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17/07/2018

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29/09/2017

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30/01/2017

Today in 1955 the board game was invented

29/01/2017

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01/01/2017

Why is New Year’s day January 1st?

Because Julius Caesar said so.

Early Roman Calendar

Since long before Caesar’s time, date keeping was dicey. In fact, the 355-day Roman calendar that immediately preceded Caesar’s Julian, worked on a four year cycle where every other year, an additional month was inserted between February (Februarius), the last month of that calendar year, and March (Martius), the first month of the year; this was done in order to catch the calendar up with the Earth’s orbit of the Sun. That additional month, called the Mensis intercalaris, brought in the missing 22 or 23 days, and to even things up, took another five days from February in the years it was present.

Since the calendar had been designed to ensure the proper observance of religious dates, priests, called pontifices, were responsible for declaring when the interclaris month should begin and end. Since these priests were also involved with politics, they sometimes:

Misused their power by intercalating days or not intercalating them, merely in order to lengthen or shorten some magistrate’s year of office, or to increase the gains of some government contractor, or to inflict loss upon him.

By the time Caesar came around, the Roman calendar was in shambles, and in 46 BC, Julius Caesar commanded that it be changed.

Julian Calendar

The Julian calendar’s beginnings were as crazy as the old Roman calendar at its worst:

In order to wipe out the consequences of past neglect, it was necessary that the year 46 BC (called by Macrobius the annus confusionis) should extend to 445 days. The normal number of 355 days had already been increased by the addition of the ordinary 23 days, inserted after Feb. 23. As many as 67 days, divided into two me**es intercalares . . . were now interposed between November and December. . . . This year thus consisted of 15 months.

After this “year of confusion,” the new calendar really started. Intercalation was abolished, and each year was increased to 365 days, with a leap year added every fourth year (quarto quoque anno) to February. The months of the calendar after Caesar’s shake-up followed the old Roman calendar closely and most are familiar to us even today: Ianuarius, Februarius, Martius, Aprilis, Maius, Iunius, Guintilis, Sextilis, September, October, November and December.

Along with these changes, Caesar set the New Year to January 1. Why? Since 153 BC, January 1 was the day new consuls in Rome took office and Romans had commonly used the name of the two consuls to identify a specific year in question. Thus, by officially making January 1 start the New Year, it simply lined up with the consular year.

As to why the consular year started on January 1 instead of the original Roman Calendar New Year’s day of March 1, this isn’t known. That said, there are references that seem to imply that January 1 may have begun marking the New Year as early as 189 BC, which precedes when the consular year started beginning on that day.

One proposed reason for this switch is that January is thought by most to have been named after the god of transitions and beginnings, Janus, during the reign of the second King of Rome, Numa Pompilius, who lived from 753-673 BC. Thus, it was naturally enough for the Romans to eventually decide to make the switch. However, whether this is the reason or not is very much up for debate.

Gregorian Calendar

Although the Julian Calendar was relatively accurate, its use of 365.25 days in a calendar year, as opposed to the precise 365.2425 days, over centuries, created a discrepancy in the calendar. In fact, by the time Pope Gregory XIII (1572-1585) became the Bishop of Rome, the Julian calendar had lost 10 days.

It was this discrepancy that brought about the reformed calendar. Actually beginning 20 years before the calendar took effect with the Council of Trent in 1563, church leaders wanted to restore the spring equinox to the date it was when the First Council of Nicaea was convened in 325 (by 1563, the equinox was falling on March 11, rather than March 21).

As simple as making a Papal decree, Gregory issued the Inter gravissimas on February 24, 1582, and nearly eight months later, the last day of the Julian calendar, October 4, 1582, was followed by the first day of the Gregorian calendar, October 15, 1582. Voila!

Today, the Gregorian calendar is the unofficial calendar of the United States and the United Nations, as well as most countries in the world.

New Year’s Day

Since before even Caesar’s time, people celebrated the New Year. In ancient Babylon, this began after the spring equinox in March, and part of the celebration including subjecting the king to ritual humiliation. In fact, “if royal tears were shed, it was seen as a sign that Marduk [a god] was satisfied and had symbolically extended the king’s rule.”

