whim#11: Magnetic Cows, Roman Celtic Culture, SCOTUS Math, LIGO

After a brief hiatus, we are back with four new #whimsday stories!

At Pandera Labs, we dedicate our Wednesday morning stand-ups to sharing things that we’ve learned over the past week. We like to call it Whimsical Wednesday — Anything that piques one’s curiosity is fair game to share, the topics tend to span a plethora of categories. Here are a few highlights of what we were curious about this past week:

G Link recently learned that cows tend to be magnetic. While they graze away all day they aren’t very particular about what they are eating, so along with the grass (and previous chewed, partially digested grass) they end up ingesting bits of barbed wire. Farmers then intentionally feed them magnets to collect all the metallic debris stopping it from cutting up the cow’s intestines. Cows are like the refrigerators of fields; hang art on them!

In the year 387 BC, when Rome was a small city-state, it was sacked by the Celtic people of Gaul. The Celtic people’s sack of Rome was remembered for centuries in Roman culture, and despite the disdain for the Celts (which eventually led to Julius Caesar conquering them centuries later), the Celtic people were respected for being “cool”, for lack of a better word.

The average Celt would have stood 5 inches taller than a Roman, and in Celtic tradition the men grew out long hair beyond their shoulders and bleached it white with lime. Because Celts were so awesome and metal, many Celtic traditions were stolen by Roman culture, where people would bleach their hair, wear shoe-heighteners, and even copy the skin-tight cut of the pants worn by Celts.

Dean Michael Larbi thought this was interesting because it gives an idea of how people thousands of years ago were similar to us in many ways; concerned about fashion and fascinated by foreign ideas which they often tried to emulate.

While reading about the Gill v Whitford case before the Supreme Court on 538, Tom Price was surprised to see the outright opposition to empirical evidence presented to the Court. “Four of the eight justices who regularly speak during oral arguments voiced anxiety about using calculations to answer questions about bias and partisanship. Some said the math was unwieldy, complicated, and newfangled. One justice called it “baloney” and argued that the difficulty the public would have in understanding the test would ultimately erode the legitimacy of the court.” Chief Justice John Roberts’ quote was especially troubling: “It may be simply my educational background, but I can only describe it as sociological gobbledygook.”

Unfortunately, the Supreme Court’s allergy to basic mathematics is not a new phenomenon. In a 1986 death penalty case from Georgia (McCleskey v Kemp), the Defense argued that McClesky’s 14th Amendment right to equal protection because “a defendant in Georgia was more than four times as likely to be sentenced to death if the victim in a capital case was white compared to if the victim was black”. Justice Lewis Powell majority opinion disagreed, stating: “Statistics, at most, may show only a likelihood that a particular factor entered into some decisions.” McCleskey lost the case.

Scientists have been following this binary star system that consists of neutron stars for some time now. They have been waiting for the moment that these two neutron stars collide because it has been theorized (by Albert Einstein and other notable physicists) that when two or more neutron stars collide with each other that a black hole will be formed by the incredibly dense stars and the amount of energy released from the impact itself.

These stars are about the size of New York City, but they are many times more dense than our own sun. A couple of years ago, scientists discovered that there are such things as gravitational waves, but we didn’t have (and still don’t really have) the equipment to properly measure these types of waves.

However, we do have plenty of devices and ways to track light energy and waves. So the idea in observing this collision was to record as much gravitational wave data as possible by having recording devices “piggyback” on devices that normally record light energy. Supposedly, they collected a gold mine’s worth of data.

Adam Edwards’s favorite part of the announcement was that one of the lead scientists explained that this data confirms that neutron star mutual annihilation is what is responsible for forming heavy elements such as Gold and Titanium. So the wedding band you may have on your finger was only possible because two neutron stars gave their “lives” to create the material needed for it. Which is really cool when you think about it!

Bonus video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e7LcmWiclOs

Other Interesting Things

Over the weekend, Mallory Haack learned that she will become an aunt for the first time!

While in Rome, Jeff Hassberger heard about the new Bonci Pizzeria that opened over in West Loop. Their only other location is right next to the Vatican!

Joel McCance started reading Soonish, an exciting look at futuristic technologies that aren’t too far away. Particularly interesting was Gerald Bull who is best described as a “Canadian Bond Villain”. Bull began research into a Space Gun, that would fling payloads into space via controlled explosion, rather than the more commonly adopted liquid fueled rockets. When his research was shut down, he eventually found himself working for Saddam Hussein building Project Babylon.