I am seeing reports that Steven Weinberg, one of the great physicists, has died.
The University of Texas has a tribute up, but I have not found a mainstream news source reporting this yet.
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Archive for the ‘Geek’ Category
Obit watch: July 24, 2021.
Saturday, July 24th, 2021Obit watch: July 20, 2021.
Tuesday, July 20th, 2021Dr. Paul Auerbach, one of the pioneering figures in “wilderness medicine”.
A medical student at Duke University at the time, he went to work in 1975 with the Indian Health Service on a Native American reservation in Montana, and the experience was revelatory.
“We saw all kinds of cases that I would have never seen at Duke or frankly anywhere else except on the reservation,” Dr. Auerbach said in a recent interview given to Stanford University, where he worked for many years. “Snakebites. Drowning. Lightning strike.”
“And I just thoroughly enjoyed it,” he continued. “Taking care of people with very limited resources.”
Back at Duke he tried to learn more about outdoor medicine, but he struggled to find resource material.
“I kept going back to literature to read, but there was no literature,” he said. “If I wanted to read about snake bites, I was all over the place. If I wanted to read about heat illness, I was all over the place. So I thought, ‘Huh, maybe I’ll do a book on wilderness medicine.’”
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The resulting book, “Management of Wilderness and Environmental Emergencies,” which he edited with a colleague, Edward Geehr, was published in 1983 and is widely considered the definitive textbook in the field, with sections like “Protection From Blood-Feeding Arthropods” and “Aerospace Medicine: The Vertical Frontier.” Updated by Dr. Auerbach over 30 years, it is in its seventh edition and now titled “Auerbach’s Wilderness Medicine.”
“Paul literally conceived of this subspecialty of medicine,” said Dr. Andra Blomkalns, chair of emergency medicine at Stanford. “At the time, there wasn’t a recognition that things happen when you’re out doing things. He developed this notion of, ‘Things happen to people all the time.’ Which is now a big part of our identity in emergency medicine.”
John P. McMeel, co-founder of Universal Press Syndicate (later Andrews McMeel Universal).
Indefatigably sunny, Mr. McMeel had the optimism — and the stamina — of a true salesman. Jim Davis, the creator of the misanthropic cat Garfield, first met Mr. McMeel at an American Booksellers Association convention in 1981. Mr. McMeel approached him for an autograph, brandishing a Garfield book with a contract tucked inside. But Mr. Davis had a long-term contract with United Media, which had been syndicating his strip.
“It became a running gag,” Mr. Davis said. “Every time we met he’d hand me a newspaper or something with a contract inside.” After 15 years, Mr. Davis was finally free to sign with Universal.
“The thing with John,” he said, “is it didn’t feel like business. I once did an interview and the reporter asked me why Gary Larson had retired and I was still going. I said: ‘Well, Gary works so hard and he puts so much pressure on himself. Me, if I feel that kind of pressure, I lower my standards.’ It was that kind of air that John encouraged.”
For the record: NYT obit for Kurt Westergaard.
Real estate watch.
Thursday, July 8th, 2021For those of you in the UK.
The asking price is £1,100,000 (which works out to about $1.5 million). But: five beds, three bathrooms, 2,954 square feet, a “utility room” and a cellar (that’d be great for your wine collection), plus “reception room”, “garden room”, and “dining room”.
And you can’t put a money value on the prestige of being able to say, “Yes, I live in the old Alan Turing place.”
Obit watch: June 24, 2021.
Thursday, June 24th, 2021There’s an abundance of John McAfee obits out there on the web. Take your pick from Hacker News: for the hysterical record, I’m linking to the NYT obit.
Promoted from the comments, and by way of great and good FotB Joe D.:
Edited to add NYPost headline:
John McAfee hideout traced to Spanish ‘ghost hotel’ with a bitcoin farm
Biden administration cracking down on ghost hotels in 3, 2, 1…
(Possible) obit watch.
Wednesday, June 23rd, 2021I am seeing reports that John McAfee has committed suicide in a jail in Spain. I have not been able to confirm those reports: they currently trace back to one Spanish newspaper.
