Fred Lepore

Newton rings created by oil on wet tarmac

Newton rings in Newton I. Opticks (1704)

Physics in Princeton Parking Lots
Looked down & saw oil/wet tarmac create Newton's rings (L today/R 1704)
Reflections from different refractive indexes of air/oil/water create bright (construct interf.) & dark(destruct interf.) colors->light as a wave

cf Newton favored corpuscular light

Unfunny Monkey business
The Good and the Great have been pilloried by the Knuckle-Draggers for more than 1 1/2 centuries
It didn't succeed with Charles Darwin in 1874 ... and it won't today
Wild guess ... the purveyors of Truth Social endorse that Creation occurred on October 23, 4004 BC [J. Ussher]

Cold snap
Prolonged single digit temperatures in Princeton take a toll on man and beast.
Left: Found this frozen red-bellied woodpecker today (beautiful zebra wings and the red is mostly on the head .. not belly)
Right: Audubon's painting of same c 1827-38

Wizard of Oz. Cowardly Lion gets a medal

eBay add for Nobel Peace Prize

Letter to Venezuela
re: regifting Nobel awards
1. Confirm that recipient is right species
2. Keep the 11 million Swedish kronors
3. 196 gm 18k gold medal (w/24k gold plate) is worth ~$9300. Take the tax deduction
4. Scan ebay if the medal gets "flipped"

2/Secrets
..revealed a century ago by Dr. Francis W Peabody who died at age 45 from gastric leiomyosarcoma. In his last year of life he wrote "one of the essential qualities of the clinician is interest in humanity, for the secret of the care of the patient is in caring for the patient."
Simple.

1/Medical Secrets
When A.I. Offers What Doctors Don’t www.nytimes.com/2025/11/16/w...
It's not about growing patient faith in "Dr. Chat GPT's""stochastic parrot" built of neural nets & vagaries of its training sets
It's really about physicians forgetting the 100 year old "secret" of patient care..

Geographic poison pill

Dear King Frederik X of Denmark,
Prior to any territorial "negotiations" w/ Don the Orange, consider a name change (map attached).The Epstein-Green rhyme is nice. Apologies to Erik the Red.
Keep your eyes on the Faroes, he's sneaky.
Your USA friends

"How is it that one fine morning Duchenne discovered a disease that probably existed in the time before Hippocrates?" -JM Charcot speaking of his teacher who died in 1875.
Autism was described in the medical literature by Kanner in 1943 & Asperger in 1942/44 ... 10 years before RFK Jr was born

The cybertrucks flanking the crimson Morris Mini-Minor bear an uncanny resemblance to coffins with wheels

The model shown costs $250. $240 for pine boards and $10 for soft rope handles. For mobility it needs 6 pallbearers.

Winter Solstice 2025
Shortest day of the year
Longest shadow (sundial compass)

11:03 AM (sun behind clouds at noon)
Princeton elev 220 ft
40 deg 20 min N and 74 deg 40 min W

"There are strange things done in the midnight sun
By the men who moil for gold
The Arctic trails have their secret tales
That would make your blood run cold ..."

"The Cremation of Sam McGee" 1907 Robert W Service

Lord Rayleigh in his lab by Philip Burne-Jones

Rayleigh scattering at Princeton sunset 11.5.25

Lord Rayleigh and Bluesky
JW Strutt, born this month 1842, described Rayleigh scattering of short wavelengths by the atmosphere-> blue skies.
He also did red skies - see Princeton this PM w/decreased scatter & absorption of long wavelength light traversing greater span of atmosphere at sunset

Know thyself.
Delphic maxim inscribed upon the Temple of Apollo

Received today. We're already on a first name basis. How is this possible?

Q. What did Einstein do on his day off?
A. The Marquand estate is now a public park, and because today was Sunday and I didn't go to the Institute, I took a walk there- it's so close by, and so beautiful. "Conversations with Einstein" May 8, 1954

I agree-Marquand Park seen on a ramble yesterday.

Living Fossil Find in Princeton
Fossils indicate that Dawn redwood-metasequoia glyptrostroboides-went extinct 65 MYA (mesozoic) until its rediscovery in Sichuan province in 1941. Seeds were planted in Marquand Park in 1955. We found it growing there today.

OK, so it's not a coelacanth...

