Tycho Brahe

Tycho Brahe!

Astronomer, Moose Tamer

Hypothetically, you have to go to a friend’s wedding and your spouse gets the stomach flu and has to stay in the hotel room.  You already reserved “the plus one” and you would really like to have someone to talk to at your table during the reception. Fortunately, in the hotel you are staying at there is a convention of reanimated astronomers. Which one do ask to join you for the wedding?

Carl Sagan? Aryabhata? Copernicus? Liu Xin? Aristarchus? Sir Issac Newton? Not only are they boring but they will  insist you will be their wing-man and/or “score them some herb”.  Tycho Brahe may have never figured out the earth revolves around the sun, but he knows how to party.

Examples!

1. He pays a dwarf to entertain him and tell him the future.

2. One wedding he attended, led to a duel where he lost his nose. Therefore:

3.  He has a prosthetic nose for any occasion.

4. He had a tame moose as a drinking buddy.

So pick Tycho if nothing else you get a night of pleasant conversation and a moose ride home. Worst case scenario, you wet your pants, spend the night looking for a missing nose and the moose falls down the stairs… but the dwarf will probably warn you before hand.

Smelling the world through rose colored noses

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Gottfried Leibniz

Are you having a bad day? I am sorry. Take heart, according to today’s honoree we live in the best possible universe. But don’t take too much heart because this man’s best possible universe involved a lot of differential and integral calculus.

Gottfried Leibniz is probably most famous for his rivalry with Sir Isaac Newton. They both invented calculus, at the time, people in the Newton camp were quite successful in accusing Leibniz of plagiarism, though modern mathematical historians believe that he did arrive at his conclusions independently. Leibniz also criticized Newton’s Law of Universal Gravitation because he maintained that space was relative and not absolute, likewise everyone sided with Newton (until Einstein came on the scene.)  Also, Leibniz is better than Newton in that he has a delicious German butter cookie named after him  http://www.leibniz.de/spiele (Catch a Cookie and Knackfrische Abenteuer can be played without logging in.)  Leibniz also worked with binary code before it was cool, and made mechanical computation machines that could add subtract multiply and divide.

To celebrate Leibniz head to the international section of your local grocery store and pick up some delicious butter cookies. Avoid Fig Newtons: 1. they are not cookies they are fruit and cake, 2. They are not named after an inventor of Calculus, 3. They are not very good.

Do innkeeper's wives have naturally curly hair?"

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