Edited to add: the NYPost has the story, but they are crediting it back to that same Spanish newspaper.
Obit watch: June 21, 2021.
Monday, June 21st, 2021George Stranahan, colorful figure.
His family owned the Champion Spark Plug company, so he had family money. He got a PhD in physics, and spent a lot of time doing physics in the late 1950s.
So he did:
The Aspen Center for Physics was born. It proved pivotal in the development of the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, for a long time the world’s most powerful particle accelerator, and the formulation of string theory, regarded by many physicists as the most promising candidate for a “theory of everything” that would explain all the universe’s physical phenomena.
Sixty-six Nobel laureates have visited. “I’m convinced all the best physics gets done there,” Tony Leggett, one of those Nobelists, wrote on the center’s website. Another, Brian Schmidt, called the center “the place I have gone to expand my horizons for the entirety of my career.”
He cut back on his involvement in physics in 1972.
He went on to found Stranahan’s Colorado Whiskey (which I have heard good things about, but never been able to find) and Flying Dog beer.
He also did some ranching:
In 1990, Mr. Stranahan’s Limousin bull Turbo was declared grand champion at the 1990 National Western Stock Show, a highly regarded trade show. The price for a shot of Turbo’s semen rose to $15,000.
He quit the business not long after. Even with Turbo, Mr. Stranahan estimated that he lost $1 million during 18 years of ranching.
Going back for a minute, if the Woody Creek Tavern rings a bell with you, yes, that was Hunter S. Thompson’s hangout. Mr. Stranahan and Hunter were close friends.
Mr. Thompson either leased or bought the land he lived on from Mr. Stranahan. The details of the arrangement, intended to be easy on Mr. Thompson, appear to have been lost in a haze of friendship and misbehavior. The first time the two men met, Mr. Stranahan told Vanity Fair in 2003, they took mescaline that hit him “like a sledgehammer.”
“We talked a lot, drank a lot and dynamited a lot,” Mr. Stranahan said about their friendship in a 2008 interview with The Denver Post. “If you’re a rancher, you have access to dynamite.”
For the historical record: NYT obit for Frank Bonner.
“What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…” part 418
Sunday, May 23rd, 2021Science Sunday!
For the final Science Sunday, I thought I’d go back to one of my favorite topics – computing history and computer science – and cover two companies whose machines I find fascinating.
“Cray Research at Chippewa Falls – A Story of the Supercomputer”.
I apologize for the quality on this one: it is from 1976, but I think it is worthwhile because…Seymour Cray introduces the Cray-1.
Bonus: During this week’s episode of one of the podcasts I listen to, one of the hosts made a reference to the Connection Machine. The other two hosts had never heard of the Connection Machine, so they were part of that day’s lucky 10,000.
For those of you who fall into the same boat, this is a fairly recent (so higher quality) talk by a guy named Dan Bentley about the Connection Machine and the concept of “Data Parallel Algorithms”.
“What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…” part 411
Sunday, May 16th, 2021Science Sunday!
I thought I’d do a sampler platter today. Roughly from short to long:
“The Creation and Behavior of Radio Waves”. This is a 1942 Army Signal Corps film: I guess technically this could be MilHisMonday, but it is more about the theory of radio than specific military radio usage, so I feel like it qualifies here.
“The Nuclear Look”, a pro-nuclear power propaganda film from Westinghouse.
And speaking of nukes, “Medical Aspects of Nuclear Radiation”.
In the light of more current science, the film seems woefully incomplete and misleading.
Finally: I know this was just posted recently, and I’m trying to avoid using anything that’s not older than at least a month. But I haven’t done any space science recently, I haven’t done anything from the Soviet perspective, and we’re moving towards closure here, so: “Conquerors Of the Universe”, a documentary about the Soviet space program. Don’t worry, it’s narrated in English.
“What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…” part 404
Sunday, May 9th, 2021Science Sunday!
My paternal grandmother was a teacher. There were always books and magazines around the house, many of which were appropriate for the younger set.
