Andy and I were talking on the phone tonight, and the conversation stirred in the direction of his opinions on the town in which he lives. He’s in Arcata, California, and he mentioned Eureka, California and its list of disadvantages.

I got slightly distracted (just a little, Andy!), and thought of how someone got the idea of calling a place “Eureka”. What’s with the Archimedian streak? Then I started laughing quite a bit at the thought of some nitwit leaping into the air, squeaking “Eureka!”

Andy, however, shared an even better insight - Truth or Consequences, New Mexico! Whoa, I must say. The town bears the name of an old American quiz show. Towns with names like these definitely have a higher place on my dislike of some North American city-naming traditions (I have a penchant for discrediting towns with names such as Paris, [insert states] or Moscow, [insert state])

Did you know?! -> Carl Friedrich Gauss, echoed Archimedes when in 1796 he wrote in his notebook, “ΕΥΡΗΚΑ! num= Δ + Δ + Δ”, referring to his discovery that any positive integer could be expressed as the sum of at most three triangular numbers. Thx, wiki!