COMET HOLMES! IT'S HOT! IT'S BIG! IT'S NOW! Vleeptron's FAQs -- Reliable Science Info 100% Guaranteed UnPerverted by the Bush White House!

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Top image:

Comet Holmes finder chart

Periodic Comet Holmes (17P) is located in east-central Perseus. Although this finder chart shows the northeastern horizon at dusk, the comet will be easier to spot later in the evening when Perseus is higher.

Bottom image:

Comet Holmes from my Hood

At Williams College in Williamstown [northwest corner of] Massachusetts, Steven Souza writes: "Our students observed it last night (October 25th). This image was taken with a 0.6-meter DFM Cassegrain scope and Apogee Alta U9000 CCD camera, unfiltered, with an exposure time of 0.1 second. There's obvious and asymmetric structure to the coma, which is (at about 0:47 UT October 26th) about 2.3 arcminutes across — similar in size to the Ring Nebula, M57."

Photo by Huajie Cao, Adam McKay, Steven Souza

========

Okay, this is all new to me, but apparently Comet Holmes (officially known as 17P) is blossoming and erupting into one of the brightest, largest visitors ever to cruise the night skies near Planet Earth.

I filched all this stuff from Sky & Telescope Magazine, 'cause they've been writing reliably about crap in the sky for about a century, and no one has ever accused them of lying or intentionally misleading people about Scientific Things for political reasons.

Notice I did NOT link you to or filch anything from the Bush White House or any agency of the US Government, like a FEMA press conference, or sworn testimony about global climate change from the head of the US Centers for Disease Control (an M.D. doctor, I don't know what her specialty is, maybe you should take your sick kid to some other doctor).

My experience bumbling around the Heavens suggests that a comet is a northern/southern hemisphere-specific thingie, and Holmes is putting on its show in the Northern Hemisphere. So people in the Southern Hemisphere -- Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, South America -- might not get much of a show or any show.

But that's just the best guess from the Vleeptron Space Academy. If you're getting a whale of a show from Madagascar, please Leave A Comment.

But if you're in North America, Europe or most of Asia -- GO OUTSIDE AT NIGHT! Call the local university Astronomy Department and ask which direction to point your binoculars in!

If it's really going to be as big and bright and spectacular as this dump from the USA magazine Sky & Telescope is ballyhooing, a good pair of binoculars is probably the best thing you can use to see Comet Holmes. Reserve a fancy telescope for trying to take photographs. And whatever you do, THIS IS A WRONG MOMENT TO RUN OUT AND BLOW $$$$ ON AN EXPENSIVE TELESCOPE!!! If you must blow money on something in a hurry, invest in some really good binoculars, perfect for the comet and nature stuff and cheerleader practice across the street.

But remember last year's Comet McNaught over South Africa? Vleeptron's Comet Correspondent in Cape Town shot wonderful, amazing comet photos with an ordinary digital Ph.D. camera! (Ph.D. = Push Here, Dummy.)

I just hosed up everything about Comet Holmes in S&T. You'll have to make Geek Sense of it as best you can. Please Leave A Comment if you see the Comet, or if you have a Question.

VLEEPTRON SPACE ACADEMY
FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS
ABOUT COMET HOLMES 17P

Q. Which direction should I look?

A. Up. Almost all comets are best seen by looking up.

Q. When is the best time to see the comet?

A. Night. Not day. When the Up Sky is Very Dark. My buddy said he saw it about 30 minutes before midnight. That was local New York City USA time.

If you're in Bucharest or Tel Aviv -- how the hell do I know? Don't they teach astronomy at the university there?

Q. Well, "Up" is certainly helpful. But then where should I look?

A. START by looking toward the NORTHEAST. If you're looking up and northeast and you DON'T see a big, bright, strange, creepy, unusual thing that you've never seen in the sky before, slowly turn your toes to the right and keep looking up. Keep turning your toes to the right until you return to the direction you began.

If you still don't see a big, bright, unusual object in the night sky, is the sky clear, or full of dark clouds? Are you in the Northern Hemisphere? Are you on the surface of Planet Earth?

If you're a lefty, you can turn your toes to the left.

Q. Why didn't somebody tell me this comet was coming?

A. They did. You just weren't paying attention. What do you usually do when it's dark? Hang in a pub or a bar or a club?

Comet Holmes is one of those periodic comets that passes by Earth regularly, exactly like clockwork. Since Halley, elliptical, periodic Comets just aren't surprises anymore.

Well, maybe they're surprises for you. Can you really meet cool people in bars? Good conversationalists?

Q. Does the appearance of this bright, large comet mean that somewhere on Earth, a very important person will die, or a very important person will be born, or a very important battle will take place, and one side will win the battle, and history will be changed? Does this comet mean there will be a big change in the stock market?

A. Yes.

Q. Is this a good time for me to get married?

A. Yes! Hurry! You don't have much time! Get married while Comet Holmes is still in the night sky!

================

Sky & Telescope
Monday 29 October 2007

Comet Holmes Stays
Bright, Enlarges
in the Evening Sky

Amateur astronomers the world over have been stunned and amazed by the weirdest new object to appear in the sky in memory. And it's one of the brightest, too.

For the most recent news, see the daily updates at the end of this article.

Less than a week ago Periodic Comet Holmes (17P) was a tiny, roughly 17th-magnitude nonentity out between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. Then on Wednesday, October 24th, skywatchers looked up to see a bright new yellow-orange "star" shining in Perseus. For no apparent reason, the comet had brightened about a millionfold to shine at close to magnitude 2.5. That made it plain to see even in the bright moonlight and through all but the worst light pollution. It looked truly starlike; even high telescopic magnification barely resolved it as anything larger at first. But within a day it had expanded into a perfectly round, bright little disk with a tiny nucleus as seen in binoculars and telescopes. It looked like no comet ever seen.

Its startling outburst, however, has a precedent. The comet was also in a major eruption 115 years ago, in November 1892, when English amateur Edwin Holmes was the first to spot it. It reached 4th or 5th magnitude, faded in the following weeks, and then underwent a second eruption 2 1/2 months after the first. (The comet's history.)

Comet through full moonlight, 25 October 2007

Observers worldwide had no trouble spotting Comet Holmes through the full moonlight on the evening of October 25, 2007. Shigemi Numazawa took this very wide-field shot from Niigata, Japan. Click image for larger view.

Shigemi Numazawa
The Outburst. The first person to notice something happening this time, according to IAU Circular 8886 (issued October 24th by the Central Bureau for Astronomical Telegrams) was A. Henriquez Santana at Tenerife, Canary Islands, shortly after midnight on the morning of [24 October] local time. The comet was then about 8th magnitude, but within minutes Ramon Naves and colleagues in Barcelona, Spain, caught it at magnitude 7.3.

