Hiya Skeleton Crew,

Happy Wednesday!

Answers to Last Time

• Did ya ever learn about the Tacoma Narrows Bridge in physics class? Here’s a wild video a’ when it collapsed.

• Haleakalā crater is one a’ the must-do things on the island a’ Maui. Ya can be sure I’ll be checkin’ it out when I visit next week!

Today’s Trivias

Trivia 1

So the standard story ’bout Tacoma Narrows is that, owin’ to how ’n’ where the bridge was built, its natural resonance frequencies were somehow exactly (accidentally) tuned to how the wind blew through the Tacoma Narrows strait. Or somethin’ like that? I don’t REALLY know!1

But point is if ya got somethin’ oscillatin’ in a way ya don’t want it to, ya can apply what’s called a damping measure to try ’n’ slow it down. They even tried to do that at Tacoma Narrows! Though obviously it didn’t really work so good.

Well, those physicists folks like to use what Greek letter in their equations to represent the damping ratio?

Since I know not everyone who’s readin’ this is a physicist, I’ll give ya another hint, why not? This Greek letter is also in the name of a famous actress who’s ... Welsh? What are the Welsh doin’, namin’ their kids after Greek letters?? (Well, accordin’ to IMDb, it wasn’t her parents at all! It’s because “she added her paternal grandmother's name so as to stand out from the many other young women with the exact same name”.

Trivia 2

Now let’s move from Maui to elsewhere in Oceania. What’s probably the most famous insect endemic to New Zealand? It’s the namesake for a local digital FX company—although apparently that company forgot to put the macrons over some a’ the letters when they first set themselves up, which was a bit of a whoopsie, ’cause without the macrons the word means somethin’ ... well, let’s just say it’s somethin’ more scatological than they intended!2

OK then

Byeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee

If ya give me your email address, I’ll send some trivias to ya! No joke!!!