Ides (of March or whenever)

Reverse side of a coin issued by Caesar's assassin Brutus in the fall of 42 BC,
with the abbreviation EID MAR (Ides of March) under a "cap of freedom" between two daggers

Today is the "Ides of March" (Latin: Idus Martii or Idus Martiae) but it is not a date limited to the month of March, although William Shakespeare's Julius Caesar has fixed that particular Ides in our culture. Shakespeare, like playwrights and filmmakers of our time, used history for his stories, and you shouldn't learn your history only from the arts.

In his play, a soothsayer makes the prophecy that Caesar needs to "Beware the Ides of March." It turns out to be true as a few idealistic Romans decide to win Rome back for the people by killing Caesar. Even his friend, Brutus, gets in on the multiple stabbings and is asked "Et tu Brute?" by the Emperor.

But that is only partially true to history. The history is actually as interesting as the fiction. For example, there was a soothsayer named Spurinna whose divination foretold (the bad omen was supposedly a bull without a heart) that had him tell Caesar to beware for the next 30 days. Like soothsayers throughout history and into today, the mysticism was mixed with some careful assessment of the real world. The 30 days would end with March 18 and Caesar was going to embark on a multi-year military campaign that would take him away from Rome, any assassination would probably occur before he left.

The Death of Caesar (1798) by Vincenzo Camuccini

The ancient Romans did count the days of the month as we do - sequentially from the first through the last day. They counted back from three fixed points of the month. It varied a bit by the month, but the Nones was the 5th or 7th, the Ides (13th or 15th), and the Kalends was the first of the following month).

The Ides occurred near the midpoint, on the 13th for most months, but on the 15th for March, May, July, and October.

Being that the Roman calendar was a lunar one, the Ides were supposed to be determined by the full moon. Originally, the Ides of March would have been the first full moon of the new year.

The Roman calendar changed its form several times between the founding of Rome and the fall of the Roman Empire. The common calendar we generally use today is known as the Gregorian calendar. It is a slight refinement of the Julian calendar used after by the Romans after 46 BC.

The Ides of March would have been marked with several religious observances and became  famous then and now as the date of the assassination of Julius Caesar in 44 BC. Caesar's death was a turning point in Roman history, often shown as the turn from the Roman Republic to the Roman Empire.

March (then called Martius) is the third month in the newer Julian calendar, but in the oldest Roman calendar it was the first month of the year and so it was treated as a time of new year celebrations.

Robot and Robotics

An android is a robot designed to resemble a human,
which can appear comforting to some people and disturbing to others. "Actroid-DER 01" Photo by Gnsin Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons

A robot is a mechanical or virtual artificial agent. Today, it is usually an electro-mechanical machine that is guided by a computer program or electronic circuitry. Robots can be autonomous or semi-autonomous and range from humanoids such as the TOSY Ping Pong Playing Robot (TOPIO) to industrial robots, collectively programmed swarm robots, and even microscopic nano robots.

The word robot goes back much earlier than these examples. The word was introduced by the Czech writer Karel Čapek in his play R.U.R - Rossum's Universal Robots, published in 1920.

In the play, a factory uses a chemical substitute for protoplasm to manufacture living, simplified people called roboti. Though the first robots actually built were crude, these fictional ones (played by actors, of course) prefigure androids who can be mistaken for humans.

Like modern industrial robots, these mass-produced workers are efficient but emotionless. They don't "think" as a human and have no sense of self. However, like many sci-fi stories that follow and still are written today, some of the robots do achieve self-awareness and incite the other robots of the world to rise up against the humans.

Karel Čapek said that his brother, the painter and writer Josef Čapek, actually originated the word. Josef suggested "roboti" from the word robota meaning literally "serf labor" and figuratively "drudgery" or "hard work" in Czech. (The word actually appears in a number of Slavic languages (e.g.: Bulgarian, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Polish, Macedonian, Ukrainian, archaic Czech and Hungarian) meaning work or labor.

"TOPIO 3" by Humanrobo - Own work.
Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons

Robotics became the name for the technology that deals with the design, construction, operation, and application of robots and the computer systems used in them. The word robotics was coined by another writer, the prolific science fiction author Isaac Asimov.

Asimov also created the "Three Laws of Robotics" which are a recurring theme in books of his, such as I Robot. These laws have since been used by others in other fiction and also in real robotic applications.

The Three Laws are:
1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
2. A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

Beetlejuice

Michael Keaton, as Beetlejuice, with Winona Ryder

I am a big fan of the film Beetlejuice and, like many films, its title has an origin story.

The name is a misspelling and mispronunciation of one of the sky’s most famous stars. The star is Betelgeuse and is often pronounced as “beetle juice” (which the film has certainly encouraged) but astronomers pronounce it as BET-el-jews.

The actual etymology of the star's name is a tangled one, but it certainly comes from Arabic origins, as do many other star names.

The star is sometimes described as "grandfatherly” because it appears in a reddish color to our eyes and that itself indicates that it is a star in its "autumn years."

By the way, I discovered that you can buy a copy of the Handbook For The Recently Deceased which is a book featured in the film.  It's a blank book, which is either a statement on the afterlife or a suggestion to write you own rules.

But back to Betelgeuse...

It is a rare red supergiant. So rare that it is said that there might be only one red supergiant star like Betelgeuse for every million or so stars in our Milky Way galaxy.  Red Antares is similar to Betelgeuse in that way.