Internet discussion groups came alive with the news. "To my amazement, 17P had brightened to naked-eye visibility," exclaimed Bob King when he spotted Comet Holmes shortly before dawn in Duluth, Minnesota. "What a sight!" he posted to the Comets Mailing List. Alan Hale of Cloudcroft, New Mexico, concurred. To Hale (well-known codiscoverer of Comet Hale-Bopp) it appeared essentially starlike in a telescope until he switched to high power.

Then things only got better. As Earth continued to turn, nightfall arrived in Japan. "It is visible with naked eyes in a large city!" posted Seiichi Yoshida, who observed the comet from beside Tsurumi River in Yokohama. By 17:15 Universal Time he was describing Comet Holmes as magnitude 2.8.

Since then the comet has remained just as bright or even a little more so — shining as the third-brightest "star" in Perseus — while enlarging substantially. It's still a round, sharp-edged disk with a bright core in binoculars and telescopes. Comet expert Gary Kronk expects Comet Holmes to remain bright and continue to enlarge in the coming days, as it makes its way slowly westward across Perseus. Its position on 25 October (0h UT) was

right ascension 3h 53m
declination +50.1° (equinox 2000)

and by October 30th it will have moved only slightly, to 3h 48m, +50.4°. On November 19–20 It will pass closely by Alpha Persei (by 1/3°).

For skywatchers in the Northern Hemisphere, Perseus is visible all night around this time of year. The comet will stay in Perseus all the way into next March.

See pictures. And submit yours to S&T's online gallery!

Chart and ephemeris of the comet's future motion. Light curve (scroll down).

This 12-arcminute-wide frame from Arkansas Sky Observatory shows the comet as a brilliant, near-circular disk on the morning of October 25th. Clay Sherrod used a 0.4-meter (16-inch) Schmidt-Cassegrain telescope at f/3.
Clay Sherrod / ASO

Thursday 25 Oct: "This object is amazing!" posted Brian Cudnik of Houston, Texas, on the Yahoo CometChasing group after coming in from his telescope on the evening of the 24th. "I have just observed it with an 8-inch f/10 Cassegrain, boosting the power up to 163x then to 508x.... The bright inner coma seems displaced off-center toward position angle 315°. The inner coma opens up into a fan toward position angle 300°, and I have noticed one ripple, akin to the hoods/ripples seen in Comet Hale-Bopp ten years ago. The coma is uniform in brightness, aside from this fan-shape material emanating from the central condensation, and has a well-defined edge." He measured the coma to be 69 arcseconds wide using using the drift method. "The entire object has a nice yellow-white color; no sign of any tail. The apparent magnitude is +2.8 (estimated using Alpha Per at +1.9 and the other two bright stars adjacent to it at +3.0 each) and has remained rather steady all evening."

Posted Dan Laszlo of Fort Collins, Colorado: "In an 18-inch Newtonian at 90x, the yellow orb is like a bright spherical planetary nebula. Diameter of the bright portion is about equal to the lunar crater Tycho, so magnification helps. I can detect a very faint spherical outer envelope, about equal in radius to the diameter of the bright portion, tough with the moonlight."

From Florian Boyd, Palm Springs, California: "I think this is about the most amazing thing I've ever seen in the sky!"

Despite moonlight and smoke from wildfires near Los Angeles, Anthony Cook captured the comet at the prime focus of Griffith Observatory's 12-inch Zeiss refractor at 8:30 UT on October 25th. This frame, cropped to 4 arcminutes wide, shows the comet's nucleus slightly off-center in the larger coma. In longer exposures the coma had a well-defined edge, allowing Cook to measure its growth rate. He got a diameter of 86 arcseconds at 7:46 UT, then 89 arcseconds an hour later.
Griffith Observatory / Anthony Cook

Friday, Oct. 26: Last night S&T's Alan MacRobert wrote: "Omigod. Through thin clouds lit by the full Moon I had to guess where Perseus was, but I swept around with 10x50 binoculars from my front step, and wham, there was the comet! It's sure isn't starlike now, at least not in the 10x binocs (with homemade image stabilization). It's a very sizable bright fuzz spot, perfectly round, with a large, brilliant, hazy nucleus and a very sharp edge to the circular coma. It's yellow with just a hint of green.

"When the clouds finally cleared and I could see it with the naked eye, it was still starlike to my vision. Magnitude 2.7, based on Alpha Persei being mag. 1.9 and Delta Persei mag. 3.0. You just look up and there it is. It's the brightest 'star' in Perseus after Alpha Per and Algol."

Comet Holmes at high power, Oct. 25, 2007

At Williams College in [Williamstown in the northwest corner of] Massachusetts, Steven Souza writes: "Our students observed it last night (October 25th). This image was taken with a 0.6-meter DFM Cassegrain scope and Apogee Alta U9000 CCD camera, unfiltered, with an exposure time of 0.1 second. There's obvious and asymmetric structure to the coma, which is (at about 0:47 UT October 26th) about 2.3 arcminutes across — similar in size to the Ring Nebula, M57."
Huajie Cao, Adam McKay, Steven Souza

Later that night: "Used the 12.5-inch reflector at 75x, 110x, and 180x. A brilliant, starlike, white nucleus is dead center in the perfectly round coma. What looked like the nucleus in the binoculars is an inner coma or broad fan offset from the nucleus toward the southwest. At these magnifications the bright round disk is no longer perfectly sharp-edged, but still pretty nearly so. It also has a slight but definite ring appearance, as if some of the light is coming from a hollow, spherical, glowing shell. Farther out beyond this is a much dimmer round glow with about twice the diameter of the bright disk. Only out this far does the brilliant skylight of the perigean full Moon in this part of the sky begin to matter. This was at 1 a.m. EDT (5:00 UT) October 26th with the comet (and Moon) near the zenith. Still magnitude 2.7 naked-eye."

Comet Holmes at October 27.31 UT
It's enlarging daily. P. Clay Sherrod took this CCD image at 9:55 UT October 27th, using a 16-inch Schmidt-Cassegrain telescope at f/3 for a 5-second RGB composite exposure.
P. Clay Sherrod

Saturday, Oct. 27: Last night the comet was as bright as ever; various people's estimates averaged magnitude 2.5 early in the night (time zones of the Americas). Its overall form in a telescope has not changed, just enlarged a lot (animation by Wah). Writes P. Clay Sherrod, who took the image at right: "Even more incredible each night. The comet now measures 255 arcseconds across (via CCD [Charged-Couple Device, a solid-state device used for high amplification of faint light signals] direct measure). On October 25, similar measures of the coma revealed diameter of approximately 121 arcseconds." View the comparison.

