact the copper-plating accounts for only 2.5% of the weight. Of course that makes sense; a pure-copper penny would be unacceptably soft.


• The nickel weighs in at 5.000 grams, twice that of the penny.


• The composition of the nickel, dime and quarter is the same Cupro-Nickel, consisting of 8.33% nickel (Ni) and the balance in copper (Cu).

That's more than a penny's worth of coinage trivia. Don't spend it all in one place.

From the Grand Canyon to Oz

My recent visit to the Grand Canyon set me to wondering about the first sighting of the Canyon by Europeans. The first was Spaniard García López de Cárdenas, in 1540. (Cárdenas' party was a unit of Coronado's search for the "Seven Cities of Cibola".)

In a chapter/essay entitled "The Loss of the Creature" in The Message in the Bottle: How Queer Man is, How Queer Language Is, and What One Has to Do With the Other, author Walker Percy compares the perception of the Grand Canyon by a present-day tourist with that of Cárdenas at the time of his discovery.

The blogger responsible for The Dogfish traces the origin of the blog's name in post Dogfish: In the Beginning to inspiration from "The Loss of the Creature". She states that the essay is "about the sovereignty of the learner and the knower" and goes on to explain the dogfish.

And the dogfish? It was an example Percy used. The zoology student is so surrounded by the “package” of learning that it becomes impossible to truly see the dogfish lying there on the dissection table.

The same blogger provides a link to her other blog, Honeydew, where the post for Thanksgiving  includes a picture of the "Turducken" prepared for the feast. The "turducken" in this case was a Cornish hen inside a chicken inside a duck inside a turkey. (See also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turducken.)

This odd nesting of fowl naturally reminds one of the story of the Churkendoose. "The Churkendoose" is a children's story featuring a misfit fowl ("part chicken, turkey, duck, and goose") who teaches kids that beauty is in the eye of the beholder and it all "depends on how you look at things". In 1946, Ray Bolger (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_Bolger) recorded the story as a children's album for RKO. I was surprised to find the recording available as an mp3 at wilderworld on "pod-O-matic"; the namesake and inspiration for the podcast, Alec Wilder, was credited for the music used on the 1946 recording. (See http://www.alecwilder.org/ for more on Alec Wilder.)

Of course the aforementioned Ray Bolger is the same fellow who played the scarecrow in the 1939 movie, The Wizard of Oz.

 

Fowler place names

Following is a tabulation of place names in the U.S. which include my surname as found on website www.placesnamed.com (http://www.placesnamed.com/f/o/fowler.asp). Numbers following place names indicate the number of occurrences when more than one.

Fowler, Alabama (2)
Fowler, Arizona
Fowler, Arkansas
Fowler, California
Fowler, Colorado
Fowler, Illinois
Fowler, Indiana
Fowler, Kansas
Fowler, Louisiana
Fowler, Michigan

Fowler Bluff, Florida

Fowler Crossroads, North Carolina

Fowler Grove, Tennessee

Fowler Heights, Pennsylvania

Fowler Landing, Maine
Fowler Landing, North Carolina

Fowler Spring, Alabama

Fowlers Crossroads, Alabama
Fowlers Crossroads, North Carolina

Fowlers Mill, Ohio

Fowlerston, West Virginia

Fowlersville, New York
Fowlersville, Pennsylvania

Fowlerton, Indiana
Fowlerton, Texas

Fowlertown, Georgia

Fowlerville, Michigan
Fowlerville, New York (3)

Learning Spanish

I have been learning some Spanish lately, through the use of the following two resources available via the Internet.

1. Coffee Break Spanish
   
2. Destinos: Introduction to Spanish

Regular birds

Here is a list of bird species which frequent our hillside bird feeder:

Mourning Dove
House Finch
Song Sparrow
Western Scrub Jay
California Thrasher
California Towhee
Spotted Towhee

Our "hillside bird feeder" is simply the side of the hill just outside our door, onto which we throw some birdseed every morning.

Other regular visitors are "J.R." and "J.S." -- "Just Rabbit" and "Just Squirrel".

Hawk Mountain Sanctuary

Hawk Mountain Sanctuary is a place to which I have been many times and which I plan to visit again this autumn. Situated on the Appalachian Flyway in east-central Pennsylvania --roughly north of Reading and west of Allentown -- Hawk Mountain Sanctuary is noted as an extraordinary site for watching the annual autumnal spectacle of raptor migration.

Geographic incompetence

The map on the right is a section of Amtrak's National Route Map. Can you spot the error here? Yes, that's correct, Manitoulin Island -- which belongs to Ontario in Canada -- is colored as if it belongs to the United States. Admittedly, it is a somewhat obscure geographic feature, but if -- like me -- you have family that came from there, you will recognize it as Canadian. The person tasked with making this map has publicly demonstrated geographic incompetence.

 

Murphy the Dog

Once I met Murphy the Dog, I knew that an Australian Shepard is the dog for me.

I met Murphy on the front porch of a little cafe in Tumacacori, Arizona, across the road from the entrance to the Tumacacori National Historic Park. He was laying at the feet of his owners, a nice couple from Tucson. The woman told of how once, a bird had gotten into their house; they had chased the bird around the house, trying to get it to the door and back outside, but without success. Ultimately, Murphy caught the bird, held it gently in his mouth, carried it to the door and, after being let outside, released it unharmed. An impressive display of intelligence and compassion.

By the way, a segment of the Juan Bautista de Anza National Historic Trail passes near the historic park.

Japanese Story, Pilbura Desert

I recently rented a movie entitled "Japanese Story". It stars Australian Actress Toni Collette as an Australian geologist who is given the task of being the tour-guide for a visiting Japanese business man Hiromitsu, played brilliantly by Gotaro Tsunashima. The location for the tour is the somewhat Mars-like and starkly beautiful Pilbura Desert in Western Australia.

To quote from IMDb, the pair "play out a story of human inconsequence in the face of the blistering universe. The end of the journey leaves no-one capable of going back to where they started from."

Toni Collette's acting is superb and she is perfect for the role. She is slightly frail yet rugged looking; beautiful in the same strange way that the Pilbura desert is beautiful.

The keyword for this movie is surprise. The location and extraordinary performances, the twist to the plot, the "psychological intensity", and the lasting effect of the movie are all surprising.

It was, for me, perfectly engrossing and affecting, and it is one of those movies viewers are likely to either love or hate. As such, it is another "litmus test movie", reminiscent the Meryl Streep movie "Plenty". Any reviewer who gives poor ratings to either of these movies is undeserving of my attention.

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Links:

Green Cine: Japanese Story (2003)

Haro Online: Japanese Story

Rotten Tomatoes: Japanese Story

IMDb: Japanese Story (2003)

The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara

The Vatican claimed Edgardo Mortara, who was Jewish, had been secretly baptized when he was two years old by a servant who wanted to save his soul. In 1858, when Edgardo was six, the Vatican ordered that the boy be taken from his home in Bologna, then a papal state, to be raised Catholic. In the face of an international outcry, Pope Pius IX adopted the boy.

This story is told in an episode of the PBS mini-series Secret Files of The Inquisition. It draws on the book The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara, by David I. Kertzer.