Good morning, Whitewater.

Thursday will be rainy, and colder than yesterday, with a high temperature of forty-five. Sunrise is 5:51 AM and sunset 7:53 PM, for 14h 02m 10s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 67.2% of its visible disk illuminated.

There will be a meeting of the Downton Whitewater Board this morning at 8 AM, and of the Community Development Authority this afternoon at 5 PM.

On this day in 1947, Thor Heyerdahl begins an ocean voyage in the Kon-Tiki expedition:

Heyerdahl believed that people from South America could have settled Polynesia in pre-Columbian times. Although most anthropologists as of 2010 had come to the conclusion they did not,[1][2][3] in 2011, new genetic evidence was uncovered by Erik Thorsby that Easter Island inhabitants in fact do have some South American DNA,[4] lending credence to at least some of Heyerdahl’s theses. His aim in mounting the Kon-Tiki expedition was to show, by using only the materials and technologies available to those people at the time, that there were no technical reasons to prevent them from having done so. Although the expedition carried some modern equipment, such as a radio, watches, charts, sextant, and metal knives, Heyerdahl argued they were incidental to the purpose of proving that the raft itself could make the journey.

The Kon-Tiki expedition was funded by private loans, along with donations of equipment from the United States Army. Heyerdahl and a small team went to Peru, where, with the help of dockyard facilities provided by the Peruvian authorities, they constructed the raft out of balsa logs and other native materials in an indigenous style as recorded in illustrations by Spanish conquistadores. The trip began on April 28, 1947. Heyerdahl and five companions sailed the raft for 101 days over 6900 km (4,300 miles) across the Pacific Ocean before smashing into a reef at Raroia in the Tuamotu Islands on August 7, 1947. The crew made successful landfall and all returned safely.

Here’s Thursday’s puzzle from JigZone:

Good morning, Whitewater.

Wednesday in town will be mostly cloudy and windy with a high of fifty-four. Sunrise is 5:52 AM and sunset is 7:52 PM, for 13h 59m 37s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 76.4% of its visible disk illuminated.

Whitewater’s Tech Park Board meets today at 8 AM.

On this day in 1667, John Milton sells for a bargain:

Blind poet John Milton sells the copyright to his masterpiece Paradise Lost (1667) for a mere 10 pounds.

Milton was born and raised the indulged son of a prosperous London businessman. He excelled at languages in grammar school and at Christ’s College, Cambridge, where he took a bachelor’s and a master’s, which he completed in 1632. He then decided to continue his own education, spending six years reading every major work of literature in several languages. He published an elegy for a college classmate, Lycidas, in 1637 and went abroad in 1638 to continue his studies.

In 1642, Milton married 17-year-old Mary Powell, who left him just weeks later. Milton wrote a series of pamphlets arguing for the institution of divorce based on incompatibility. The idea, however mild it seems today, was scandalous at the time, and Milton experienced a vehement backlash for his writing.

Milton’s wife returned to him in 1645, and the pair had three daughters. However, he continued espousing controversial views. He supported the execution of Charles I, he railed against the control of the church by bishops, and he upheld the institution of Cromwell’s commonwealth, for which he became secretary of foreign languages.

In 1651, he lost his sight but fulfilled his government duties with the help of assistants, including poet Andrew Marvell. His wife died the following year. He remarried in 1656, but his second wife died in childbirth. Four years later, the commonwealth was overturned, and Milton was thrown in jail, saved only by the intervention of friends. The blind man lost his position and property.

He remarried in 1663. Blind, impoverished, and jobless, he began to dictate his poem Paradise Lost to his family. When the poem was ready for publication, he sold it for 10 pounds. Once printed, the poem was immediately hailed as a masterpiece of the English language. In 1671, he wrote Paradise Regained, followed by Samson Agonistes. He died in 1674.

Here’s Wednesday’s JigZone puzzle:

Good morning, Whitewater.

Tuesday will be significantly cooler than yesterday, with a high of fifty-seven under mostly cloudy skies.  Sunrise is 5:53 AM and sunset 7:50 PM, for 13h 57m 02s of daytime.  The moon is a waning gibbous with 84.3% of its visible disk illuminated.

Whitewater’s Urban Forestry Commission meets at 4:30 PM, and Police and Fire Commission at 7 PM.

On this day in 1954, significant medial trials begin:

…the Salk polio vaccine field trials, involving 1.8 million children, begin at the Franklin Sherman Elementary School in McLean, Virginia. Children in the United States, Canada and Finland participated in the trials, which used for the first time the now-standard double-blind method, whereby neither the patient nor attending doctor knew if the inoculation was the vaccine or a placebo. On April 12, 1955, researchers announced the vaccine was safe and effective and it quickly became a standard part of childhood immunizations in America. In the ensuing decades, polio vaccines would all but wipe out the highly contagious disease in the Western Hemisphere….

Today is the anniversary, from 4.26.1986, of the Chernobyl Disaster:

The Chernobyl disaster … Chornobylska Katastrofa – Chornobyl Catastrophe; also referred to as Chernobyl or the Chornobyl accident) was a catastrophic nuclear accident that occurred on 26 April 1986 at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in Ukraine (then officially the Ukrainian SSR), which was under the direct jurisdiction of the central authorities of the Soviet Union. An explosion and fire released large quantities of radioactive particles into the atmosphere, which spread over much of the western USSR and Europe.

The Chernobyl disaster was the worst nuclear power plant accident in history in terms of cost and casualties.[1] It is one of only two classified as a level 7 event (the maximum classification) on the International Nuclear Event Scale, the other being the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster in 2011.[2] The battle to contain the contamination and avert a greater catastrophe ultimately involved over 500,000 workers and cost an estimated 18 billion rubles.[3] During the accident itself, 31 people died, and long-term effects such as cancers are still being investigated….