Sunday, Oct. 28: By last night the comet had enlarged to 348 arcseconds (6.3 arcminutes), as measured by Clay Sherrod on his CCD images. "It's beginning to look a bit nonstellar to the naked eye," writes Alan MacRobert. "Not as crisp and sparkly as Alpha and Delta Persei."

Comet Holmes on the night of Oct. 27–28, 2007

All of the comet's features that are visible in the eyepiece of a telescope are captured in this image by Sean Walker. The bright yellow-white coma is dust lit by sunlight; the green halo is fluorescing gas (the green emission is mainly from C2 and CN molecules). Walker used a 108mm F/4 Faworski Astrograph and a Canon 10D camera. This image is a stack of ten 30-second exposures and (to bring out the nucleus) ten 6-second exposures. Click image for larger view.
S&T: Sean Walker

Within a few more days the nonstellar appearance ought to be obvious, making this object more of an attraction for the non-astronomical public. Hold a star party, and alert your local news media!

"When I first saw it, I thought it looked like a frosted incandescent light bulb on a dimmer switch," commented Mike Foreman of Carrollton, Texas, on the Comets Mailing List.

Using Alpha and Delta Per as comparisons (magnitudes 1.9 and 3.0), MacRobert estimated the comet to be magnitude 2.8, just a trace fainter (more similar to Delta) than two nights ago. In stabilized 10x50 binoculars it looked just the same as before only bigger, with all its details easier to see.

Monday, Oct. 29 (by Alan MacRobert): Last night the comet was very plainly a little disk to the naked eye rather than a star. Definitely a more interesting naked-eye view now! No change in brightness in the last 24 hours. In fact, the average of all good magnitude estimates has basically stayed flat since the outburst. (Light curve.)

Finally, the bright round disk is starting to show some asymmetry. In the 12.5-inch scope at 75x, the disk's northeast edge — the side away from the bright fan near the nucleus — is looking more compressed and sharp-edged than the southwest edge, which is a bit vaguer. The slightly darker 'moat' inside the disk's edge is better defined on the northeast side too.

The fan southwest of the nucleus seems more diffuse now. The nucleus itself is fuzzier too, no longer so starlike. This was easy to judge tonight because an actual orange star, roughly as bright as the nucleus, was shining right through the disk!

Even in the waning-gibbous moonlight, the dim, diffuse, outermost glow of gas was a little more than twice the diameter of the bright disk of dust. All this was around 12:25 a.m. EDT (4:25 UT) October 29th, right after the Sox won the World Series. I'm sure I wasn't the only one running back and forth between the telescope and the baseball game — just like the last time the Sox won the [baseball World's] Series, in 2004 in the middle of a total lunar eclipse.

Future prospects. The comet is likely to stay bright for many days or weeks. The yellow color is dust reflecting sunlight, as confirmed by the spectra that have been taken. Dust is what keeps a comet bright — as opposed to gas (comet gas is green and blue), which blows away quickly in the solar wind. This comet won't fade out soon.

Any tail will probably be short and stubby when, or if, it forms. The tail should be pointing nearly away from us in space — we're looking down its length — since the comet is nearly on the opposite side of Earth from the Sun. From the comet's viewpoint, the Earth and Sun are only about 15° apart, and this phase angle will stay small for many months. So we'll keep looking down the tail.

- 30 -

Posted by the Editors of Sky & Telescope, October 27, 2007

comments (72)
The following comments do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Sky Publishing.
By posting a comment, you agree to our Rules of Conduct and Terms of Use.

Holmes Outburst
Posted by Duncan Parks October 24, 2007 At 11:06 PM PDT
This one is really rewarding in the telescope, even in urban skyglow. At 72x, it showed a broad, round coma, with a notably bright streak smearing out from a very bright nucleus. Seen from Portland, OR, 10/25, 9:15 pm PDT, 10-inch Dob. We're really lucky to have a clearish night here in October!

Comet Holmes Outburst
Posted by David Knisely October 24, 2007 At 11:31 PM PDT
Well, I got a better look in my Nexstar 9.25 (0600 UT on Oct. 25th). The comet has a very faint outer halo perhaps four or maybe five arc minutes in diameter. Inside this is a *brilliant* inner coma around 1.5 arc minutes in diameter with very well-defined edges. At 297x, the core showed a small star-like point when the seeing settled with a diffuse conical fan-like brightening flowing away from the nuclear condensation roughly in the anti-solar direction. The edge of the coma seems to show a somewhat shell-like feature, as if the outburst generated a bit of a shock front. The comet is very similar in brightness to Algol (very slightly fainter), so it is probably around magnitude 2.3 to 2.5 or so. I hope it hangs in there for a while!

Comet Holmes (17P)
Posted by Indigo_Sunrise October 25, 2007 At 09:40 AM PDT
Is it known why the comet has brightened so much? I don't know much about comets, asteroids, etc., but is it because of the mineral or elemental make-up of the comet causing it to brighten as it comes in close proximity to the sun? I'm hoping it clears up here at my location (MD), so that I can have a chance to view it before it's gone. Which brings me to another question: how long is Comet Holmes expected to be visible?

rain, rain...
Posted by Todd Vance October 25, 2007 At 10:05 AM PDT
gee--can you guys do something to make sure the comet is still there when the clouds clear and I can actually look? If not, I have to ask The Weather Channel to move the clouds away a little faster :) All this time, no rain, and now that there's a comet, the Washington, DC area is all clouded over and it rains like in a rainforest or something.

Reasons for Outburst
Posted by Bryan Seigneur October 25, 2007 At 10:16 AM PDT
IANAAstronomer, or planetologist. However, from reading pop journals, I get the idea that we don't know a lot about the make up or behavior of comets. One fact is that their orbits move them between extremes. They go from solar altitudes that are near absolute 0 (0K), where methane and many other compounds we think of as gaseous are slowed down and even crystalized, and they swing all the way down to the inner solar system, where things are as we know them, or even hotter. This can understandably wreak havoc on a poor little planetoid. I assume this havoc of heating, evaporation, an d shifting is seen in the cometary tail. I think it would not be foolish to imagine that any small object like Pluto et al would do similar things if its orbit were magically made wildly eccentric like that of a comets. I'd say the object would then actually be a comet for all intents. Another fact is that comets change. Think about all the matter that is blown away from a comet, or violently shifted, during its foray into the inner solar system. Then, as it leaves the warm bosom of the sun, things fall back down and freeze solid, but not *at all* necessarily in the same place. If it comes through one time and does one thing, it may do something totally different the next time. So, we were just lucky enough to spot a comet during a particularly violent warming event.

holmes
Posted by matthew burmeister October 25, 2007 At 11:42 AM PDT
i hope that i can see this in my 90mm goto!

