Science Sunday!
Today, I thought I’d reach back to the AT&T Tech Channel again. Let’s start with “Similiarities of Wave Behavior”, from 1959. I set this to start about 1:18 in, skipping the introduction.
And as a bonus, Dr. Walter Brattain on “Semiconductor Physics”. You may remember Dr. Brattain as one of the inventors of the transistor who shared the 1956 Nobel Prize in Physics. (The other two were John Bardeen and William Shockley.)
I really enjoyed “Catch Me If You Can”, both the book and the movie. So here’s something on the long side for you: Frank Abagnale talks at Google.
Shorter bonus: the two red flags to look for.
A quick round-up of obits I’ve been meaning to make note of over the past few days.
Michael Lonsdale, actor. He was “Hugo Drax” in “Moonraker”, but he did a whole bunch of other work. Some of it was in “avant-garde” films, but he also played “Lebel” in the original “Day of the Jackel”, “Jean-Pierre” in “Ronin”, and a long list of other work “with a Who’s Who of directors, including Mr. Spielberg, François Truffaut, Orson Welles, Luis Buñuel, Jean-Jacques Annaud, and James Ivory”.
Pierre Troisgros, famous French chef.
The Troisgros brothers eventually took charge of their parent’s restaurant and transformed it into a gastronomic destination, at the cutting edge of the culinary revolution known as la nouvelle cuisine. That style was influenced by the austere finesse of Japanese cooking and known, at its extreme, for tiny portions on huge white plates, a caricature in which the Troisgros brothers never indulged.
Their contribution was to showcase the innate flavors of seasonal ingredients, and to pare down some of the overblown creations buried in thick sauces that had come to represent French haute-cuisine.
It earned them Michelin stars and top ratings from other guides. And it put the restaurant high on the list for tourists starting in the 1970s, many of whom, like safari-goers ticking off the “big five,” went to France mainly to experience its top restaurants, collecting souvenir menus along the way.
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The restaurant’s most famous dish was salmon with sorrel sauce (saumon à l’oseille). In the Troisgros kitchen the sauce was not thickened with starch but depended on well-reduced sauce ingredients and a touch of cream. Mr. Boulud pointed out that the dish was cooked in a nonstick pan, noting that Mr. Troisgros was among the first chefs to use one.
Alain Ducasse, the chef and restaurateur who is part of a generation that followed in the footsteps of Mr. Troisgros, Mr. Bocuse and others, said in a statement that the Troisgros brothers had developed the basis for nouvelle cuisine, but that their food was never austere or posed.
Robert Gore, inventor of Gore-Tex.
Mr. Gore’s billion-dollar invention was born out of failure and frustration. In 1969, as head of research and development for W.L. Gore & Associates, the manufacturing company founded by his parents, he was tasked with creating an inexpensive form of plumber’s tape for a client. The tape was made from polytetrafluoroethylene, or PTFE, known commonly by the brand name Teflon.
Mr. Gore sought to make more efficient use of the material by stretching it, not unlike Silly Putty. But each time he heated and stretched a rod of PTFE in his lab, it broke in two.
“Everything I seemed to do worked worse than what we were already doing,” he told the Science History Institute in a short film. “So I decided to give one of these rods a huge stretch, fast — a jerk. I gave it a huge jerk and it stretched 1,000 percent. I was stunned.”
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Mr. Gore became president and chief executive of W.L. Gore & Associates in 1976 and pursued new applications for his invention. He would stand in a rainstorm to check garments and footwear for waterproofness, and he filled his home with prototypes. He called the company’s 800 numbers to make sure the customer service was up to par.
“Bob was the guy who made things happen,” Bret Snyder, the chairman of W.L. Gore & Associates and Mr. Gore’s nephew, said in a phone interview. “He had a passion not just for the theoretical, but how the products worked in customers’ hands.”
Science Sunday!
The SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory has a YouTube channel. (The SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory was formerly known as the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, so I guess this is now the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center National Accelerator Laboratory, unless SLAC is now one of those acryonyms that doesn’t stand for anything.)
“Here Be Monsters: Tales of the Hot Universe”.
