odditudes-and-weirdities

Wrong Line Day - September 2 Have you ever filled out a form incorrectly by putting something on the wrong line? All it takes is a badly designed form or just being distracted to botch up a form, sometimes (especially on government forms) forcing you to go through the whole thing again. ( Murphy's Law ensures that you won't make or notice the mistake until you're nearly done with the form.) We celebrate Wrong Line Day on September 2 because of a potentially impactful signature that went on the wrong line in 1945. The Canadian representative signing the "Japanese Instrument of Surrender", documenting the end of WWII, signed on the wrong line . It's unclear how Colonel Lawrence Moore Cosgrove made this mistake, triggering every following signatory (France, Netherlands, and New Zealand) to also sign on incorrect lines. It sounds like the Japanese considered making a big deal out of this, but the instrument got hand-corrected country names before things went ove...

Happy Catalan Numbers Day! Catalan numbers are a sequence of numbers that represent the counts of several mathematical concepts. They're named after Eugene Charles Catalan , a French-Belgian mathematician who worked on number theory and combinatorics .  One of the things Catalan numbers count are the number of Dyck words, which are words consisting of X's and Y's which: Consist of an equal number of X's and Y's, And where all beginning sub-words have their number of X's greater than or equal to their number of Y's. For example, XYXY is a Dyck word because XYX, XY, and X are all beginning sub-words where there are at least as many X's as Y's. But XYYX is not a Dyck word because XYY is a beginning sub-word where there are more Y's than X's. Note that if you substitute "(" for X and ")" for Y, Dyck words constitute a valid sequence for arithmetic or regular expressions. Here are the smallest Dyck words. This video provides...

Another year, another boring summary of that year's trip around the sun. (For those struggling with insomnia, I have a series of these: 2024 , 2023 , 2022 .) Here's this year's picture, meant to suggest that it's been relatively cold here this winter. (I actually do dress like this on especially cold days; the key to staying warm is "layers, layers, layers".) Health : My knee and back continue to cause sporadic issues but they don't normally prevent me from doing much. I somehow managed to hurt my hip. I'm not sure how it happened; my best guesses are pulling stubborn weeds out of the ground or trying to open a sliding glass door that doesn't slide very well. On the bright side, staying away from the door and with no wintertime weed-pulling activities, the hip issue seems to have (temporarily?) gone away. As I'm wont to do, I got flu and COVID vaccinations in the autumn, and (thus far) I haven't gotten sick this season. (I do worry that thi...

Here's the Cornell Lab of Ornithology jigsaw puzzle I recently completed. Although there are 120 bird species in the picture, there are a few cases where, due to sexual dimorphism , they show a picture of both a male and a female, so there are over 120 birds pictured. It's a 1000 piece puzzle. The birds are all indigenous to eastern/central North America, though it's not a complete set.  Some of you have heard this before, so be prepared for a recap. Here are some observations: I don't really have the proper lighting for doing jigsaw puzzles in my apartment. I have those somewhat out-of-date "pig-tail fluorescent" light bulbs, which doesn't exactly emulate natural light all that well. And even during broad daylight my living room doesn't get the sunlight that would be helpful, especially in winter. A couple times I turned a flashlight on some pieces, detected some red or yellow feathering, and quickly found a spot for them. (The flashlight trick waned ...

On the eleventh day of the eleventh month we celebrate This One Goes to Eleven Day! Inspired by a Frazz cartoon , which was inspired by the This Is Spinal Tap movie, this day is about going beyond what conventionally would be a limit. (Admittedly in the movie they changed the labels more than extended their limits, but you've got an opportunity to do better than that!)

Happy Interstellar Picard and Dathon at El-Adrel Day! This holiday celebrates one of the more interesting Star Trek TNG episodes . In it, the Enterprise meets the Tamarians, a race of people whose words translate well but without much meaning. The Tamarians employ a dangerous strategy to achieve a communications breakthrough; they transport Picard and their captain, Dathon, down to a planet where they'll need to coordinate together to survive against a dangerous predator. Picard eventually figures out that the Tamarians use allegory to express themselves, and if you don't know the allegorical references, their speech sounds like gibberish. Although the Tamarian captain dies, Picard's breakthrough in understanding the Tamarians allows the Federation to develop relations with them. The phrase "Picard and Dathon at El-Adrel" becomes a new allegory in the Tamarian language, presumably signifying a communications breakthrough or sudden understanding.