Comet likely brightning?
Posted by Garret Moore October 25, 2007 At 01:20 PM PDT
I'm an astronomical and science illustrator and have illustrated many comets based on speculative science. In the 80's I did my first multiple comet illustration after observing many single nuclei and speculating this could happen. Shoemaker-Levy was the first recorded, so I was ecstatic. So, thinking about this for some time now. I am speculating that the comet could be breaking up and will slowly spread as it is influenced by planetary or solar gravitational. The brightening could be the result of more surface area exposed in the break up. Depending on how it fractioned and warming it could multiply its output my many multiples. Could this be another Shoemaker-Levy? I will go to the software (SNP)to see its track and estimate it's probable effects. I'll be looking to reports here of any observed separation or displacement of the nuclei or dramatic shape changes in the coma. I will observe tonight, but without a collimator my 17" Dob will be close to useless. Especially in city sky's

Comet 17P Holmes
Posted by Kent Blackwell October 25, 2007 At 01:48 PM PDT
When I returned home from the movies on Wednesday night, October 24 it was raining. Suddenly the sky temporarily cleared long enough for me to set up my 80mm and 100mm refracting telescope to view the outburst of Comet 17P Holmes from my home in light-polluted Virginia Beach, VA. At 30x in the 80mm the comet closely resembled the reddish colored planetary nebula IC 418 in Lepus. The red color vanished at higher power, nor did it show in the 100mm telescope, although that instrument revealed more inner detail. As I was connecting A/C power to the motor-driven equatorial mount of the 100mm the rain returned so I had to drag everything quickly back into the garage. An hour later the skies cleared long enough for me to set up my 10" f/4.7 Dobsonian. Wow! At 175x Comet 17P Holmes resembled the large planetary nebula IC 1535 (Cleopatra's Eye) in Eridanus, only much brighter! The core was exceedingly bright and slightly elongated towards the south. What a great surprise! What a great comet! Don't miss it. Kent Blackwell Virginia Beach, VA

Could this be caused by an Impact.
Posted by Marshall Eubanks October 25, 2007 At 05:45 PM PDT
I would suspect that the most likely reason for the outburst was that it was hit by a meteor. It will be interesting to see if it was disrupted. Let's do a back of the envelope sanity check. This looks like considerably more material than came from the "Deep Impact" impactor, which left a 100 meter crater. If Comet Holmes is about the same size as the comets wit known sizes, the exposed surface area is about 100 square km. Assume that the Martian cratering rates apply; there are 200 similar comets, and each is obseved for something between a few months and many years. That is maybe as much as 100,000 years of comet observations and, using the standard Martian crater model at http://www.psi.edu/projects/mgs/cratering2.html you can see that the expected crater size in that period for 100 square km is about 30-50 meters (i.e., smaller than the Deep Impact crater). There is thus roughly a 1% chance of forming a 100 meter diameter crater in our observation history, and a pretty small chance of a much larger crater being formed in any comet observed in modern times. So, I conclude that it is unlikely that this is is due to a meteor impact, unless there is something wrong with my BOE calculations

cOMET hOLMES
Posted by LOUIS wELKE October 25, 2007 At 06:47 PM PDT
ON 10-25-07 AT 8: 30 PM I began observing Comet Holmes with my Meade 8' LX90 USING a 26 MM 2" eyepiece and tracking the comet just above the star Capella and a little to the south. I then tried a 2" 16.5mm eyepiece and then went to a 5mm 1.25 eyepiece at 400X it was huge but it had lost resolution so I went back to a 26mm 2" eyepiece that produced 77X. This is a beautiful comet to watch. Lou Welke

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Comet Holmes! Look to the Skies!

e-mail from buddy in New York City ... if you Google, you can probably find astro websites which tell you how to (clear local night skies permitting) see this Comet Holmes from the entire Northern Hemisphere, Europe, Asia. A good comet usually stays visible for at least three nights in a row. But I wanted to zap this to all Vleeptroids immediately. I got it Sunday night at 04:00 GMT (11 pm US Eastern Time).

I don't know whether from your home at night you can conveniently look northeast. If you can, check out Comet Holmes. As the night progresses, the comet rises. Last night at about 1:30am it was near the zenith. (I almost fell off my balcony.) Right now, both the moon and the Empire State Building are in my field of vision. I'm mentioning that so you can get a sense of relative brightness. With nothing other than my [eye-] glasses, the comet is a dim star. But considering the moon and the Empire State Building, it ain't that dim. With binoculars (10 x 50) it's a regular old fuzzy ball. e you later.

PIZZAQ: find a value of the Squuzuu Function

Click image for bigger.

How hard can this be?

In increasing order, the positive whole integers are n.

Each n returns an integer with that funny symbol, which is called The Squuzuu Function. They increase, too.

I didn't just make up the Squuzuu Function. It's not random or arbitary. It's a well-known, even (among certain nerd circles) a famous relationship.

Here's a hint. To define the Squuzuu Function, you don't need the whole table. You don't need to know what numbers went before 8 and 22 to determine that

if n = 8,
then Squuzuu(8) = 22.

Once you understand the relationship, I could ask

If n = 33,
what is Squuzuu(33) ?

and you could calculate or compute Squuzuu(33) = 10143 without using any previous part of the table, or without having the table at all. In other words, once you understand the relationship, you can make your own table from scratch, or just any one line of the table, with pencil, paper and patience, and then when things get really big, with a fairly simple computer program.

I could ask

if n = 73,
what is Squuzuu(73) ?

and (with or without a computer's help) you could compute the value of Squuzuu(73) .

In fact, that's what I'll award 1 whole Pizza, with extra cheese, shallots, endives, and shitaki mushrooms for. Given this partial table,

if n = 73,
what is Squuzuu(73) ?

You're on the Vleeptron PizzaQ Honor System, no Googling, no phoning Klaas in Rotterdam. But I think I've done a pretty good job of insulating this from idle cheating.

If anybody sends in a guess, I'm going to be really sorry, because I don't know the answer yet, so I'll have to grind it out, and that should take a few aspirin.

Maxi Boyd honors Bob the dubious artist with a spot in her art show memorializing our departed friends and loved ones

In memory of Albertine Sarrzin
Remembered by JNP, France

from the on-line and Toronto gallery art exhibition
"All My Friends Are Dead,"
by Maxi Boyd and fellow artists.

Several fine visual artists keep mistaking me and my strange, confused, substandard regrigerator art for visual art. I find this both mystifying, inexplicable and, of course, very flattering.

