- Manjirō Nakahama: From Castaway to Samurai (hakaimagazine.com)
On October 4, 1987, the town of Fairhaven, Massachusetts (population 16,000), had a pair of unlikely visitors: Akihito, crown prince of Japan (today, the emperor), and his wife, Princess Michiko. Why would Japanese royalty visit this small American whaling and fishing port? The events that forged the unlikely connection between Japan and Fairhaven began 146 years earlier.
- Lozenge (shape) (Wikipedia)
A lozenge (/ˈlɒzɪndʒ/ LOZ-inj; symbol: ◊), often referred to as a diamond, is a form of rhombus. The definition of lozenge is not strictly fixed, and the word is sometimes used simply as a synonym (from Old French losenge) for rhombus. Most often, though, lozenge refers to a thin rhombus—a rhombus with two acute and two obtuse angles, especially one with acute angles of 45°. The lozenge shape is often used in parquetry (with acute angles that are 360°/n with n being an integer higher than 4, because they can be used to form a set of tiles of the same shape and size, reusable to cover the plane in various geometric patterns as the result of a tiling process called tessellation in mathematics) and as decoration on ceramics, silverware and textiles. It also features in heraldry and playing cards.
