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eub(Cambridge Univ. Press 1961 abridgement, Canto 1992 edition)
38 - raindrops in power-of-two sizes - "The drops are of graded sizes, each twice as big as another, beginning with the minute and uniform droplets of an impalpable mist. They rotate as they fall, and if two rotate in contrary directions they draw together and presently coalesce; but this only happens when two drops are falling side by side, and since the rate of fall depends on the size it always is a pair of coequal drops which so meet, approach, and join together." Okay this would rock but "From an empirical study of the distribution of raindrop sizes J.S. Marshall and W.M. Palmer concluded that such distributions could be adequately represented as negative exponential functions."
106 - tourbillons cellulaires
114 - honeycomb as standard of length - "The cells vary little in size, so little that Thévenot ... suggested using their dimensions as a standard of length; but after all, the constancy is not so great as has been supposed."
122 - squeeze dry clay pellets (Buffon's peas), get rhombic dodecahedra; squeeze wet clay pellets, get tetrakaidecahedra. "But a young student once showed me (in Yale)* that if you wet these clay pellets thoroughly ...", footnoted "* This 'young student' is the well-known protozoologist Dr. Vance Tartar of the University of Washington"
124 - Stephen Hales, Vegetable Staticks, 1727: "'I compressed several fresh parcels of Pease in the same Pot with a force equal to 1600, 800, and 400 pounds; in which Experiments, tho' the Pease dilated, yet they did not raise the lever, because what they increased in bulk was, by the great incumbent weight, pressed into the interstices of the Pease, which they adequately filled up, being thereby formed into pretty regular Dodecahedra.' Now Buffon ... fails to refer to Hales. This is unfortunate simply because ... one of Buffon's first scholarly undertakings ... was the translation of Hales's book into French."
154 - class of radiolarian skeletons made of strontium sulfate.
38 - raindrops in power-of-two sizes - "The drops are of graded sizes, each twice as big as another, beginning with the minute and uniform droplets of an impalpable mist. They rotate as they fall, and if two rotate in contrary directions they draw together and presently coalesce; but this only happens when two drops are falling side by side, and since the rate of fall depends on the size it always is a pair of coequal drops which so meet, approach, and join together." Okay this would rock but "From an empirical study of the distribution of raindrop sizes J.S. Marshall and W.M. Palmer concluded that such distributions could be adequately represented as negative exponential functions."
106 - tourbillons cellulaires
114 - honeycomb as standard of length - "The cells vary little in size, so little that Thévenot ... suggested using their dimensions as a standard of length; but after all, the constancy is not so great as has been supposed."
122 - squeeze dry clay pellets (Buffon's peas), get rhombic dodecahedra; squeeze wet clay pellets, get tetrakaidecahedra. "But a young student once showed me (in Yale)* that if you wet these clay pellets thoroughly ...", footnoted "* This 'young student' is the well-known protozoologist Dr. Vance Tartar of the University of Washington"
124 - Stephen Hales, Vegetable Staticks, 1727: "'I compressed several fresh parcels of Pease in the same Pot with a force equal to 1600, 800, and 400 pounds; in which Experiments, tho' the Pease dilated, yet they did not raise the lever, because what they increased in bulk was, by the great incumbent weight, pressed into the interstices of the Pease, which they adequately filled up, being thereby formed into pretty regular Dodecahedra.' Now Buffon ... fails to refer to Hales. This is unfortunate simply because ... one of Buffon's first scholarly undertakings ... was the translation of Hales's book into French."
154 - class of radiolarian skeletons made of strontium sulfate.
