Good morning,

It’s another mild day for Whitewater, with a predicated high of seventy-eight degrees, and breezy conditions.

It’s VIP Day at Lakeview School. Today is also the end of the academic quarter, with one quarter yet to go in this school year.

On this day in 1945, the United States began the invasion of Okinawa. The New York TImes reported on the landing:

Guam, Monday, April 2 — The United States Tenth Army landed yesterday morning on Okinawa, main island of the Ryukyus, 362 miles from the Japanese home islands. This morning found the invaders three miles inland and holding two airfields, with the defenders retreating all along the eight-mile landing line.

The veteran doughboys and marines met amazingly light resistance from the minute they landed yesterday at 8:30 A.M. They pushed up the steep slopes from the landing beaches with ease, although the shore was dominated by enemy guns on high ground.

Marines took the Yontan airfield at the northern end of the beachhead while Army troops captured the Katena airdrome in the southern area.

Action in Okinawa was to last for nearly three months, until defeat of the Japanese on the island in June.

US Flag raised over Shuri castle on Okinawa. Braving Japanese sniper fire, US Marine Lieutenant Colonel R.P. Ross, Jr. places on American flag on a parapet of Shuri castle on May 29, 1945.

Good morning,

Whitewater, Wisconsin’s forecast calls for a breezy day, with a high of seventy-two degrees.

There will be a joint Common Council and Whitewater Aquatic Board meeting tonight at 7 p.m. The agenda is available online.

On this day in history, in 1991, the Warsaw Pact came to an end. The History Channel has the details about its origins, use, and eventual collapse, a collapse that portended the end of Soviet domination and oppression of millions of eastern Europeans:

After 36 years in existence, the Warsaw Pact-the military alliance between the Soviet Union and its eastern European satellites-comes to an end. The action was yet another sign that the Soviet Union was losing control over its former allies and that the Cold War was falling apart.

The Warsaw Pact was formed in 1955, primarily as a response to the decision by the United States and its western European allies to include a rearmed West Germany in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). NATO had begun in 1949 as a defensive military alliance between the United States, Canada, and several European nations to thwart possible Soviet expansion into Western Europe. In 1954, NATO nations voted to allow a rearmed West Germany into the organization. The Soviets responded with the establishment of the Warsaw Pact. The original members included the Soviet Union, East Germany, Poland, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, and Albania. Although the Soviets claimed that the organization was a defensive alliance, it soon became clear that the primary purpose of the pact was to reinforce communist dominance in Eastern Europe. In Hungary in 1956, and then again in Czechoslovakia in 1968, the Soviets invoked the pact to legitimize its interventions in squelching anticommunist revolutions.

By the late-1980s, however, anti-Soviet and anticommunist movements throughout Eastern Europe began to crack the Warsaw Pact. In 1990, East Germany left the Warsaw Pact in preparation for its reunification with West Germany. Poland and Czechoslovakia also indicated their strong desire to withdraw. Faced with these protests–and suffering from a faltering economy and unstable political situation–the Soviet Union bowed to the inevitable. In March 1991, Soviet military commanders relinquished their control of Warsaw Pact forces. A few months later, the pact’s Political Consultative Committee met for one final time and formally recognized what had already effectively occurred-the Warsaw Pact was no more.

Good morning,

Whitewater’s forecast for today is for a breezy day, with a high of sixty-three degrees.

There will be a charter school listening session at the Cravath Lakefront Center this afternoon, from 4 to 6 p.m.

There’s also a district-wide science night tonight, at the high school, from 6:30 – 8 p.m. Here’s my science-oriented contribution, from Wired‘s science news: how elephants run. The story, entitled, ” Video: Elephants Run Like No Other,” describes their unique running technique:

A biomechanical analysis of running elephants has revealed that Earth’s largest land animals do some strange things at high speed.

Unlike every other quadruped, they use all four legs for braking and propulsion, rather than rather dividing those tasks between hind and front legs.

Elephants also prove to be extremely inefficient while running. Compared to animals like horses, they perform quite poorly. Then again, given their size, running itself is quite an achievement.

“It’s pretty cool that they can run at all. And they do it in such a weird way,” said John Hutchinson, an evolutionary biologist at the University of London.

In a study published March 29 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Hutchinson’s team videotaped six Asian elephants as they ran across mechanical plates that measured the force of each stride. By combining gait models distilled from the video with force measurements, they could quantify the elephants’ biomechanics.

Here’s a video of the Hutchinson’s observations:

Link:
http://link.brightcove.com/services/player/bcpid46203255001?bclid=46205328001&bctid=74491839001

On this day in 1867, Secretary of State Seward came to an agreement with Russia to purchase Alaska, at a cost of around seven million dollars. That’s less than a single office building today, and the building would lack reserves of oil, other diverse plants and animals, and a famous former governor. more >>

Good morning,

Whitewater’s forecast today calls for a sunny day, with a high of fifty-three degrees.

In the City of Whitewater, there will be a meeting of the Alcohol Licensing Commission at 6 p.m. tonight.

Over at Wired, there’s a story about how purchasing groceries (and tracking inventory) may become much easier. In “New RFID Tag Could Mean the End of Bar Codes,” Lisa Grossman writes that

Lines at the grocery store might become as obsolete as milkmen, if a new tag that seeks to replace bar codes becomes commonplace.

Researchers from Sunchon National University in Suncheon, South Korea, and Rice University in Houston have built a radio frequency identification tag that can be printed directly onto cereal boxes and potato chip bags. The tag uses ink laced with carbon nanotubes to print electronics on paper or plastic that could instantly transmit information about a cart full of groceries.

“You could run your cart by a detector and it tells you instantly what’s in the cart,” says James M. Tour of Rice University, whose research group invented the ink. “No more lines, you just walk out with your stuff.”

RFID tags are already used widely in passports, library books and gadgets that let cars fly through tollbooths without cash. But those tags are made from silicon, which is more expensive than paper and has to be stuck onto the product as a second step.

“It’s potentially much cheaper, printing it as part of the package,” Tour says.

There’s a long way to go, and this research isn’t store-ready; it’s still a proof-of-concept effort. There’s also been talk before about RFID tags in stores, but it’s remained only talk. Still, this has come so far not by government mandate, but through the discoveries of scientists that cannot be assured through regulation or business pressure.

(Photo of a currently-used RFID tag.)