This is a good time of year to look for Betelgeuse. It is part of the constellation Orion the Hunter. It is high in the night sky around 8 p.m. local time. As the night continues, and Earth turns eastward under the stars, Orion falls into the southwestern sky by late evening and then heads westward throughout the evening hours and finally plunges beneath the western horizon in the wee hours after midnight as Orion moves on his celestial hunt.

Betelgeuse forms Orion’s shoulder. You might also recognize some of Orion's other stars from films, TV and cultural references. Bellatrix is a star and an evil witching character from the Harry Potter novels and films.

The star Rigel has also been included in pop culture. Rigel-3 is a fictional planet in the Marvel Universe, homeland of the Rigellians. Rigel 4 is a fictional planet in The Simpsons , and Rigel 9 pops up in the lyrics of the opening theme music to Futurama: Into The Wild Green Yonder as a parody of Rigel 4.

Geek

In Shakespeare's time, a geek was sometimes a geck. They were both English dialect words meaning a "fool" or "freak. That came by way of German geck which still exists, also meaning a fool. Dictionaries say that its roots are in the Dutch and Afrikaans adjective gek meaning "crazy." There is also an Alsatian word gickeleshut which is a hat worn by a clown or jester, especially during carnival.

In 18th century in Austria-Hungary, gecken were truly freakish people (as in people with physical abnormalities) who were unfortunately on display in some circuses. By the 19th century, that had moved to North America and a geek was a performer in a geek (or freak) show in a circus, carnival or sideshows at fairs.

That use of the word continued throughout the 20th century, though the term "freak" began to be used in the 1960s to describe "hippies" and counter-culture people and the term took on a more positive spin.

In Jimi Hendrix's song, "If 6 Was 9" he sings:

White collared conservative flashing down the street,
Pointing their plastic finger at me.
They're hoping soon my kind will drop and die,
But I'm gonna wave my freak flag high, high.
Wave on, wave on
Fall mountains, just don't fall on me

David Crosby refers to long hair as a freak flag in his song "Almost Cut My Hair"  "I feel like letting my freak flag fly."


Geek  evolved in a similar way, especially in the more technology-obsessed 80s and 90s. Author William Gibson was interview in the mid-1980s by a young Neil Gaiman and Gibson said that as a kid he was a "geek who couldn't play baseball." The usage was odd enough that an editor for Time Out magazine changed geek to Greek. Though neither probably made much sense to many readers ("It's all Greek to me."), the word was evolving from a negative connotation to one that could be used with pride.

Geek and nerd are sometimes used interchangeably but there have different connotations.  In a 2007 interview on The Colbert Report, Richard Clarke said the difference between nerds and geeks is "geeks get it done."

The similarity may have been that both were usually used to describe males who were socially inept, felt out of place and freakish and yet have some advanced skills in science, math, computers, history, or gaming etc.



The TV show The Big Bang Theory features geeks who are successful and get girlfriends (including the hot non-geeky girl) and the show has become so popular in the culture that there is a kind of "geek chic" movement in fashion and the general youth culture.

Geeks can use all the new technologies to do fun, interesting or also useful things. That is, in its way, "cool."

Best Buy stores capitalized on the concept by introducing their Geek Squad employees for tech support.

The term nerd is similar when it comes to tech, but perhaps is slight;y less "chic" and associated with thinking of some things as "cool" that the general population might laugh at. The Revenge of the Nerds films signaled a similar rise in positivity towards that term.

So let your geek flag fly. But don't call a geek or a nerd a dweeb. That's a whole other thing.

The Who

THE WHO in 1975

The 3 founding members of The Who are Roger Daltrey, Pete Townshend and John Entwistle who grew up in Acton, London and went to Acton County Grammar School. Townshend and Entwistle became friends in their second year of Acton County, and formed a traditional jazz group. Entwistle and Townshend both played guitar but Entwhistle had problems playing because he had large fingers and moved to bass.

After Acton County, Townshend attended Ealing Art College which he claims as very influential on the course of the band in later years.

Daltrey was expelled at 15 and working at construction when in 1959 he started the Detours. The band played corporate and wedding functions and Daltrey handled the finances and selected the music. He saw Entwistle by chance on the street carrying a bass and recruited him into the Detours. In 1961, Entwistle suggested Townshend as a guitarist. This early version of The Who (but still called The Detours) had Daltrey on lead guitar, Entwistle on bass, Harry Wilson on drums, and Colin Dawson on vocals.

It was a cover band with Daltrey clearly the leader. Dawson left after frequently arguing with Daltrey and Daltrey moved to lead vocals. Townshend became the sole guitarist. Another local band, The Pirates, also had only one guitarist, Mick Green, who inspired Townshend to combine rhythm and lead guitar in his style. Entwistle then began to use his bass as more of a lead instrument playing melodies.

According to Before I Get Old: The Story of The Who by dave Marsh and other books, in 1964 the Detours became aware that there was another group called Johnny Devlin and the Detours and decided to change there name. The band members and friend considered "No One" and "The Group" and "The Hair" but Daltrey chose "The Who." No deep meaning, but rather one of several goofs on band names.

Their classic line-up consisted of lead singer Daltrey, guitarist Townshend, bassist Entwistle, and drummer Keith Moon. They are considered one of the most influential rock bands of the 20th century, selling over 100 million records worldwide and establishing their reputation equally on live shows and studio work.