After he was murdered by a small group of his “friends” (“Et tu, Brute?”), the Roman Senate made Caesar a god on January 1, 42 BC, a date which coincided with the time-honored practice of making offerings to Janus in the hope of having good fortune throughout the year.

Throughout the Middle Ages in Europe, January 1st’s New Year’s celebrations were discouraged, as they were seen by church leaders as a pagan practice. Instead, other days were often used as a substitute varying from nation to nation. This changed when the Gregorian calendar was instituted and, at least in the Catholic nations, January 1 once again became the official New Year, and it slowly spread from there with the Gregorian calendar.

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Bonus Facts:

As mentioned, many protestant nations ignored the Gregorian calendar for some time. England stuck to the Julian Calendar until 1751 before finally making the switch. Orthodox countries took even longer to accept the change in calendars. Russia, for one did not convert to the Gregorian calendar until after the Russian Revolution in 1917. The funny thing was, in 1908, the Russian Olympic team arrived 12 days late to the London Olympics because of it.

Under the Gregorian calendar we do not have a leap year every four years, since to properly align the calendar with the Earth’s orbit, an additional day is required in only 97 out of 400 years. So, leap years are calculated as follows:

Every year that is exactly divisible by four is a leap year, except for years that are exactly divisible by 100, but these centurial years are leap years if they are exactly divisible by 400. For example, the years 1700, 1800 and 1900 are not leap years, but the year 2000 is.

Expand for References

The post Why Does the New Year Begin on January First in Many Countries? appeared first on Crafty Puzzles Blog.

16/12/2016

Marcus J. asks: Why are bowie knives named that?

James Bowie is a man today known primarily for two things- his participation in the Battle of the Alamo and a large knife design that bears his name. It’s impossible to separate fact from legend concerning an amazing amount of this American folk hero’s life, owing to Bowie leaving exceptionally little in the way of a paper trail documenting the events of his life and the fact that contemporary news articles about him are conflicting in their reports. That said, concerning the topic at hand today, we do definitively know how the style of knife now known as a “Bowie” knife got the name and how it was popularised.

It all started in 1826 when Bowie and his brother Rezin were staying in Alexandria, Louisiana. In the years leading up to this, the brothers operated an illegal foreign slave trade business in which they’d acquire foreign slaves from Jean Laffitte, who in turn had acquired these unfortunate individuals via capturing slave ships traveling through the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean. The brother’s profit from this slave smuggling scheme supposedly made them almost $65,000 (about $1.1 million today) in the two years they were involved in it before moving on to land speculation.

This brings us back to 1826 in which James was in need of a loan for a business deal- a loan that one Norris Wright, banker and sheriff in Rapides Parish, Louisiana, denied the frontiersman. It is widely reported that there was bad blood between the two owing to Bowie previously supporting Norris’ opponent in the election to become sheriff.

Later, Bowie and Wright seem to have gotten in a physical tussle, with Wright drawing his pistol and shooting at the unarmed Bowie. The bullet missed, but various accounts claimed Bowie then lunged at Norris and the two fought hand to hand. Ultimately Bowie had to be pulled off of Wright lest he kill him. But, again, at the risk of being a bit of a broken record, so much of Bowie’s history lacks any sort of definitive primary documents to back up these stories, and even first hand accounts, when available on some aspects of his life, are often contradictory. So whether this is exactly how it happened or not isn’t clear. The real point here is that the pair most definitely didn’t like each other, partially leading to a more famous incident to come between the two, which gave us the name “Bowie knife”.

After the fight, Bowie was given what was essentially an overly thick butcher’s knife by his brother for protection. This was a knife Rezin would later claim in a letter that he had custom made, reportedly forged by Louisiana blacksmith Jesse Clifft.

At this point, you might be wondering why Bowie would want to carry that knife around and not a gun. It’s important to remember here that flintlock pistols of the age were notoriously unreliable for a variety of reasons, so a knife was sometimes preferred in relatively close quarter fighting. In fact, it was partially the unreliability of sidearms at the time that led to so many people wanting a Bowie knife, and later why its popularity diminished rapidly when more reliable hand guns, like the C**t pistol, became available to the masses.