Bonus: Here’s a lost art: “The Slide Rule (The “C” and “D” Scales)”.
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“hardly any encryption, authorization or authentication”. I bet you can guess what happens next. Yes! Hilarity ensues!
The write-up is much, much longer and more detailed: I’m just trying to hit the high points here.
Bonus:
(Hattip: Hacker News on the Twitter.)
Science Sunday!
I thought I’d do another assortment today, instead of a single theme.
First up: “Shaping Things to Come”, with Professor Eric Laithwaite of Imperial College London. Professor Laithwaite sounds like an interesting guy: he was one of the pioneers of maglev technology, did a lot of work on electric motors (specifically linear induction motors)…and had some rather eccentric ideas about gyroscopes and moths.
I just love the way this video opens. I don’t know how you could get more British than this.
Bonus: for something a little different, Alan Holden of Bell Labs explains crystals.
It didn’t take long to find something even stupider than “Mean Girls” toaster pastry.
In the interest of fairness, note the “said” above:
But it’s not an official jar of Bella Delphine bathwater. “I know it’s disappointing,” Josh Wilkinson, the case’s designer, told Motherboard on the phone. “It’s like 400 bucks on Ebay. The more official reason is that these cooling loops, if it was just normal water they wouldn’t hold up after a while.”
Liquid cooled PCs reduce temperatures of a machine with a liquid that’s a mix of distilled water and additives that prevent corrosion. Using Delphine’s dirty bathwater to cool down a machine is probably hazardous to the machine’s health.
Science Sunday!
Here’s something a little off the beaten path for you: “The Story of Dr. Lister”, a 1963 dramatization from Warner-Lambert Pharmaceuticals, about the life of Dr. Joseph Lister.
For those of you who aren’t big medical history buffs, Dr. Lister was one of the pioneers of antiseptic surgery.
Lister promoted the idea of sterile surgery while working at the Glasgow Royal Infirmary. Lister successfully introduced carbolic acid (now known as phenol) to sterilise surgical instruments and to clean wounds.
Applying Louis Pasteur’s advances in microbiology, Lister championed the use of carbolic acid as an antiseptic, so that it became the first widely used antiseptic in surgery. He first suspected it would prove an adequate disinfectant because it was used to ease the stench from fields irrigated with sewage waste. He presumed it was safe because fields treated with carbolic acid produced no apparent ill-effects on the livestock that later grazed upon them.
Bonus: I spent some time trying to find a decent video about Ignaz Semmelweis, but couldn’t. So for a change of pace, please enjoy an Army Air Corps video from 1944 on what is rapidly becoming a lost art: “Celestial Navigation”.
(Yes, even though this is a military training film, I do think understanding the relationship of celestial objects to one’s position on the Earth does count as science.)
Science Sunday!
An assortment today. Sort of like a box of chocolates. (I’ll let you decide which one is the “Spring Surprise“.)
A short one: vintage video of the flight of the Gossamer Albatross.
(“Albatross!“)
Somewhat longer: by way of the San Diego Air and Space Museum Archives, a lecture from the “Convair Lecture Series” by George Gamow on “Stellar Evolution”.
This is an interesting oral history from Marvin Stern, who worked at Convair at one time, which touches briefly on the Convair Lecture Series.
Longest: “Nuclear Reactor Construction and Operation” from MIT “MIT 22.01 Introduction to Nuclear Engineering and Ionizing Radiation, Fall 2016”.
This is lecture number 16 in the course, but I feel like it is fairly stand-alone. Y’all know how I am about nukes and nuke stuff.
Science Sunday!
Today, a compilation of shorter videos for once. First up: yes, it is a TED talk. But it is also James Randi. As I’ve said previously, I consider debunking pseudoscience (including “psychic” frauds) to be legitimately science.
Bonus: from the Periodic Videos channel, a short video on anatoxin-a. Anatoxin-a is also known by another name: “Very Fast Death Factor“.
Bonus #2: from the MIT Science Reporter, “Underwater Photography”. I picked this one because it features another one of my heroes, Harold “Doc” Edgerton.