Well, I think I'm a good joke-teller, most of the time with words, but a joke is a joke whether you tell it with words or with pictures, so they laugh at my picture jokes and behave toward me as if I were an artist. I'm not complaining. This is a very high-class bunch of Kunstlers I have been allowed to hang with. In the coffee-table biography books about their lives and achievements, I'm the guy at the party in the third row behind the famous artists. I'm eating a sausage.

The highly talented and accomplished Toronto artist Maxi Boyd is one of the artists who -- for reasons she has never made very clear -- keeps confusing me with and accusing me of being a visual artist. It's almost Halloween, and her annual Halloween Show, an invitational from a large and worldwide community of artists, is entitled

"All My Friends Are Dead."

She has asked dozens of her artist pals to make works of art to memorialize dead friends and loved ones. I would describe the results, but

1. You can see the whole highly colorful and interesting show for yourself, and

2. The whole thing rather echoes and radiates the spirit -- both beautiful and creepy -- of Halloween, so if you know and like Halloween, you'll like the works of art and the ideas these artists have sent to Maxie.

And I'm one of them! My Vleeptron Talking Board and Planchette are there, on display, as well as a little bit of text about my dead friends and lovers and my relationship with them.

The original Talking Board post, with some comment about Communicating with the Dead, and a beautiful song about those who have foolishly left this "Sweet Old World" before they had to or before they should have or before I gave them my permission to leave, is here.

I don't know if Life is clearly superior to Death, because I know a lot about Life, and I know absolutely nothing about Death. I only know I wish my friends and my lovers wouldn't have died and left me here missing them.

Who will save us from this disaster??? Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? Harvey Johnson fucks up a wet dream & wins the Mike Brown Incompetence Award

FEMA Deputy Administrator Harvey Johnson [see official FEMA biography at bottom] talks about the agency's response to the California wildfires at the FEMA press briefing room in Washington, D.C. on Tuesday 23 October 2007.

It was later revealed that reporters were not given adequate time to travel to the event, so instead, the agency's public affairs staff asked questions. The decision prompted backlash from the media, Department of Homeland Security and the White House. (photo: Bill Koplitz, FEMA)

===============

FEMA is the Federal Emergency Managemant Agency. These are the federal officials charged with the responsibility of saving your life in case of a disaster or catastrophe -- hurricane, earthquake, tsunami, tornado, flood, and this week, forest fires of historic proportions in Southern California.

This remarkable story raises a very important and interesting question:

How stupid can a human being be and still be able to breathe and urinate without professional assistance?

Or, as we used to say in the Army -- these guys could fuck up a wet dream.

===============

ABC News
(American Broadcasting Company
USA commercial television network
owned by the Walt Disney Company)
Friday 26 October 2007

FEMA Apologizes
After Sham News Conference

White House, Homeland Security
Angered by FEMA 'Stunt'

by PIERRE THOMAS, THERESA COOK, JASON RYAN and JACK DATE

It looked like any other Washington press briefing, with a public affairs official walking up to a podium, introducing a government official and kicking off a press conference.

But what happened next raised the ire of the news media and ticked off Bush administration officials.

Tuesday the Federal Emergency Management Agency announced it was holding a news conference to answer reporters' questions about the federal agency's emergency response to the Southern California wildfires.

The agency gave reporters just 15 minutes notice to attend, and those members of the media who called in via phone lines could listen to the event but were not able to ask questions.

FEMA's Deputy Administrator Harvey Johnson conducted the event like a regular press briefing, assuring those in attendance that FEMA -- the agency that performed so poorly in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina -- was responding well to the disaster in Southern California.

"The report basically is that were doing a fine, doing a pretty good job," Johnson told the audience.

The event went smoothly. That is, until the news media discovered that the press conference wasn't exactly a press conference at all.

Unlike most press briefings, this one was missing a key component: members of the press.

FEMA: No Reporters? No Problem.

No reporters? No problem for FEMA. The agency filled the press room with its own public affairs personnel who asked questions.

It looked real enough for cable networks to briefly air the live event.

"I'll be glad to take some of your questions," Johnson said.

"Are you happy with FEMA's response so far?" one staffer asked.

"I'm very happy with FEMA's response so far," Johnson replied.

And so it went for more than 10 minutes, without any journalists.

Kicking Katrina Comparisons

The inevitable comparisons to Katrina came up during the questioning, giving Johnson an opportunity to tout the agency's improved disaster response.

He said, "In lessons learned from Katrina, it's like, is there day and is there night?"

"But what you're seeing now is a very smoothly, very efficiently performing team," he said.

After the event was over, FEMA staff members went back to their day jobs, perhaps unaware of the fallout to come.

'Inexcusable and Offensive'

Over the next few days, the incident became fodder for news blogs.

Friday a spokeswoman for the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees FEMA, said Secretary Michael Chertoff was not pleased with the decisions made by agency staff.

"This is simply inexcusable and offensive to the Secretary [Chertoff] that such a mistake could have been made," Laura Keehner said Friday on a conference call with the media.

"We have made it clear stunts such as this will not be tolerated or repeated."

Keehner noted that the department is looking into the possibility of reprimanding FEMA staff.

White House Press Secretary Dana Perino told reporters Friday that the White House did not know about FEMA's plan beforehand, and said, "It was just a bad way to handle it, and they know that."

"It's not something I would have condoned. And they, I'm sure, will not do it again."

FEMA Issues Apology

FEMA released a statement of apology Friday afternoon.

In the statement, Johnson said FEMA is reviewing its procedures to ensure that future communications with the press are "straightforward and transparent."

"We can and must do better, and apologize for this error in judgment," Johnson said.

But he asked the media not to focus on that misjudgment, and instead concentrate on the "real story" of the successes of the efforts in California.

Turns out the U.S. government still believes the news media is needed -- at least at press conferences.

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Copyright © 2007 ABC News Internet Ventures

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The Associated Press (US news wire service)
Friday 26 October 2007

FEMA Workers Play
Role of Reporters

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The White House scolded the Federal Emergency Management Agency on Friday for staging a phony news conference about assistance to victims of wildfires in southern California.

The agency -- much maligned for its sluggish response to Hurricane Katrina over two years ago -- arranged to have FEMA employees play the part of independent reporters Tuesday and ask questions of Vice Adm. Harvey E. Johnson, the agency's deputy director.

The questions were predictably soft and gratuitous.

"I'm very happy with FEMA's response," Johnson said in reply to one query from an agency employee.

White House press secretary Dana Perino said it was not appropriate that the questions were posed by agency staffers instead of reporters. FEMA was responsible for the "error in judgment," she said, adding that the White House did not know about it beforehand and did not condone it.