In any event, in 1827, a friend of Bowie’s, Samuel L. Wells III, was set to duel a prominent Louisiana native known as Dr. Thomas H. Maddox. Both men were known to be mostly friendly with one another, but relations between their respective families were heated, with things eventually escalating to honour needing to be satisfied. Thus various duels were fought between the sides, including this one.

At the time, anti-dueling laws were in effect in the region, so the men arranged to shoot at each other on a small island in the middle of the Mississippi river, where they assumed state jurisdiction didn’t apply. Supporting each man was a contingent of friends and witnesses, some of whom had themselves previously dueled or otherwise come to blows with each other. Notable here is that one of them was the aforementioned enemy of Bowie’s, Norris Wright, who supported Maddox in the duel.

Taking place on September 19, 1827, the actual duel itself ended without any bloodshed; both Wells and Maddox missed their agreed upon number of shots. With that, the pair resolved to end the duel with a handshake, honour having been satisfied.

Up to this point, we can be reasonable confident the details are accurate from surviving news accounts. What happened next, however, is much less clear. While there are numerous newspaper accounts covering what would be called the “Sandbar Fight”, for legal and personal bias reasons, as well as possibly just notoriously inaccurate human memory, the participants of the event would later tell contradictory stories, and even impartial observers’ accounts differ. So take the details on the next bit with a grain of salt- the important thing in terms of the topic at hand today, the Bowie knife, is simply the general event and Bowie’s use of the knife in it.

After the shots were fired, it seems the two men shook hands, but tempers flared between Wells’ contingent and Maddox’s and a fight broke out. In subsequent news accounts, it appears that Bowie was a central target for Maddox’s side’s men, with it later being speculated that this was because “they considered him the most dangerous man among their opposition.” However, it should also be noted that Bowie wasn’t exactly the type of man who endeared himself well to others for various reasons, including somewhat unscrupulous business practices- the bottom line being that Wright wasn’t the only one who loathed him. So they may have simply targeted Bowie particularly in the fight because they just really didn’t like him and thought this was a great opportunity to kill him without getting into too much trouble with the law.

Whatever the case, Judge R.A. Crane drew his pistol and shot at the frontiersman, hitting him in the hip, then later let loose a second shot that missed and killed an unarmed innocent bystander, Dr. Samuel Cuney. Bowie then got up and charged at the judge, at which point the judge used the gun to club Bowie on the head, knocking him down once again.

It was at this point that Wright took the opportunity of his hated foe lying on the ground to rush him with his cane sword, stabbing Bowie straight through the chest. With sword through his body, Bowie then grabbed at Norris and pulled him to the ground. Using the knife he was about to make famous world-wide, he violently disemboweled Wright.

His nemesis dead, it was then reported that Bowie once again joined the rest of the Wells’ party attacking the Maddox contingent. Using a whirlwind of knife slashes, he seriously wounded one Alfred Blanchard while his brother ineffectually shot and then stabbed Bowie some more.

During the estimated 90 second brawl, according to the physicians’ reports, Bowie sustained about a dozen serious wounds from various attacks, including having been shot and stabbed multiple times.

After the melee ended, the physicians present attended to the wounded, including Bowie and, miraculously, he survived.

Shortly thereafter, the “Sandbar Fight” was national news, and Bowie’s exploits in it became the stuff of legend. Most pertinent to the topic at hand, reports tended to focus on the “large butcher’s knife”, as it was described by one witness, Bowie used in the fight.

In the months following the brawl, blacksmiths across the country were being asked by hunters and other men to make them a knife “like the one Bowie used”- a general knife design that was good to passable in use in knife fighting, eating, chopping, and various uses in hunting, such as skinning and carving up animals. In fact, within a few years of the fight, even blacksmiths across the pond in England are known to have started producing similar blades known as “Bowie” knives.

The post Why Bowie Knives are Called That appeared first on Crafty Puzzles Blog.

16/12/2016

Most people would agree that children are generally more creative than adults. Children draw more, ask more questions and come up with interesting ideas. There are two commonly held theories about why we lose our creativity as we age.

