Scientists gone wild

OK, in case you lot didn't know, I enjoy playing games. And I especially enjoy playing games that have a point to them, or games that involve numbers. That made the game I recently played with Nathan extra fun¹. But this is a different game, one that arose out of the fact that there's a road in Chicagoland that's called Euclid Avenue. That brought up the discussion about naming roads after people who were valuable in the sciences, not just politicians and activists.

So we got to a-thinking, about who we'd name streets after. And, just for fun, we decided that we'd limit our city plan to 26 consecutive streets, alphabetically. Sure, then we have to chose between Hooke, Halley or Heisenberg and Fr. Mendel or Mendeleev², but it's easier that way than having unending roads named after semi-obscure scientists.

So my game is: who would you have as your alphabetic roads, keeping in mind both scientific advancement and popular opinion of them?

My partial list;
(Archimedes, Boltzman, Curie, Darwin, Einstein, Faraday, Geiger, Hooke, and then I give up trying to think of an "I" without straining myself)


¹I am thinking of a rule which governs sequences of three numbers. The sequence 2-4-6, as it so happens, obeys this rule. Write down a sequence of three numbers on a card, and I'll mark it "Yes" for fits the rule, or "No" for not fitting the rule. Then you can write down another set of three numbers and ask whether it fits again, and so on. When you're confident that you know the rule, write down the rule. You can test as many triplets as you like.
²I really wanted to link to the Oscar Mayer Periodic table, but after 10 minutes of searching, I couldn't find images of Bolognium.

Anywhere but here

I was indeed listening to Radio 4 this afternoon when they discussed basically what Nate just wrote. Part of the report stated that girl from a working class English background was asked why she wasn't participating in Citizenship class. She replied "I don't come from anywhere".


I, on the other hand, am one quarter American (from Georgia, y'all), one quarter of me is Derbyshire mining stock and half of me is from Clapham, Saaaf London.

My paternal grandfather was a cobbler, and one of his legs was shorter than the other. When my parents met, my father described my mother as looking like a sack of potatos, and told her he didn't know why he was going out with her because he didn't like fat women.
My maternal grandmother dumped an un-named very rich man to move to England and become a miner's wife. My great uncle loves genealogy, and as a result I know that I have ancestors on the Mayflower, in the Domesday book and on both sides of the Salem witch hunts.

My grandfather proposed to my grandmother over the phone. He said "Sally, you're going to have to marry me!" and she replied "...I guess so."

Family history is fun!