"FEMA has issued an apology, saying that they had an error in judgment when they were attempting to get out a lot of information to reporters, who were asking for answers to a variety of questions in regard to the wildfires in California," Perino said. "It's not something I would have condoned. And they -- I'm sure -- will not do it again."

She said the agency was just trying to provide information to the public, through the press, because there were so many questions.

"I don't think that there was any mal-intent," Perino said "It was just a bad way to handle it, and they know that."

FEMA gave real reporters only 15 minutes notice about Tuesday's news conference . But because there was so little advance notice, the agency made available an 800 number so reporters could call in. And many did, although it was a listen-only arrangement.

On Tuesday, FEMA employees had played the part of reporters. Johnson issued a statement Friday, saying that FEMA's goal was "to get information out as soon as possible, and in trying to do so we made an error in judgment."

"Our intent was to provide useful information and be responsive to the many questions we have received," he said. "We can and must do better."

Officials at the Homeland Security Department, which includes FEMA, expressed their concern.

"This is simply inexcusable and offensive to the secretary that such a mistake could be made," Homeland Security spokeswoman Laura Keehner said Friday, referring to DHS Secretary Michael Chertoff. "Stunts such as this will not be tolerated or repeated."

Keehner said senior leadership is considering whether a punishment is necessary.

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Copyright © 2007 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.

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From the FEMA website:

Harvey E. Johnson, Jr.
Deputy Administrator and Chief Operating Officer

Harvey E. Johnson, Jr. (US Coast Guard, retired Vice Admiral) is the Deputy Administrator and Chief Operating Officer of FEMA. He came to FEMA in April 2006 after serving as Commander, Pacific Area of the U.S. Coast Guard since June 2004.

Mr. Johnson has a wealth of emergency and crisis management experience, including support to Admiral Thad Allen and the Coast Guard's Hurricane Katrina response efforts by coordinating and deploying West Coast resources.

His operational experience includes various Coast Guard efforts, including search and rescue, freighter grounding, vessel break-up and pollution response for the motor vessel Selendang Ayu and the tank vessel Seabulk Pride in Alaskan waters. In addition, he participated in multiple Naval War College, Lead Shield and Rogue Vessel exercises in response to simulated maritime homeland security threats and the management of hundreds of Coast Guard law enforcement, search and rescue and pollution response cases in the Pacific.

While serving as Commander, Pacific Area, Mr. Johnson led efforts that encompassed more than 73 million miles west of the Rocky Mountains and throughout the Pacific Basin to the Far East. Prior to this assignment, he was the Commander, Seventh Coast Guard District and served as the Director, Homeland Security Task Force-Southeast, where he directed Operation Able Sentry, the Department of Homeland Security's response to the crisis in Haiti. In addition to these duties, he served as the Executive Director of the Coast Guard's transition into the Department of Homeland Security, Director of Operations Capability and Director of Operations Policy.

Prior to promotion to Flag rank in 2001, Mr. Johnson served as the Executive Assistant to the Commandant of the Coast Guard. Other assignments included: Commanding Officer of Air Station Brooklyn, and concurrently as Commanding Officer of Air Station San Diego and Commander, Activities San Diego. He also served as a fellow at the Chief of Naval Operations Strategic Studies Group in Newport, Rhode Island.

Mr. Johnson began his career as a Deck Watch Officer aboard the Cutter Steadfast (WMEC-623). He then earned his Naval Aviator wings in 1977. He flew the HH-52A helicopter at Coast Guard Air Station Houston, the HH-3F at Coast Guard Air Station Kodiak, the HH-65A in Brooklyn and Corpus Christi and the HH-60J in San Diego. His staff assignments include: Aviation Assignment Officer in the Office of Personnel and Training; Program Reviewer and Analyst within the Office of the Chief of Staff; Deputy Chief, Programs Division within the Office of the Chief of Staff; and member of the Streamlining Team.

His major decorations include the Legion of Merit (3), the Meritorious Service Medal (3), the Coast Guard Commendation Medal (2) and the Coast Guard Achievement Medal.

Mr. Johnson received a Bachelor of Science degree at the U.S. Coast Guard Academy in 1975. He earned a Master of Science degree at the Naval Postgraduate School in 1983 and a Master of Science degree in Management as a Sloan Fellow at the Sloan School of Management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1993.

Mr. Johnson is a native of Tampa, Florida. He is married to the former Janet L. Cronin of Boston, Massachusetts, and they have two children, Jennifer and Scott.

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R. David Paulison
Administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency

R. David Paulison serves as the Administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Appointed by the President George W. Bush, Administrator Paulison, reports directly to the Secretary of Homeland Security. The Administrator may also be called upon by the President to serve as a member of the Cabinet in the event of natural disasters, acts of terrorism, or other man-made disasters.

Serving under the Administrator are two Deputy Administrators, nine Assistant Administrators and 10 Regional Administrators.

Administrator Paulison has more than 35 years of experience in emergency management. He began his career as a firefighter and paramedic, rising to serve as Fire Chief in Miami-Dade, Florida. Since 2001, he has held a number of senior positions within the federal government, including the Director of the Preparedness Division of the Emergency Preparedness and Response Directorate and the U.S. Fire Administrator. In 2006, he was confirmed by the U.S. Senate as Director of FEMA and, with the 2007 Reorganization, continues to lead FEMA as Administrator.

As a career firefighter, the Administrator began as a rescue firefighter and climbed the ranks of rescue lieutenant commander, district chief of operations, division chief, assistant chief and then deputy director for administration before becoming the Miami-Dade Fire Chief. He is a certified paramedic and, as fire chief, oversaw the Miami-Dade Urban Search and Rescue Task Force. His emergency management experience includes Hurricane Andrew and the crash of ValuJet Flight 592. He is also past president of the International Association of Fire Chiefs.

A native of Miami, Florida, Mr. Paulison earned a bachelor of arts from Florida Atlantic University and completed the Program for Senior Executives in State and Local Government at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government. In 2004, he received the Mason Lankford Fire Service Leadership Award from the Congressional Fire Service Institute. Additionally, he has received the LeRoy Collins Distinguished Alumni Award and has been inducted into the Miami-Dade Community College Hall of Fame. Mr. Paulison was selected as Fire Chief of the Year by his colleagues from the State of Florida in 1993 and holds positions in several professional associations.

John Warner Backus, Lois Haibt, FORTRAN -- an American moment of creative ideas and positive achievement

I did a little FORTRAN programming before I was abducted by the BASIC cult. The two languages are very similar, and share a human-friendly face. They are heavily oriented toward Solving The Problem, and burden the user with very few computer-specific details which are not important for solving the problem. FORTRAN and BASIC opened digital computing to ordinary people who simply wished to solve problems, and ended the monopoly priesthood of mathematicians and computer scientists who kept computers all to themselves.