E=MC Square in Princeton on No Kings Day

Einstein at No Kings 10.18.25 in Princeton
After being "received w/ such kindness & respect as I have been in America" Einstein wrote in 1921-"this proves that knowledge & justice are ranked above wealth & power by a large section of the human race"(Ideas and Opinions)
True 104 years ago.. and today

1500 and counting
The Good (they eat up to 3000 insects/day), the Bad (vectors for ~130 viruses), & the Ugly (chiropteran visages are an acquired taste)
Pictured: pensive flittermouse I apprehended in the kitchen before release in NJ pines
Go sky puppies!

March of the Man-Apes www.nytimes.com/2025/08/27/s...
Thomas Huxley-aka Darwin's bulldog- used Waterhouse Hawkins' marvelous drawing (Gibbon 2x) in 1863 to promote evolution
Alas Hawkins was anti-evolution but he was the first to mount and restore dinosaurs for the Crystal Palace exhibit 1852-54

Neanderthals had larger brains (1500 cc) than Homo sapiens (1350 cc).
If we de-extinct them, I'm pretty sure they wouldn't need ChatGPT.
If they don't come back, don't worry. Modern humans have 1-4% Neanderthal DNA in their genomes.

Mani pedi & more
It's not just their nails. Sloth nervous systems are "wired in reverse" for reflex hanging.
Antigravity muscles prevail w/midbrain lesions.Decerebrate cats "stand" erect w/rigid extensor muscles but in 1926 it was found that decerebrate sloths hang w/rigid flexor antigravity muscles

2/Agassiz & me
..he stuck with Creationism & wrote after exploring the Galapagos in 1872- "there is no evidence of a direct descent of later from earlier species in the geological succession of animals"
Darwin "added nothing new to our previous knowledge concerning the origin of man"
Even Homer nods

Bedrock outcropping with glacial striations along Route 1A in Ellsworth Falls ME on 8/28/2025

Detail in schist outcropping Ellsworth Falls ME

1/Agassiz & me
Drove 15 miles today to a schist outcrop along Rte 1A in Ellsworth ME where in 1864 Louis Agassiz found scratches/furrows pointing north in support of his theory of continental glaciation 13K-25K yrs ago.
Glacial scratches can be seen today!
He ruled out icebergs & Noah's Flood but ..

His "ask" w/4 refs was announced in non peer reviewed "TrialSite News." Peer reviewed Annals of Internal Medicine stood by the 1.2 million child Danish vaccine study w/39 refs.

The Dogs may Bark, the Caravan goes on"

Alice's Adventures Underground. Did Lewis Carroll draw his own migraine aura?
Carroll first mentions migraine "fortifications" in his 1885 diary but he consulted an oculist in 1852.
Did his 1862 drawing of mock turtle & gryphon anticipate H. Airy's iconic 1870 tracing of his own migraine teichopsia?

The MAGA-ized Smithsonian can revise American mores- just not on my dime. I'm not subscribing.
MAGA need not worry about my dime. Creationists aside, they're gonna love Ales Hrdlicka's (physical anthropologist/eugenicist emeritus) scavenged racial brain collection (WaPo 8/14/2023) & Wall of Skulls.

Losing my Accommodation
Mid-40s is a visually dangerous age as lens gets stiffer, diopters of accommodation <4, & arms are too short
If progressives don't cut it, consider tri-focals or monovision refraction making one eye near-sighted & the other far-sighted (not a fan)
Or just make the font bigger

Academic conflicts - "because the stakes are so low"
Easy. If a scientist read a typical IMRAD format paper, the audience would achieve REM sleep in seconds

Try JK Galbraith,econ prof:"There seems little question that in 1929,modifying a famous cliche,the economy was fundamentally unsound"
Bored?

What happened to the lion and the sleeping dog (Durer 1514)?

Ship of State

"You can't manage what you can't measure" (Variously attributed to Peter Drucker/ Lord Kelvin/VF Ridgeway)

I guess #47 is a proponent of the "Dead Reckoning" style of management (Left)

So was EJ Smith navigating the ice field off Newfoundland on April 15, 1912 (Right)

SOS

What we have here is a failure to communicate (to an on-line audience):
1.Rolling Stones:"to get my fair share of abuse"
2.Walt Whitman:"sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs"
3.Vance Packard: advertising's "Theory of the Marginally Committed"

Pick one... but we may be preaching to the choir