tingilinde

when bell labs was magical

Greg points to a piece about the old Bell Labs that was recently aired on Studio 360.

When a monopoly allowed science and technology to flower in an industrial lab. There were warts, but it was an amazing place.

scientific american and quackery

The current podcast from SciAm has a talk by John Rennie on the magazine's early efforts to confront quakery... and a near misstep influenced by, what else, sex.

via the podcast or here

the 4 humours

Why were cats depicted as melancholy beasts, why do people eat chicken when feeling ill, what dictated Hamlet's physical appearance?

The BBC 4 radio program In Our Time has a great segment on the four humours.

Highly recommended. Catch on the podcast.

the manhattan part of the manhattan project

A fascinating little piece in today's NY Times

particle cosmology

The June 2007 issue of Scientific American has a piece on the history of the relatively new field of particle cosmology (30 to 40 years old depending on how you count). It is curious that the study of the largest things in the universe and the smallest are intimately linked.

An interesting observation is the Vietnam War may have been a catalyst for the field. Experimental particle physics is spendy and Vietnam dried up much of the money for big science in the US. Physicists started branching out a little...

5000 letters to and from darwin

now online and the collection will grow

Some people will love this resource ...

the history of optics

The discussion on this week's In Our Time (BBC podcast available in the iTunes podcast section and other podcast link sites)

Just the thing for a walk.

multiplication on a gerbert's abacus

and numerous other obscurities. Along the way you get a sense of the invention of numbers across civilizations and centuries.

If you know anyone who loves numbers a fantastic last minute gift would be Georges Ifrah's The Universal History of Numbers. Get a copy for yourself if numbers are a personal passion.

math from the subcontinent

The audio for today's lunchtime walk was this week's program from the BBC's In Our Time.

Indian Maths ...

Recommended listening (which is true of most of these programs)

find it on your friendly podcast aggregator

back of the envelope from 1953

A note that appeared in the August 1953 Popular Mechanics.

The history of the science of global warming is fascinating. The first serious science appeared in the 1950s and Gilbert Plass was a pioneer. Tools (models, measurements and available computing power) for making real predictions were too primitive, but testable models began to appear and early predictions were made.

(The four percent temperature increase is a misquote - his original paper predicted 1.1 deg C/century from human produced excess CO₂. The reporter probably converted it to F and took 56 F as the average global temperature and thought he could report a percentage:-)

calories

From the University of Georgia:

Athens, Ga. – While enjoying a Thanksgiving dinner with friends and family, most try to avoid thinking about the seemingly unending number of Calories they’re consuming.

It probably never crosses their minds, however, to think about why food is measured in Calories.

James L. Hargrove, associate professor of foods and nutrition in the University of Georgia’s College of Family and Consumer Sciences, said many nutritionists aren’t even sure of the true origin of the Calorie (or why it’s supposed to be capitalized).

“We all teach this unit, and nobody knows where it came from, not even the historians of nutrition,” he said.

After this realization, Hargrove began studying the origins of the Calorie. He details his findings in a study to be published in the December issue of the Journal of Nutrition.

Formally, a Calorie is a measure of the amount of energy required to heat one kilogram of water one degree Celsius. It was first used in engineering and physics, but eventually found its niche in nutrition, where it is used to measure the amount of energy food contains.

Hargrove found that there’s some controversy about who “invented” the Calorie. Some references show that two Frenchmen, P.A. Favre and J.T. Silbermann, invented the Calorie in 1852. Other texts state that a German physician, Julius Mayer, effectively invented the Calorie in a study he published in 1848.

Hargrove credits the French chemist Nicholas Clement with the invention, however, citing lecture notes from Clement that define the term as early as 1819.

He credits Mayer with beginning a dialogue about food as an energy source. Before Mayer’s time, people thought that energy was God-given; they made no concrete connections between food they ate and the energy on which their bodies ran.

Despite the confusion over who invented the unit, Hargrove notes that the Calorie as a nutritional unit came to the U.S. by way of a man named Wilbur Atwater in 1887. Shortly afterward, the science of nutrition began to take hold in the U.S.

A popular early nutrition text published in 1918 by Lulu Hunt Peters outlined the first methods of counting Calories. In her bestseller, Diet and Health, with the Key to the Calories, Peters outlined 100-Calorie portions of many foodstuffs and preached counting Calories as a way to regulate weight.

Hargrove notes that one common misunderstanding about the Calorie is why it is spelled with an uppercase “C” rather than a lowercase “c.” Owing to the obscure origins of the measure, there was confusion about whether or not a calorie was defined as the amount of heat required to raise one kilogram of water one degree Celsius or one gram of water one degree Celsius. As the Calorie became popular in nutrition, it became more practical to measure the amount of kilograms. To denote this, a capital “C” refers to a kilogram calorie, while a lowercase “c” refers to a gram calorie.

