odditudes-and-weirdities

Some places on the web (mostly but not entirely zoos) advertise today as World Anteater Day! I'm assuming that today is about celebrating the true  anteaters , 4 species that are related to sloths but that excludes animals with similar eating habits through convergent evolution like Aardvarks or Pangolins . Anteaters don't just eat ants; termites are on their menu too. And so are less social insects of a similar size. Since ants and termites will attack with bites/stings, anteaters utilize a hit-and-run strategy. They tend to slurp up some insects at a nest, then move on to another nest that's not gearing up to attack the anteater. Though you might not share their dietary preferences, you can still celebrate these odd animals today 350z33, CC BY-SA 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

Happy Fractals Day! Today is a day do celebrate fractals and the math ( measure theory , chaos theory ) underlying them.  Fractals are fairly weird. If you zoom in on a fractal pattern far enough, you'll see a self-similar fractal pattern. And the length of any 2 points on a fractal pattern "curve" is, due to infinite smaller patterns, is infinite. Though they're an abstract notion, they do have some relationship to the natural and technological worlds . We celebrate Fractals Day on November 20 because on this date in 1924 Benoit Mandelbrot , a fractal pioneer and the first person to use a computer to create fractal geometric images, was born. By Created by Wolfgang Beyer with the program Ultra Fractal 3. - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=322042

Happy Lucas Numbers Day! If you understand Fibonacci numbers , you'll have no trouble with Lucas numbers . Just like the Fibonacci numbers, the Lucas numbers start with 2 "seed numbers", and every subsequent number is defined as the sum of the preceding 2 numbers. The difference is that while the Fibonacci numbers start with the seed numbers of 0 and 1, the Lucas numbers start with the seed numbers of 2 and 1. This produces a different but similar sequence of numbers. Similar to Fibonacci numbers, Lucas numbers are found in nature. Some sunflower seed patterns eschew the Fibonacci numbers, and use the Lucas numbers instead. Also similar to the Fibonacci numbers, as the numbers get larger, the ratio between consecutive numbers converges on the golden ratio . We celebrate Lucas numbers today because the date, November 18, can be represented as 11/18, the largest consecutive Lucas numbers to form a date.

Happy Godzilla Day! On this date in 1954 the first Godzilla movie was released throughout Japan. While Godzilla was initially considered a metaphor for nuclear weapons, later renditions of Godzilla have been more heroic, saving Earth from other giant monsters. And although early Godzilla movies probably remind you of campy special effects, they were considered good enough in 1954 for the movie to win a Japanese film award in that category. (Of course, nowadays we can make Godzilla depictions that look a lot more like a real creature.) By Toho Company Ltd. (東宝株式会社) - movie poster made by Toho Company Ltd. (東宝株式会社, Tōhō Kabushiki-kaisha), Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3648684