The first theory is that as we age, we become more and more aware of practical constraints such as gravity or economics. Working within these constraints prevents us from fully utilizing our imaginations. We must suspend our disbelief in order to be mentally playful.

The second theory is that our culture socializes creative properties out of people. When we are young we are encouraged to draw and play, but as we get older more emphasis is placed on more cerebral activities such as math and reading. Children are slowly trained that being able to do arithmetic is more important than being creative.

The post Children are more creative than adults appeared first on Crafty Puzzles Blog.

07/12/2016

When we are confronted with a problem, we typically look for a solution by thinking about past problems that we have encountered. Because a certain solution worked last time, we are confident that it is the best. This is uncreative thinking.

A creative thinker thinks about the problem from many different angles. This gives them a number of possible solutions to choose from, which helps them find a unique elegant solution.

The next time you are confronted with a problem (even a very tiny one), instead of jumping to the first obvious solution, take a step back and see if you can find several alternatives. At first this is going to be difficult to do, but with practice you will be able to come up with many alternative solutions to your daily problems.

The post Alternate Solutions appeared first on Crafty Puzzles Blog.

07/12/2016

Unlike Santa, elves or even clean coal, reindeer are real. They may not fly, but there’s a good deal of truth around the many myths of Christmas’s favorite animal. Yes, they do live in extremely cold conditions. Yes, they are known to pull sleds. And, yes, their noses really do turn a shade of red given the right conditions.

First off, caribou and reindeer essentially are the same animal and are classified as the same species (Rangifer tarandus). They are also both part of the deer family, or cervidae, which also includes deer, elk and moose. However, there are subtle differences. “Reindeer” is often used to describe the domesticated animals, the ones that are herded and employed by humans to pull sleds. They are also often smaller and have shorter legs than their wild brethren. In addition, the name reindeer is more often used to refer to the European variety, ones that live in Siberia, Greenland and northern Asia.

The word “caribou” tends to mean the North American (meaning living in Canada and Alaska) and/or the wild variety. Because caribou are wild and reindeer are domesticated, scientists agree that most of the differences between the two are evolutionary as opposed to inherent. Caribou are larger, more active, faster and migrate further than reindeer. In fact, the caribou undertake the largest land migration of any animal in North America every year in search of better conditions and food for their young.

Antlers are the defining characteristic of many large deer and Rangifer tarandus certainly have large antlers (in fact, they are the largest and heaviest antlers of any living deer species). However, there are differences between their antlers and other deer. Unlike other deer species, both male and female Rangifer tarandus can have antlers, but they possess them at different times of the year depending on gender. Males start growing them in February and shed them in November. Females start growing them in May and keep them until their calves are born sometime in the spring. This has led many to note that Santa’s reindeer (including Rudolph) would technically have to be all female because males usually shed their antlers by November- only females have them through the Christmas season.

For both caribou and reindeer, cold climates are where they thrive. Covered in head to toe with hollow hairs that trap in the air and insulate from the cold, they are built for the tundra and high mountain ranges. Their hooves and footpads also are adapted for frigid temperatures, shrinking and contracting in the cold which exposes the rim of the hoof. This allows them to gain better traction by cutting into the ice and snow.

Another cold weather adaptation is that the animal’s nose does, in fact, turn red. In much the same manner as humans, caribou and reindeer have a dense amount of blood capillaries in their nasal cavities – actually 25% more than humans. When the weather turns particularly cold, blood flow in the nose increases. This helps keeps the nose surface warm when they root around in the snow looking for food; plus, it’s essential for regulating the animal’s internal body temperature. This results in a reddened nose, matching Santa’s own cold weather red nose.

It’s believed reindeer were domesticated by native peoples (particularly by the Nenets) at least two thousand years ago in northern Eurasia. Reindeer bones have been found in ancient caves in Germany and France, meaning they once roamed much of Europe. Old Chinese annals dating back nearly eighteen hundred years ago also mention domesticated reindeer. Over a thousand years later, Marco Polo also wrote about tamed reindeer in his journals. People used reindeer in much the same way we use horses today, to transport people and supplies. There is even a good deal of evidence that humans used to milk reindeer.

