clockwise

We are fans of any method that encourages numeracy and engages and like the concept behind the Albert Clock, which does not surrender the hour without a challenge.  I always liked doing factorials (n!) myself and working out how many ways and with what operators one can reach a given number.  Depending on your target audience—this would be a good addition for a classroom or waiting area, the skill level of the problems to solve can be dialled up or down.

franking privilege

Found on Booooooom, we enjoyed these little figures composed of stamps and cancelations by Sapporo-based artist Baku Maeda. The cut-up typography includes the stylised katakana symbol〒(yūbin kigō, read more here) the service mark of Japan, derived from the word for communications teishin and used to as punctuation to indicate a zip code as well. Explore more of the artist’s portfolio, his collaborations with fellow creative Toru Yoshikawa and peruse a large gallery of his drawings and photography at the links above.

shock and awe

Gleaned from the latest instalment of Kevin Stroud’s excellent History of English podcast, our generic word for firearm entered the English language in the early fourteenth century as gunpowder was gradually making its way to Western Europe as the namesake of a very large and formidable catapult inscribed in the armorial inventory of Windsor Castle called Domina Gunilda.
This practise of naming munitions and engines of war after women is an ancient tradition that still echoes today and sure carries some problematic psychological associations—though recalling that the common female name of Norse extraction might be somewhat fitting, itself derived from Gunnr the Valkyrie, meaning battlefield and the handmaid of Odin assigned the onerous task of separating the heroic from the cowardly casualties and determining who gets into Valhalla. It is unclear if Lady Gunilda herself actually used any of the newly introduced gunpowder as a range-multiplier (early cannons, like their Chinese predecessors relied mainly on their ability to scare and disorientate belligerents by its noise rather than projectiles) though other, contemporary documents mention “gonnylde gnoste”—that is, Gunnild’s spark—and whatever the firepower, the written use of gonnes and handgonne appears shortly thereafter.

kernspaltung

Along with laboratory assistant Fritz Straßmann, chemist Otto Hahn, researcher at the Kaiser-Wilhelm Institute in Berlin, made a breakthrough on this day in 1938 that led to the understanding of the process of splitting the atom.
The results of their experiments were interpreted and explained to them by physicist Lise Meitner a few weeks later—being chemists, they interpreted the change as a chemical one—confirming that they had in fact demonstrated the previously unknown property of nuclear fission after bombarding uranium with neutrons and reducing it to barium—with attendant energy as a by-product, ushering in the Atomic Age.