Quiz erat demonstrandum

“Today is the first day of the rest of your life,” and: “Your message is very important to us” – I was impressed by these sentiments when I first heard them, and have been teased ever since for not knowing that they were already clichés.  Well, today is the first of what I hope will be your best year, and here is the morrow’s pre-dawn sky.

Mercury, Jupiter, and Venus, in that order of increasing height and brightness, slope up from where the Sun is about to rise.  Saturn was almost exactly behind the Sun six hours ago.  The waning Moon cruises past them, closest north of Venus in the night between January 1 and 2, and Jupiter the following night.  Some Quadrantid meteors may already be showing in the sky – in our dawn picture their radiant would be above the eastern horizon but very high, almost at the zenith.

We’re giving a rest now to those imaginary Earths that show our route forward into the new year – by now you can perhaps imagine them out in front of the ecliptic, but dwindling away along the ring that is Earth’s orbit, to pass behind the Sun six months into the future.

As for “Your comments are very important to us”: your answers to the Christmas Eve quiz were good but few.  That was my fault for making it rather intimidating.  We’ll try a lighter one sometime.  Meanwhile, here are the answers according to me.  Several people got most of them.

(1)  Isaac Newton was born on both 1642 December 25 and 1643 January 4, because those were the same date, as expressed in the Old Style (Julian) and New Style (Gregorian) calendars.)

(2) The word quiz doesn’t come, as might be expected, from a Latin questioning word such as quis, “who?”  According to the Oxford English Dictionary, its earliest known meaning (from 1780) was “an odd person,” and the story about its origin (though this story is attested no earlier than a newspaper of 1835) is that Richard Daly, an Irish actor, made a bet that he could invent a meaningless word and have people using it within twenty-four hours.  “The letters Q, u, i, z were chalked or pasted on all the walls of Dublin with an effect that won the wager.”  (There was already the word quirk, “odd characteristic,” also of unknown origin, so maybe that was why people gave this new unknown word the meaning “odd person.”)

(3)  Words for star:  Stern German, étoile French, estrella Spanish, zvezda Russian, stella Latin, astêr Greek, astron also Greek, yildiz Turkish, kaukab Arabic, kochav Hebrew, setâre Persian, stelo Esperanto.  I mis-spelt the Russian and Esperanto as zvezd and stela, and could have added Arabic najm and Navajo so’.

(4)  The Andromedid meteors of early December are also known as the Bielids because derived from the disintegrated Comet 3D Biela; and the Draconid meteors of October are also unofficially called the Giacobinids because derived from periodic Comet 21P Giacobini-Zinner.

(5)  It was Don Quixote Who mistook a barber’s basin for the enchanted Helmet of Mambrino.

(6)  Rhymes for Cato are Plato and potato, and, in American but not British English, also tomato.  I was given, when young and starting to write poems, a rhyming dictionary; I disdained to search it for rhymes, but I was fascinated by its arrangement, in alphabetical order of words’ letters backward, so that there were several pages for -tion.  An appendix grouped words by their real rhymes, but the book was a century old, and rhymed tea along with day.  “Cato, Plato, potato” was almost a found poem in itself.

(7)  Comet 1P Halley was not discovered by Edmond Halley; he was one of those who observed it in 1682, he calculated that it was identical with several earlier comets, and in 1705 predicted its return in 1759, which he did not live to see.  2P Encke also had been discovered many previous times before Johann Franz Encke calculated its short oribt in 1819.  Comet 27P was called Pons-Coggia-Winnecke-Forbes after its discoverers at several appearances, but is better known as Comet Crommelin after Andrew Crommelin who in 1930 calculated its Halley-like orbit.

(8)  Cassius, in Shakespear’s Julius Caesar, says:  “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars / But in ourselves, that we are underlings.”

(9)  J.M. Barrie used “Dear Brutus” as the title of a play.

(10)  MVEMAJSUNP: Mercury, Venus Earth, Mars, asteroids, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Pluto.  OBAFGKM: the spectral classes of stars, from blue and hot to red and cool.  VIBGYOR: violet, indigo, blue, green, yellow, orange, red, the colors of the spectrum, according to Newton.

(11)  From the commas and periods in “MVEMAJSUNP. OBAFGKM, VIBGYOR,” you might detect that I changed my mind about the order of the three acronym but forgot to change the punctuation marks accordingly.