The disaster began during a systems test on Saturday, 26 April 1986 at reactor number four of the Chernobyl plant, which is near the city of Pripyat and in proximity to the administrative border with Belarus and the Dnieper River. There was a sudden and unexpected power surge, and when an emergency shutdown was attempted, an exponentially larger spike in power output occurred, which led to a reactor vessel rupture and a series of steam explosions. These events exposed the graphite moderator of the reactor to air, causing it to ignite.[4] The resulting fire sent a plume of highly radioactive fallout into the atmosphere and over an extensive geographical area, including Pripyat. The plume drifted over large parts of the western Soviet Union and Europe. From 1986 to 2000, 350,400 people were evacuated and resettled from the most severely contaminated areas of Belarus, Russia, and Ukraine.[5][6] According to official post-Soviet data,[7][8] about 60% of the fallout landed in Belarus.

JigZone‘s puzzle of the day is of a fish:

Good morning, Whitewater.

Monday will bring an even chance of afternoon thunderstorms with a high of seventy-six. Sunrise is 5:55 AM and sunset 7:49 PM, for 13h 54m 27s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 90.6% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1990, America places the Hubble Space Telescope in orbit:

The crew of the U.S. space shuttle Discovery places the Hubble Space Telescope, a long-term space-based observatory, into a low orbit around Earth.

The space telescope, conceived in the 1940s, designed in the 1970s, and built in the 1980s, was designed to give astronomers an unparalleled view of the solar system, the galaxy, and the universe. Initially, Hubble’s operators suffered a setback when a lens aberration was discovered, but a repair mission by space-walking astronauts in December 1993 successfully fixed the problem, and Hubble began sending back its first breathtaking images of the universe.

Free of atmospheric distortions, Hubble has a resolution 10 times that of ground-based observatories. About the size of a bus, the telescope is solar-powered and orbits Earth once every 97 minutes. Among its many astronomical achievements, Hubble has been used to record a comet’s collision with Jupiter, provide a direct look at the surface of Pluto, view distant galaxies, gas clouds, and black holes, and see billions of years into the universe’s past.

On this day in 1996, Gov. Thompson signs welfare reform into law:

1996 – W-2 (Wisconsin Works) Signed Into Law
On this date Governor Tommy Thompson signed the W-2 (Wisconsin Works) program into law, making Wisconsin the first U.S. state to replace a benefits-based welfare system with a requirement that recipients work to get aid. W-2 formed the basis for national welfare reform.[Source:Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and Tommy G. Thompson Center]

Here’s the Monday puzzle from JigZone:

Good morning, Whitewater.

Sunday in town will be partly cloudy and warm, with a high of seventy-six. Sunrise is 5:56 AM and sunset is 7:48 PM, for 13h 51m 50s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 95.5% of its visible disk illuminated.

Friday’s FW poll asked if a snake that feel from an elementary school ceiling in Mississippi was an unwanted pest or an opportunity for observation. A majority of respondents (65.22%) felt that it should be considered an unwanted pest.

On this day in 1800, a Library of Congress is authorized:

…legislation to appropriate $5,000 to purchase “such books as may be necessary for the use of Congress,” thus establishing the Library of Congress. The first books, ordered from London, arrived in 1801 and were stored in the U.S. Capitol, the library’s first home. The first library catalog, dated April 1802, listed 964 volumes and nine maps. Twelve years later, the British army invaded the city of Washington and burned the Capitol, including the then 3,000-volume Library of Congress.

Former president Thomas Jefferson, who advocated the expansion of the library during his two terms in office, responded to the loss by selling his personal library, the largest and finest in the country, to Congress to “recommence” the library. The purchase of Jefferson’s 6,487 volumes was approved in the next year, and a professional librarian, George Watterston, was hired to replace the House clerks in the administration of the library. In 1851, a second major fire at the library destroyed about two-thirds of its 55,000 volumes, including two-thirds of the Thomas Jefferson library. Congress responded quickly and generously to the disaster, and within a few years a majority of the lost books were replaced.

After the Civil War, the collection was greatly expanded, and by the 20th century the Library of Congress had become the de facto national library of the United States and one of the largest in the world. Today, the collection, housed in three enormous buildings in Washington, contains more than 17 million books, as well as millions of maps, manuscripts, photographs, films, audio and video recordings, prints, and drawings.

On this day in 1977, Whitewater loses an establishment:

1977 – Morris Pratt Institute of Spiritualism Moves to Waukesha
On this date the Morris Pratt Institute, dedicated to the study of Spiritualism and Mediumship, moved from Whitewater to Waukesha. Founded in 1888 and incorporated in 1901, it was one of the few institutes in the world that instructed spiritualists. These were people “who believe as the basis of his or her religion, in the communication between this and the Spirit World by means of mediumship and who endeavors to mould his or her character and conduct in accordance with the highest teachings derived from such communication.” [Source: Morris Pratt Institute]

The Story of Zero – Getting Something from Nothing from The Royal Institution on Vimeo.

What is zero? How did it come about? Hannah Fry tells the story of how zero went from nothing to something.

Once upon a time, zero wasn’t really a number. Its journey to the fully fledged number we know and love today was a meandering one. Today, zero is both a placeholder, and tool, within our number system signifying an absence of a value, and as a number in its own right.

But it wasn’t always seen as that, and it still doesn’t act quite like other numbers. Can you divide by zero, for example? Hannah Fry explains how zero came about, from its origins in ancient civilisations, through the resistance it faced from the Roman numeral system, to being the cornerstone of calculus.

Via Vimeo.