Hiya Skeleton Crew,

I’m gettin kinda way out into the boonies now! My connection’s been a bit spotty, but I found a li’l patch of signal, so hopefully this email’ll make its way to youse guys.

Trivia 1

I can’t mention the armillary sphere on the Portuguese flag without gettin sidetracked onto the topic of 16th-century Iberian nautical science.^[1] & who’s the one guy who’s basically synonymous with that topic? Pedro Nunes, obvs!

If ya don’t recall the name, Senhor Nunes was important for his work on figurin out how a ship sailin on a steady course goes along an imaginary line called a loxodrome, or rhumb line. That’d be opposed to an arc tracin an orthodrome, i.e., a path that gives ya the shortest travel distance between two points on the globe.

So … that’s kinda unintuitive, right? If ya wanna sail from point A to point B as quick as possible, ya can’t just set a steady course pointed at point B? Weird, right??

Anyways, an orthodrome’s better known by what two-word name? It’s defined as the path ya get when ya intersect a sphere with a plane that passes through the sphere’s center point.

Trivia 2

As far’s I can tell, a rhumb line’s not got anything to do with the rhumba dance.^[2] But now that I’m on the topic anyway, lemme ask youse a trivia ’bout it.

Didja ever wonder why sometimes the dance is spelled “rumba” & other times it’s “rhumba”? No? Well, I sure did! So I looked it up. I guess the h-ful spellin is mainly reserved for talkin ’bout ballroom dancin in particular, while the no-h version is a broad term that can refer to all sorts of rumbas, from ballroom to Cuban to Congolese & everythin in between.

When it comes to ballroom dance competitions, there’re five styles that get grouped under the “International Latin” category. Those are Rumba (like we just talked ’bout), Cha-Cha-Cha, Jive, Samba, & what remainin style, a Spanish dance in 2/4 time?

The story goes that this dance is s’posed to mimic a bullfight, with the leading dancer representin the torero & the follower his cape swooshin ’round in the wind. Whether or not that’s really where the dance came from … well, that’s above my pay grade! But it IS associated with bullfightin nowadays, that much I’m sure of.