tingilinde

a talk by kip thorne

Kip Thorne gave a non-technical talk last week on how and why he got into the gravity wave business.    He's a good speaker and it's fascinating if you're interested in one of the current revolutions in science and how they build.

 

planet nine

Mike Brown presents the history for the search for planet nine without the math,  Nicely written!

snip

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In 1820 Alexis Bouvard, the director of the Paris Observatory, made what could have been a huge discovery. The planet Uranus, whose position he had tracked back 130 years in old star catalogs, didn’t quite go around the Sun the way that he predicted it should. It traveled along its elliptical orbit as expected, but sometimes the old observations suggested it was a little ahead of its predicted position and sometimes a little behind. Bouvard might have realized that there was something beyond Uranus, but instead he was convinced the old star catalogs were simply wrong.

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redesigning the periodic table

It's been broken for a long time, but it's still very useful.  I think the way forward is to recognize most serious users will be viewing it on a computer.  Come up with a half dozen or so well-designed specialized versions that are a click away for whatever you're using it for.

 

 

r&d spending in 2018 dollars

 

the overall number is still a very small part of the budget

 

a serious hero

A terrific piece on Clair Patterson - a mostly unknown scientist who had an enormous impact on public health .. a bit of serendipity he ran into while determining the age of the Earth.

 

michael faraday invented the rubber balloon

For his experiments with hydrogen in 1824

"The caoutchouc is exceedingly elastic. Bags made of it...have been expanded by having air forced into them, until the caoutchouc was quite transparent, and when expanded by hydrogen they were so light as to form balloons with considerable ascending power...."

 

He made them  by cutting round two sheets of rubber, coating the inside with flour and  laying them  together.  When he pressed the edges the rubber self-welded.   Journal of Science, Arts and Manufacture 1824. 

 

dame jocelyn bell burnell

Many believe this is one of the most blatant  Nobel Prize mistakes - she really deserved it, but her boss got it instead.  The BBC's The Life Scientific podcast has an excellent interview.  Worth listening to if you have any interest in astronomy or women in science.

 

gravitational birthdays

Kepler today.. Newton was on the 25^th..  of course there is this little matter of which calendar you're using, but still.

 

 

dr. davison and the gay cure

Unerased was a short podcast series by one of Jad Abumrad of Radiolab.  One of the episodes was on a revolution in psychotherapy and a remarkable set of events that took place in a pre-Interent public forum... Playboy Magazine.  It also involves Stony Brook University.  about 42 minutes of audio

 

 

 

on the beginnings of climate science

Dating back to the mid 1800s in the Hapsburg Empire.

snip

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Azaleas played a surprisingly large role in the new conception of climatology. In the late 1800s, Anton Kerner Ritter von Marilaun spent a not-insignificant amount of his time studying the plants. Specifically, Kerner, a botany professor at the University of Innsbruck, wished to understand their distribution: why the flowers he found growing along an Alpine riverbank could also be found farther afield and at lower elevations. The most immediate explanation was that their seeds had been washed away by springtime snowmelt or carried by mountain winds.

Yet Kerner gradually came to believe something more radical. Isolated pockets of azaleas, he argued, were indicators of a changing climate: As the valleys had warmed over thousands of years, certain populations of Alpine flora had, over generations, colonized the mountainside in search of cooler temperatures and greater moisture. The plants left behind at lower elevations, or foundlings, hinted at “the advance of a given species in one or another direction,” Kerner wrote, “the retreat and extinction of others in historical times.” In his hands, flowers were a tool for slipping along scales of space and time, stepping outside the human frame of things to imagine how climate had slowly changed in the past—and might again in the future.

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