(12)  16, and not 15, is the most serviceable number for labeling the middles of months in for instance a chart of a planet’s path.  The average half-month is a little over 15 days, so we can write 1 and 16 at the beginnings of the half-months.

(13)  Mênin aeide, theâ, Pêlêïadeô Akhilêos: the first line of the Iliad.  “The anger sing, goddess, of Peleus’s son Achilles…
Arma virumque cano, Troiae qui primus ab oris…:  The Aeneid, by Virgil.  “Of arms and the man I sing, who first from the shore of Troy…”
Be-reshit bara Elohim et ha-shamayim ve-et ha-aretz…:  The Book of Genesis.  “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.”  Hebrew had a preposition et to mark the objective case.
Iqra’ bi-smi rabbika lladhî khalaq, khalaqa l’insâna min `alaq…: “Recite in the name of thy lord who created, created man from clots of blood.”  This is the beginning of the Qur’ân, in the sense that it begins the first surah or chapter uttered by Muhammad.  However, the 114 surahs were arranged with the longer before the shorter, so that this one counts as the 96th.
Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita / mi ritrovai per una selva oscura…:  Dante’s Inferno.  “At the midpoint of the road of our life, I found myself in a dark wood…”
Whan that Aprile with his shoures soote / The droghte of Marche hath perced to the roote…: Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales.  “When April with its sweet showers has piereced the drought of March to the root…”
Of man’s first disobedience, and the fruit /  Of that forbidden tree…:  Milton’s Paradise Lost.
En un lugar de la Mancha, de cuyo nombre no quiero acordarme, no ha mucho tiempo que vivía un hidalgo…:   Cervantes, Don Quixote.  “In a place of La Mancha, whose name I do not wish to recall, it has been no long time since there lived a knight…”
Once a jolly swagman camped by a billabong / Under the shade of a coolibah tree…: “Waltzing Matilda,” not Australia’s national anthem, though many like it better than the official one (“Advance Australia Fair”).  Its earliest version was by Banjo Paterson in co-operation or flirtation with Christina Macpherson of the sheep station where he was staying, and “waltzing” means roaming around in the outback.

(14)  Caroline Herschel used her brother William’s telescopes to discover a record number of comets.  Annie Jump Cannon, while cataloguing numerous stars, laid the basis for our classification of them by their spectra.  Jocelyn Bell Burnell discovered the first pulsar.  Vera Rubin, by studying the rotation of galaxies, revealed that their speed of recession must be increasing.  Hypatia of Alexandria made many contributions to mathematics and astronomy in Egypt around 400 AD and was murdered by a Christian mob.

(15)  Techniques for getting to sleep, and-or sleeping longer:  All good, and thank you!  Including the one that was only alluded to.

(16)  The figures I first gave for the distance of the imaginary Earth 10 days ago – “Nearly 60 million miles away – nearly 250 times farther from us than the Moon” – were results of laborious arithmetic, at which I’m not good.  I then added to my program a subroutine I called “TellMe,” and the computer, with its steely grin of superiority, spat out “About 16 million miles away – 68 times farther from us than the Moon.”

(17) Eve’s name is through Latin Eva from Hebrew Hawwa (the first consonant could be written as ch or as h with a dot under it), and is presumed to come from the Semitic root meaning “life.”  From the same root comes the Jewish name Chaim; and Arab boys insult each other by yelling “Haywân – animal!”  Eve and evening are old English words traceable back through Germanic.

(18)  Iraq, which is the Arabic word `irâq meaning a valley or wide opening, differs (in our alphabet) by only one letter from Iran, which is related to Aryan.

(19)  The planet whose polar icecaps are shrinking, and not just seasonally, is Earth.

(20)  The wise men said they had “seen his star in the east,” which could have meant they were in an eastern land when they saw it or, oppositely, that they saw it in the eastern sky; but, after telling this to Herod in Jerusalem, they followed it to Bethlehem, which is about six miles south of Jerusalem.  What kind of “star” can move southward and stop over a town?  That could be another question.

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DIAGRAMS in these posts are made with precision but have to be inserted in another format.  You may be able to enlarge them on your monitor.  One way: right-click, and from the drop-down list choose “View image”  Or from that list choose “Copy image”, then put it on your desktop, then open it.  On an iPad, tap with three fingers to enlarge. I would be glad to know whether these work for you, and what the equivalent actions are on a phone.  I would welcome learning of any other methods.

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