John W. Backus, leader of the 10-person IBM team which developed FORTRAN, died in March 2007. He is also renowned as the inventor of the Backus-Naur Form [with Danish computer scientist Peter Naur], a notation system which describes the grammatical structure not just of computer languages, but of human natural languages as well.

Backus and Naur's notation is also called the Panini-Backus Form, acknowledging original ideas of Panini, who wrote the comprehensive grammar of classical Sanskrit, probably in the 4th Century BCE. Almost nothing is known of Panini's life, but (Wikipedia):

According to legend, he was born in Shalatula, a town beside the Indus River, in Gandhara, which is in the modern day the Attock District of Pakistan's Punjab province, located between Rawalpindi and Peshawar.

Please enjoy these accounts of John W. Backus's very interesting life. He seems to have accidentally drifted into computer science because he wanted a good hi-fi system after he got out of the Army after World War II, and because hi-fi systems didn't exist, he had to enroll in school to learn to build one. That led to his interest in mathematics.

Note also the positive and constructive achievement and thought contained in these accounts. These are Americans -- even powerful American corporations -- at their best, using intellectual creativity to invent undreamed of things that help people and make the world better. These are achievements and an era to admire.

If it seems to differ from our present American moment, why? Why have we lost our interest in and emphasis on constructive ideas, inventions and achievements, and now seem so fixated -- both abroad and in our own cities -- on violence, force, imprisonment, waste, greed? When the world thinks of America at this moment, does it admire and take pleasure in our contributions and our culture?

Or do the people of the world look up at the sky and cringe in fear?

Are young Americans in sufficient numbers following in the spirit of people like John Backus and Lois Haibt, and are our corporations and institutions encouraging such creative people to make new, positive achievements?

Where are the dreamers wandering in search of machines which play beautiful music? Or is America's future in weapons design and electronic eavesdropping technology to keep us fairly safe from terrorist attacks? Is America's future growth industry our world's largest prison system? Is America's rising corporate star the Blackwater military mercenary force?

==============

School of Mathematics and Statistics
University of St Andrews, Scotland
Article by: J J O'Connor and E F Robertson

John Warner Backus

Born: 3 Dec 1924 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA
Died: 17 Mar 2007 in Ashland, Oregon, USA

John Backus spent his first years in Wilmington, Delaware and attended the Hill School in Pottstown, Pennsylvania. He graduated in 1942 although according to his own account he did not take his studies at Hill School too seriously:-

"I flunked out every year. I never studied. I hated studying. I was just goofing around. It had the delightful consequence that every year I went to summer school in New Hampshire where I spent the summer sailing and having a nice time."

He entered the University of Virginia to study chemistry at his father's request. However he was no more diligent than at school and in 1943 his studies were terminated. That year he joined the army.

In the army he took medical training, working in an Atlantic City hospital in a neurosurgery ward that treated head wounds. Strangely he was found to have a bone tumour and had a plate fitted in his head. A medical training seemed to be the right direction for Backus but after nine months of medical school he gave this up too:-

"I hated it. They don't like thinking in medical school. They memorize - that's all they want you to do. You must not think."

Again without any idea which direction he should take, he took an apartment in New York. He describes what happened next:-

"I really did not know what the hell I wanted to do with my life. I decided that what I wanted was a good hi fi set because I liked music. In those days, they did not really exist so I went to a radio technicians' school. I had a very nice teacher - the first good teacher I ever had - and he asked me to cooperate with him and compute the characteristics of some circuits for a magazine.

"I remember doing relatively simple calculations to get a few points on a curve for an amplifier. It was laborious and tedious and horrible, but it got me interested in math. The fact that it had an application - that interested me."

Backus entered Columbia University, New York to study mathematics. He graduated in 1949. Just before he graduated he visited the IBM Computer Center on Madison Avenue. When he told the guide that he was looking for a job she told him to talk to a director.

"I said no, I could not. I looked sloppy and dishevelled. But she insisted and so I did. I took a test and did OK."

Backus joined IBM as a programmer in 1950. He is the inventor of FORTRAN, the first high level computer language to be developed. It became commercially available in 1957. Describing his early work on FORTRAN, Backus said:-

"We did not know what we wanted and how to do it. It just sort of grew. The first struggle was over what the language would look like. Then how to parse expressions - it was a big problem and what we did looks astonishingly clumsy now ...."

In 1959 he invented the Backus Naur Form (BNF), a standard notation to describe the syntax of a high level programming language.

His third major contribution to computer science was to develop a functional programming language called FP, which advocates a mathematical approach to programming.

=================

The New York Times
19 March 2007

John W. Backus, 82,

Fortran Developer, Dies

by Steve Lohr

John W. Backus, who assembled and led the I.B.M. team that created Fortran, the first widely used programming language, which helped open the door to modern computing, died on Saturday at his home in Ashland, Ore. He was 82. His daughter Karen Backus announced the death, saying the family did not know the cause, other than age. Fortran, released in 1957, was "the turning point" in computer software, much as the microprocessor was a giant step forward in hardware, according to J.A.N. Lee, a leading computer historian.

Fortran changed the terms of communication between humans and computers, moving up a level to a language that was more comprehensible by humans. So Fortran, in computing vernacular, is considered the first successful higher-level language.

Mr. Backus and his youthful team, then all in their 20s and 30s, devised a programming language that resembled a combination of English shorthand and algebra. Fortran, short for Formula Translator, was very similar to the algebraic formulas that scientists and engineers used in their daily work. With some training, they were no longer dependent on a programming priesthood to translate their science and engineering problems into a language a computer would understand. In an interview several years ago, Ken Thompson, who developed the Unix operating system at Bell Labs in 1969, observed that "95 percent of the people who programmed in the early years would never have done it without Fortran." He added: "It was a massive step."

Fortran was also extremely efficient, running as fast as programs painstakingly hand-coded by the programming elite, who worked in arcane machine languages. This was a feat considered impossible before Fortran. It was achieved by the masterful design of the Fortran compiler, a program that captures the human intent of a program and recasts it in a way that a computer can process.

In the Fortran project, Mr. Backus tackled two fundamental problems in computing -- how to make programming easier for humans, and how to structure the underlying code to make that possible. Mr. Backus continued to work on those challenges for much of his career, and he encouraged others as well.

"His contribution was immense, and it influenced the work of many, including me," Frances Allen, a retired research fellow at I.B.M., said yesterday.

