11 February 09

February 11 is designated as Inventor's Day, honoring the 1847 birthday of Thomas Edison. So I'm inventing that as my reason for wearing my "pandas" tie. The label on the back of the tie says Panda Repeat, which makes no sense, because then it should simply say Panda Panda. Given the pattern it would be OK to call it Pandamonium, but I prefer the alternatives based on polymer science nomenclature, either Polypanda or (panda)n (where the subscript "n" refers to the continuing repeating pattern of the monomer "panda"). Today also marks the 1839 birthday of Josiah Willard Gibbs, memorable to students in chemistry and physics as the "father of thermodynamics" and as the honoree of the quantity named "Gibbs free energy" (symbolized ΔG as in the equation ΔG = ΔH - TΔS). As far as I know, Gibbs had nothing to do with pandas.