January 4 - Topsy's Bumpy Body

 In one of the darker turns of science and invention... Thomas Edison (yeah, the guy that 'invented' the lightbulb, I get the 'dark' pun) wanted to demonstrate to the populace how dangerous his rival's delivery of electricity was.  Edison was suggesting sending electricity by Direct Current, whereas his rival, Tesla (yeah, they really didn't like each other) was suggesting Alternating Current.  He suggested that AC was so dangerous it could kill an elephant.

And then he showed how.  He actually had his own movie company film the electrocution of Topsy, an Elephant who had a reputation of being 'bad' as it killed a spectator in 1902.  So Edison's film "Electrocuting an Elephant" documented.

This happened on this day in 1903.  What a weird time.

In lighter times, a retired wrestler, Jesse "the Body" Ventura, had decided to try out the ring of politics and on this day in 1999 was sworn in as the Governor of Minnesota.

He made the transition from 'the body' to 'the mind'.

In powers of 'the mind' is the ability that when someone loses their eyesight, a system of bumps was invented by a guy named Louis Braille to represent letters and word.  

Braille code, started in 1824 when Louis was just 15.  Nowadays, it's a simple 3x2 box of pixels and gives 64 possibilities.  I just find it amazing that someone can learn to read like that.

Today is World Braille Day

Aug 12 - Schrodinger's Young Elephant

 Ask people about Schrodinger, and they may - just may be able to remember something about him and a cat in a box.  But Erwin Schrodinger (who would have been 134 today) brought much more than a gedankenversuch about a cat that's both dead and alive - that thought experiment came out of his explanation of how something can be 2 things in quantum mechanics.

He won the nobel prize for his Schrodinger equation which describes the behaviour of the wave function.

Now, as for the young elephant.

Today is also International Youth Day

Isn't that every day for them?

And it's also, my son's favourite animal (speaking of youth), World Elephant Day.

Wonder if Schrodinger first tried to do his thought experiment with a young elephant in the jungle before he settled on cats in boxes with poison.