I’m going long again, I know. I’m sorry. But this is something I’ve actually looked for in the past, and only now just found on the ‘Tube.
One of the non-“Top Gear”/”Grand Tour” series that James May has done is “James May’s Toy Stories“, in which he did interesting things with children’s toys.
For example: launching “Action Man” (the licensed UK knockoff of “G.I. Joe”, which someone describes as “the most derided toy in Britain”) on a rocket to see if he can exceed the speed of sound.
Example #2: build a three mile long slot car track.
Just one more: a Lego house. A Lego full-sized house.
Sadly, the house no longer exists:
Science Sunday!
This is something I’d vaguely heard of in the past, but only just stumbled across on the ‘Tube.
“Mr. Tompkins In Wonderland”.
Bonus video: I could sit here every Sunday and post videos of Richard Feynman from YouTube until the end of time. But I’m going to try to avoid doing that.
This one interests me, though: Feynman responds to the question “Do you think there will ever be a machine that will think like human beings and be more intelligent than human beings?”
I like that statement: “Intelligence is to be defined.”
One more. I’m going to assert something here: pseudoscience is science. At least, when you’re debunking it.
Orson Welles talks about “cold reading“.
If you’re a big WWII buff (especially the kind of WWII buff that watches “12 O’Clock High”) you’ve probably heard of, or heard talk about, the Norden bombsight.
It was an early tachometric design that directly measured the aircraft’s ground speed and direction, which older bombsights could only estimate with lengthy manual procedures. The Norden further improved on older designs by using an analog computer that continuously recalculated the bomb’s impact point based on changing flight conditions, and an autopilot that reacted quickly and accurately to changes in the wind or other effects.
Together, these features promised unprecedented accuracy for daytime bombing from high altitudes. During prewar testing the Norden demonstrated a circular error probable (CEP)[a] of 75 feet (23 m)[b], an astonishing performance for that period. This precision would enable direct attacks on ships, factories, and other point targets. Both the Navy and the USAAF saw it as a means to conduct successful high-altitude bombing. For example, an invasion fleet could be destroyed long before it could reach U.S. shores.
To protect these advantages, the Norden was granted the utmost secrecy well into the war, and was part of a production effort on a similar scale as the Manhattan Project. Carl L. Norden, Inc. ranked 46th among United States corporations in the value of World War II military production contracts. The Norden was not as secret as believed; both the British SABS and German Lotfernrohr 7 worked on similar principles, and details of the Norden had been passed to Germany even before the war started.
In practice, it wasn’t quite that accurate: Wikipedia gives a combat CEP of 1,200 feet.
I wonder, if you had told WWII bombardiers at the time that the detailed workings of the Norden bombsight would be available to anyone in the world 73 years later, what would they have thought? Maybe nothing. Who knows?
Bonus video: and here’s how you’d actually use one in combat.
According to Wikipedia, the last use of the Norden bombsight was during the Vietnam War: “The bombsights were used in Operation Igloo White for implanting Air-Delivered Seismic Intrusion Detectors (ADSID) along the Ho Chi Minh Trail.“
Science Sunday!
I’ve been doing a lot of space history, so I wanted to change things up a bit. And I promised some abstract math, so here you go.
From the Numberphile channel (of which the Computerphile channel is an offshoot): “Hat Problems”.
Come on, you know I had to do that. Okay, bonus videos.
Number 1: “Fermat’s Last Theorem”, with Simon Singh (who as you may recall, wrote a book on FLT).
I actually didn’t know about The Simpsons and Their Mathematical Secrets, and I generally look sideways at these TV tie-in books. But I might take a flyer on that if it shows up used.
(All links are affiliate links.)
Number 2: “The Riemann Hypothesis”.
Here’s something that’s right at the intersection of military history, computer science, and general geekery.
By way of the Computerphile channel, “Turing’s Engima Problem”. This explains how the Enigma machine worked, and the problems Turing et al faced in breaking it.
This is a little long, but neatly divided into two parts. Part 1:
And part 2:
I think for Science Sunday we’re going to see some more abstract math from a related YouTube channel, so stay tuned.