"In food and daily energy, we use so much energy that if you measure in gram calories, you're talking about two million calories a day," he said. "And who wants to think about that?"

song is appropriate:

(a frightening midi version if you can't recall the tune)

I Love To Go A-Gorging

I love to go a-gorging
Amid great gobs of food,
And as I do my abdomen
Continues to protrude.

    Calorie, calorah,
    Calorie, calorah-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha
    Calorie, calorah,
    My body is obese.

Italian food with all its cheese
And thick tomato paste,
It never seems to pass on through
But hangs around my waist.

French cuisine inspires me
To even greater heights.
An eight-course meal is quickly done
In seven standard bites.

A German meal is all I need
To make my day complete.
It's hard to keep account of all
The strudel that I eat.

At hot dog stands and burger joints
To make my power play,
They bring it in a wheelbarrow
Instead of in a tray.

lots of darwin

The complete works - online (at least what has been scanned so far)

There is much still to come. The site currently contains about 50% of the materials that will be provided by 2009. New material is added almost daily. Forthcoming materials include more editions and translations, images of the majority of the Darwin Archive at Cambridge University Library, more editorial introductions and notes and transcriptions of Darwin manuscripts, and technical facilities for printing and larger images. Assistance with scanning, proof reading or transcribing is warmly welcomed.

the mother lode

(pointed out by Mike)

The Royal Society is experimenting with open access to its papers - going back to 1665 the journals will be available online for no charge until December. You need to register for the service.

the mysterious ettore majorana

Anyone in physics is familiar with Majorana, but only those who probe the history of the sport realize how brilliant and unusual he was.

A piece in the current Cern Courier (warning - it is aimed at folks with a smattering of physics)

a great global warming reference

For some time I've been going through Spencer Weart's excellent The Discovery of Global Warming site.

many references, nice summaries and a thorough history of the work - an ongoing project, but significant and important

(I've pointed their in the past and probably will in the future)

ian mcewan on literary science writing

Ian McEwan penned a piece for the Guardian on a scientific literary tradition.

highly recommended (thanks to everyone who pointed it out!)

... Or, as Orwell would have it, two plus two equals five. In 1632 Galileo might just have whispered to himself as he signed, "but it still moves" - we will never know. But his confession reminds us that open-minded rational enquiry has always had its enemies. We can take nothing for granted, for totalitarian thinking, religious or political, will always be with us in some form or other. For this reason alone, we should nurture a living scientific literary tradition

an old dialog online

We were talking about Galileo's Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World System. I last read it as an undergraduate and it is buried in old stacks in the basement. A fascinating piece - even some of the parts that are really wrong (the discussion of the tides) provoke thought and discussion (notably by Einstein).

A bit of searching provides the full text.

One of those pieces that is fundamental to an education. The Wikipedia has a nice high level commentary.

what nuclear weapons do

When I was a kid one could find circular slide rules that allowed you to calculate some of the impact of a nuclear explosion. (I'm sure Dave K. has a few of these). John Walker has published the plans for a homemade version.

At a deeper level Princeton has a The Effects of Nuclear Weapons, ed. by Samuel Glasstone and Philip J. Dolan, online.

Chilling stuff to ponder.

the first moon program

Bjarne pointed out this neat piece on one Dr. John Wilkins and his suggestion of a space program.

Read the piece .. this excerpt should be enough to pull you in.

...

"It was the first serious suggestion of space flight based on the best documentary evidence available to them at the time," said Professor Chapman, who will present his findings tomorrow night at a public lecture at Gresham College, London.

Although earlier philosophers and poets had written about visiting the Moon, the writings of Dr Wilkins were in an altogether different league, Professor Chapman believes. Wilkins lived inwhat he describes as the "honeymoon period" of scientific discovery, between the astronomical revelations of Galileo and Copernicus, who showed a universe with other, possibly habitable worlds, and the later realisation that much of space was a vacuum and therefore impassable.

According to Dr Wilkins, the gravitational and magnetic pull of the Earth extended for only 20 miles into the sky. If it were possible to get airborne and pass beyond this point, it would be easy to continue on a journey to the Moon. Inspired by the discovery of other continents and the great sea voyages of explorers such as Francis Drake and Walter Raleigh, Wilkins conceived an equally ambitious plan to explore space.

"Partly the argument was religious. As well as being a scientist, Wilkins was a theologian, and the argument was that if God had made worlds then it's within divine providence to put beings on them," Professor Chapman said.

Dr Wilkins drew up plans for what he called a flying chariot powered by clockwork and springs, a set of flapping wings coated with feathers and a few gunpowder boosters to help send it on its way.

...

It helps to run the theme to Monty Python's Flying Circus in your head while reading/

infinite secrets on archimedes

A great Nova this week on Archimedes. Watch it.

Nova has a companion site.