To this day, there are still certain peoples (including Scandinavia’s Sapmi, Northern Europe oldest surviving indigenous people) who have come rely on reindeer domestication. Native peoples in Serbia and Canada (where again, they are called caribou) use reindeer for clothing, work, food and to even pull sleds. In fact, they are thought to be more powerful than an average horse and can run up to forty miles an hour even with an attached sled. Beyond horse-like chores, reindeer meat is also an important food source and has come to be considered something of a delicacy. (There’s even reindeer jerky).

While reindeer seem to be a pretty obvious animal to help Santa on his Christmas travels, they didn’t become part of the Jolly St. Nick story until the 19th century. In 1821, a New York writer named William Gilley published a children’s booklet where Santa and reindeer were first mentioned together: ”Old Santeclaus with much delight, his reindeer drives this frosty night.”

Later, Gilley would write that he knew about reindeer living in Arctic lands from his mother, who was from the area. A year later, Clement Clarke Moore would anonymously publish his poem “A Visit from St. Nicholas,” otherwise known as “The Night Before Christmas,” co-opting the idea and popularized it as part of Christmas lore.

Although it should be noted in his version he describes St. Nick riding a “miniature sleigh” with “eight tiny reindeer” that had little hooves. This, of course, explains how St. Nick was able to fit down a chimney- he was a tiny little elf.

In the 20th century, it was department stores that pushed the reindeer and Christmas narrative even further. Working with businessman Carl Loman – who had become known as the “reindeer king of Alaska” for selling the animal’s meat across the state – Macy’s put on what may be the first Christmas display featuring Santa, a sleigh and real reindeer in 1926.

Thirteen years later, the department store (now-defunct) Montgomery Ward distributed a coloring book featuring a cute little reindeer with a nose “red as a beet..twice as bright.” The author was an ad man named Robert L. May who, after writing the initial draft of the story, perfect it with the help of his four year old daughter.

May’s boss did not like Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer at first, as he felt a red nose implied the reindeer had been drinking. However, once it was partially illustrated by Denver Gillen, who worked in Montgomery Ward’s art department and was a friend of May’s, his boss decided to approve the story.

In the first year after its creation, around 2.4 million copies of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer were given away. By 1946, over six million copies of the story had been distributed by Montgomery Ward, which was particularly impressive considering it wasn’t printed through most of WWII.

After the war, demand for the story skyrocketed, receiving its biggest boost when May’s brother in law, radio producer Johnny Marks, created a modified musical version of the story. The first version of this song was sung by Harry Brannon in 1948, but was made nationally popular by Gene Autry’s 1949 version, selling 2.5 million copies of that version in 1949 alone and has sold to date over 25 million copies.

Interestingly, despite the fact that May created the story of Rudolph and it was wildly popular, he did not initially receive any royalties for it because he had created it as an assignment for Montgomery Ward; thus, they held the copyright, not him. In a rare move for a business, in 1947, Montgomery Ward decided to give the copyright to May with no strings attached. At the time, May was deeply in debt due to medical bills from his wife’s terminal illness. Once the copyright was his, May quickly was able to pay off his debts and within a few years was able to quit working at Montgomery Ward, though just under a decade later, despite being quite wealthy from Rudolph, he did go back and work for them again until retiring in 1971.

Today, reindeer (and caribou) are still found in cold, tundra climates across the northern world. Unfortunately, at least according to one study, reindeer populations globally are plunging. If things don’t improve for them soon, they may become as fictional as Santa himself.

The post Reindeer and Why They Are Associated With Christmas appeared first on Crafty Puzzles Blog.

02/12/2016

The following limerick has had the last word of each line scrambled. Can you figure it out?

It is the unfortunate THIAB

Of the rabbit to breed like a BIRTBA.

One can say without NOUSETIQ

This leads to TECGSONINO

In the burrows that rabbits TANIIBH.

ANSWER BELOW
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It is the unfortunate habit
Of the rabbit to breed like a rabbit.
One can say without question
This leads to congestion
In the burrows that rabbits inhabit.

The post Unscramble the Rabbit Puzzle appeared first on Crafty Puzzles Blog.

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