Daily Calendar for Sunday, October 6, 2024
Question of the Day
Do female Florida alligators make the same loud roar as males do?
The loud roar of the Florida alligator (more appropriately called the American alligator) is part of the male’s mating behavior and apparently not done by females. Both sexes do, however, hiss at enemies and each other. The female is most likely to be dangerous to humans when she is guarding a nest of eggs.
Advice of the Day
Don’t oppose forces; use them. —Buckminster Fuller
Home Hint of the Day
Use baby-food jars and coffee cans to store screws, nails, and small hardware items.
Word of the Day
Opposition
The Moon or a planet appears on the opposite side of the sky from the Sun (elongation 180°).
Puzzle of the Day
My first is quality; My second, inferiority; My whole, superiority. (What’s the word? Each clue is a syllable!)
Peer-less
Born
- Joshua Reed Giddings (politician) –
- Jenny Lind (singer) –
- George Westinghouse (engineer) –
- Helen Wills (tennis player) –
- Carole Lombard (actress) –
- Thor Heyerdahl (ethnologist, leader of Kon Tiki expedition) –
- Shana Alexander (journalist) –
- Elisabeth Shue (actress) –
- Amy Jo Johnson (actress) –
- Rebecca Lobo (basketball player) –
Died
- Baron Lisgar (2nd Canadian Governor General 1869 - 72) –
- Alfred, Lord Tennyson (British poet laureate) –
- Bette Davis (actress) –
- Eddie Van Halen (musician) –
Events
- Benjamin Hanks applied for a patent for a self-winding clock –
- American Chess Association founded –
- The Naval War College founded at Newport, RI –
- Babe Ruth hit 3 home runs in World Series game –
- Premiere of The Jazz Singer, the first feature talking picture, which starred Al Jolson –
- The nuclear submarine U.S.S. Seawolf established an underseas record when it comes to the surface of the Atlantic Ocean near Block Island, after having cruised submerged for 60 days –
- Joseph Charles began 30 years of waving to motorists in Berkeley, CA –
- Greater Winnipeg Floodway (Duff’s Ditch) completed, Manitoba –
- A magnitude 2.0 earthquake registered 15 miles east of Keene, NH –
- Charles K. Kao, Willard S. Boyle, and George E. Smith won the Nobel Prize in physics for their contributions toward fiber optics and digital photography. Kao, of Standard Telecommunication Laboratories in Harlow, UK, and Chinese University of Hong Kong, won half the prize for groundbreaking achievements concerning the transmission of light in fibers for optical communication… . [In 1966] he carefully calculated how to transmit light over long distances via optical glass fibers. With a fiber of purest glass it would be possible to transmit light signals over 100 kilometers, compared to only 20 meters for the fibers available in the 1960s. Boyle and Smith, both from Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, N.J., shared the other half of the prize for the 1969 invention of an imaging semiconductor circuit – the CCD sensor… . The CCD is the digital camera’s electronic eye. It revolutionized photography, as light could now be captured electronically instead of on film. –
- 249 combines reaped 200 acres of oats in about 12 minutes, in Dalmeny, Saskatchewan –
- Takaaki Kajita of Japan and Arthur McDonald of Canada won the Nobel Prize in physics for their work on neutrinos –
Weather
- The swollen Susquehanna and Delaware Rivers in Pennsylvania were filled with pumpkins that had been washed away from nearby fields. It was thereafter known as “the Pumpkin Flood.” –
- An early storm brought 26 inches of snow to Auburn, New York. All the mountains in western and northern New England also were covered –
- Ucluelet Brynnor Mines, in British Columbia, experienced Canada’s greatest precipitation in a 24-hour period: 489.2 mm. That’s 19.26 inches of rain! –
- A high temperature of 94 degrees F was recorded in Honolulu, Hawaii –