Na excelente série The Big Bang Theory, também se falou do Natal.
Algumas das piadas nesse episódio:
Sheldon: If you insist on decorating a spider-infested fire hazard in my home, I would request that you add … this.
Penny: What is it?
Sheldon: You’re kidding, right? It’s a bust of Sir Isaac Newton.
Penny: Oh, sure, sure, yeah. Very Christmassy.
Sheldon: Wait, excuse me, but it’s much more Christmassy than anything you’ve put on the tree.
Leonard: Here we go.
Sheldon: December 25, 1642, Julian calendar, Sir Isaac Newton is born. Jesus, on the other hand, was actually born in the summer. His birthday was moved to coincide with a traditional pagan holiday that celebrated the winter solstice with lit fires and slaughtered goats. Which, frankly, sounds like more fun than 12 hours of church with my mother followed by a fruitcake.
Leonard: Merry Newton-mas, everyone.
Leonard: I didn’t have a tree when growing up.
Penny: Really? Why not?
Leonard: In my family, holidays weren’t so much celebrated as studied for their anthropological and psychological implications on human society.
Penny: Ohh, sounds festive. Did you at least give presents?
Leonard: Hmm, in a way. We presented papers and then broke off into focus groups and critiqued each other.
Leonard: When we watch Frosty the Snowman, he roots for the sun.
Sheldon: Excuse me, but the sun is essential for all life on Earth. Frosty is merely a bit of frozen supernatural ephemera and a stolen hat. A crime by the way for which he is never brought to account.
Leonard: What do you want, Sheldon?
Sheldon: What I want is to be departing the starship Enterprise in a one-man shuttle craft headed to the planetoid I rule known as Sheldon Alpha-5.
2 comentários
Melhor série de sempre.
Nada como ficar acordado até à 1.30 da manhã de quinta para sexta para ver o stream da CBS, obviamente para ver um novo episódio de TBBT!
Sheldon: You’re kidding, right? It’s a bust of Sir Isaac Newton.
Penny: Oh, sure, sure, yeah. Very Christmassy.
Sheldon: Wait, excuse me, but it’s much more Christmassy than anything you’ve put on the tree.
A tradição dos objectos que se pôem na árvore de natal vem duma tradição alemã em que se colocavam decorações nas árvores para que estas pudessem atrair “espítitos” que fossem bons, para ajudar a sobreviver ás escuras noites geladas do inverno.
Justamente, há quem coloque pequenos bustos de newton na árvore de natal:
http://boingboing.net/2011/12/23/custom-newtonmas-ornament.html
Há também uma outra possibilidade para as bolas de natal:
http://inhabitat.com/diy-how-to-make-a-terrarium-christmas-ornament/
Um “apontamento” histórico sobre música de natal nos voos tripulados:
http://boingboing.net/2011/12/16/jingle-bells-in-space-the-his.html
Para quem gosta do universo Star Wars:
http://boingboing.net/2011/12/16/vader-christmas-choir-flash-mo.html
E numa nota um algo mais “tecnológica” também se pode pensar noutra celebração, em que estruturas com semelhanças a árvores metálicas (radiotelescópios) também talvez possam atrair sinais de origem extraterrestre:
Merry Grotemas!
http://boingboing.net/2011/12/22/merry-grotemas-a-celebration.html
Between 1937 and roughly 1946 there was only one radio astronomer in the entire world: Grote Reber, an amateur from the Chicago suburbs.
Reber was a HAM operator who worked in radio manufacturing.
At night, he’d come home and tune into the stars, using a home-built telescope he erected in his backyard in Wheaton.
It was the second antenna to be used for astronomy ever, after Karl Jansky’s.
Grote Reber died in 2002.
He would have been 100 years old today, and reader Bill Higgins has written him a lovely and awe-inspiring tribute.
Here’s a short excerpt:
[Reber] later wrote:
“The astronomers were afraid of it because they didn’t know anything about radio. The radio people weren’t interested because it was so faint it didn’t even constitute an interference. Nobody was going to do anything. So, all right, if nobody was going to do anything, maybe I should do something.”
He designed and built a 31-foot dish in his yard– the largest parabolic antenna in the world, pivoting on a Model-T rear axle. Wheaton had never seen anything like it.
Neighbors were mystified by the bizarre device.
But they got used to it. Children climbed on it, rhubarb grew beneath it, and Reber’s mom hung wet laundry on it.
In 1940, he published his first results. He continued to sweep the sky, and by 1944 could publish a map of the radio sky.
Para aprofundar:
1) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grote_Reber
2) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Jansky
3) http://www.groterebermuseum.org.au/
4) http://www.nrao.edu/whatisra/hist_reber.shtml
Do quarto link, saliento:
In the 1930s Reber applied for jobs with Karl Jansky at Bell Labs and with astronomical observatories to study cosmic radio waves, but none of them were hiring at the time, since it was in the middle of the great depression.
Reber decided to study radio astronomy on his own.
The telescope was constructed by Grote Reber in 1937 in his back yard in Wheaton, Illinois (a suburb of Chicago).
He built the telescope at his own expense while working full time for a radio company in Chicago.
The mirror, made of sheet metal 31.4 feet in diameter, focuses radio waves to a point 20 feet above the dish. The cylinder contains the radio receiver which amplifies the faint cosmic signals by a factor of many million, making them strong enough to be recorded on a chart.
Reber built a parabolic dish reflector because this shape focuses waves to the same focus for all wavelengths.
This principle had been used for a long time by astronomers for design of optical telescopes, to avoid chromatic aberration.
Reber knew that it would be important to observe a wide range of wavelengths of radiation from the sky in order to understand how the radiation was being produced.
A parabolic reflector is usable over a wide wavelength range.
Observations:
Reber spent long hours every night scanning the skies with his telescope.
He had to do the work at night because there was too much interference from the sparks in automobile engines during the daytime.