Mr. Backus was a bit of a maverick even as a teenager. He grew up in an affluent family in Wilmington, Del., the son of a stockbroker. He had a complicated, difficult relationship with his family, and he was a wayward student.

In a series of interviews in 2000 and 2001 in San Francisco, where he lived at the time, Mr. Backus recalled that his family had sent him to an exclusive private high school, the Hill School in Pennsylvania.

"The delight of that place was all the rules you could break," he recalled.

After flunking out of the University of Virginia, Mr. Backus was drafted in 1943. But his scores on Army aptitude tests were so high that he was dispatched on government-financed programs to three universities, with his studies ranging from engineering to medicine.

After the war, Mr. Backus found his footing as a student at Columbia University and pursued an interest in mathematics, receiving his master's degree in 1950. Shortly before he graduated, Mr. Backus wandered by the I.B.M. headquarters on Madison Avenue in New York, where one of its room-size electronic calculators was on display.

When a tour guide inquired, Mr. Backus mentioned that he was a graduate student in math; he was whisked upstairs and asked a series of questions Mr. Backus described as math "brain teasers." It was an informal oral exam, with no recorded score.

He was hired on the spot. As what? "As a programmer," Mr. Backus replied, shrugging. "That was the way it was done in those days."

Back then, there was no field of computer science, no courses or schools. The first written reference to "software" as a computer term, as something distinct from hardware, did not come until 1958.

In 1953, frustrated by his experience of "hand-to-hand combat with the machine," Mr. Backus was eager to somehow simplify programming. He wrote a brief note to his superior, asking to be allowed to head a research project with that goal. "I figured there had to be a better way," he said.

Mr. Backus got approval and began hiring, one by one, until the team reached 10. It was an eclectic bunch that included a crystallographer, a cryptographer, a chess wizard, an employee on loan from United Aircraft, a researcher from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a young woman who joined the project straight out of Vassar College.

"They took anyone who seemed to have an aptitude for problem-solving skills -- bridge players, chess players, even women," Lois Haibt, the Vassar graduate, recalled in an interview in 2000.

Mr. Backus, colleagues said, managed the research team with a light hand. The hours were long but informal. Snowball fights relieved lengthy days of work in winter. I.B.M. had a system of rigid yearly performance reviews, which Mr. Backus deemed ill-suited for his programmers, so he ignored it. "We were the hackers of those days," Richard Goldberg, a member of the Fortran team, recalled in an interview in 2000.

After Fortran, Mr. Backus developed, with Peter Naur, a Danish computer scientist, a notation for describing the structure of programming languages, much like grammar for natural languages. It became known as Backus-Naur form.

Later, Mr. Backus worked for years with a group at I.B.M. in an area called functional programming. The notion, Mr. Backus said, was to develop a system of programming that would focus more on describing the problem a person wanted the computer to solve and less on giving the computer step-by-step instructions.

"That field owes a lot to John Backus and his early efforts to promote it," said Alex Aiken, a former researcher at I.B.M. who is now a professor at Stanford University.

In addition to his daughter Karen, of New York, Mr. Backus is survived by another daughter, Paula Backus, of Ashland, Ore.; and a brother, Cecil Backus, of Easton, Maryland.

His second wife, Barbara Stannard, died in 2004. His first marriage, to Marjorie Jamison, ended in divorce.

It was Mr. Backus who set the tone for the Fortran team. Yet if the style was informal, the work was intense, a four-year venture with no guarantee of success and many small setbacks along the way.

Innovation, Mr. Backus said, was a constant process of trial and error.

"You need the willingness to fail all the time," he said. "You have to generate many ideas and then you have to work very hard only to discover that they don't work. And you keep doing that over and over until you find one that does work."

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also: PIZZAQ! -- who needs multisubj yb? we can learn how to pronounce any Devanagari lingo all by ourselves!

or just click HERE. Make sure your MUTE is OFF.

PIZZAQ! 1 slice, no toppings. One of the keys on the keyboard will make a bloke with a very high-class uptown Brit professor voice speak English for about 15 seconds. WHICH KEY? and WHAT DOES HE SAY?

This is the pronunciation / sound key to these languages: Hindi, Marathi, Nepali, and the ancient language of the sacred Hindu texts, Sanskrit.

All these languages belong to the Indo-European language family, so their vocabulary and grammar are cousins to nearly all the languages of Europe and the Euro-colonized New World -- Romance languages, Greek, Slavic, Germanic/Teutonic languages, Gaelic/Celtic, Scandinavian languages.

Actually these lingos are from the subfamily called Indo-Aryan. From Wikipedia:

Marathi is primarily spoken in Maharashtra and parts of neighboring states of Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh, Goa, Karnataka, Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh,

[where multisubj yb practices law and is hiding from Vleeptron, and won't even tell us what modern Subcontinental lingo he speaks ...]

union-territories of Daman-diu and Dadra Nagar Haveli. The cities of Baroda, Surat, Ahmedabad and entire South Gujarat (Gujarat) Belgaum, Hubli, Dharwad, Gulbarga, Bidar (Karnataka) Indore,Gwalior (Madhya Pradesh) Hyderabad (Andhra Pradesh) and Tanjore (Tamil Nadu) each have sizable Marathi-speaking communities. Marathi is also spoken by Maharashtrian émigrés worldwide, in USA, UAE, South Africa, Singapore, Germany, UK, Australia & New Zealand.[3] The Ethnologue states that Marathi is even spoken in Israel and Mauritius.

They all sprang from an extinct language, Proto-Indo-European (PIE), whose ancient speakers probably (we know from tracing back and comparing vocabularies about plants, animals and weather) lived around the Black Sea. Estimates of when PIE flourished as a spoken language range from 4000 to 10000 BCE.

I don't know what Proto-Indo-European food was like. There are today no Proto-Indo-European restaurants.

multisubj yb, who originally advertised that he lived in Afghanistan, but now informs us that he lives in India, left some very interesting comments about Sanskrit and the Bhagavad Gita and the Caste System and religious systems and ...

But now he has deserted Vleeptron, and seems to have nothing more to tell us about all these things.

Which is a pity, because we are Dumb As Rocks about all these things. He is in India and knows all the answers, we are in the USA and know about four things that are good to eat at the India Palace Restaurant on Main Street. (The Chef is Sikh.)

So lacking multisubj yb's assistance -- which we will gladly pay for in good, honest Pizza (transportation and shipping not included) -- we will just keep ignorantly stumbling and bumbling and blundering along in matters of religion and language, and cuisine, and maybe politics and culture, in the Subcontinent.

Meanwhile, go to this website, find the Push and Pronounce keyboard, and listen to the spoken sounds (male voice) of the lingos written in the Devanagari alphabet.