One book that I vividly remember (and wish I could find today) was a book published by Scholastic about the coelacanth: specifically, about how it was thought to be extinct, until a museum curator found one in the daily catch of a local fisherman.
I was fascinated by this. Still am: I haven’t found the original Scholastic book, but Samantha Weinberg’s A Fish Caught in Time: The Search for the Coelacanth (affiliate link) is a pretty swell book, and is targeted more at the adult reader. And I think my grandmother would have endorsed this (ditto).
(I was hardly a “reluctant reader”, but I believe the kids she taught sometimes fell into that category.)
“Diving With Coelacanths”. Be warned: the people in this video are doing highly technical diving at great depth. Which means mixed gasses. Which means they sound like Donald Duck. There are subtitles: but as some of the comments point out, what’s in the subtitles doesn’t always match up with what’s actually being said.
Bonus: Another one of the Scholastic books she had lying around was a biography of Clyde Tombaugh and how he discovered Pluto.
“Reflections on Clyde Tombaugh” from NASA.
And here’s an approximately 30 minute interview with Dr. Tombaugh from 1997, shortly before his death.
Bonus #2: This is borderline science and/or technology, but I have a reason for posting this. A week ago Saturday, for some reason, we got into a discussion of auto racing and racing technology. I mentioned, but could not recall the details at the time, that there was a gas turbine powered car that competed in the Indianapolis 500, back when you could still do stuff like that. You know, before everything became standardized and homogenized and experimentation was limited…
“The Silent Screamer”, a short-ish (17 minutes) documentary about Andy Granatelli’s turbine powered car at the 1967 Indy 500.
“What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…” part 400
Wednesday, May 5th, 2021This popped up in my feed, and you know I had to post it here: “TRS-80 Color Computer: Radio Shack’s $399 Micro from 1980!”
It me. Mine had 4K of memory: not 4 GB, or 4 MB, but 4,096 8-bit bytes of memory, and used cassette tape for storage.
Bonus #1: I’m marginal about using this one, but it calls back to an earlier blog entry: “The Norco Shootout, 40 Years Later”.
Not officially part of the content here, but: the “Behind the Badge” channel posted the Norco documentary in one (54 minute) chunk. I linked to that in my previous Norco post, but that version divides the video up into three chunks.
Bonus #2: Here’s something we hope you really like (especially you, RoadRich): a video on “Use of Force” from the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center (FLETC).
Bonus #3: This is short, but I thought it was worth putting up here. Simon Sinek on “The Most Toxic Person In The Workplace”.
“What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…” part 397
Sunday, May 2nd, 2021Science Sunday!
Have you ever asked yourself, “Self, I wonder how light bulbs are made?” Specifically, incandescent lights, not LED bulbs: the latter are probably also interesting, but that’s not today’s subject.
Really, how often do you think about light? I’ve been thinking about it a fair amount recently: throughout the whole history of man, we have really only had the ability to control lighting for about 150 to 170 years now. If you want to get an idea of what things were like in the days before, pull a Samuel Pepys. Go into the smallest windowless room in your house (a bathroom is fine) with a book and a candle. Light the candle: just one candle, because candles cost money in Pepys day. Now try to read the book. Now imagine doing that every night for the rest of your life.
This is a vintage GE documentary about the making of their “Mazda” brand light bulbs.
Bonus #1: Perhaps I am fudging the definition of “science” a bit here, but you’ve heard the expression “build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door”, right?
“West Germany vs. East Germany Mouse Traps. Mousetrap Monday”.
Also, this gives me a chance to retell the classic Soviet joke (which I think was used in “Chernobyl”): “What’s as big as a house, burns 20 liters of fuel every hour, puts out a shitload of smoke and noise, and cuts an apple into three pieces? A Soviet machine made to cut apples into four pieces.”
Bonus #2: Let’s get back to something that is at least a close approximation to science. Plus bonus fun!
“Shaking Buildings Over a Mile Away!” from “Tech Ingredients”. Basically, this involves igniting decently large amounts of hydrogen mixtures.
“Let’s bring everything in soon so if the cops come there’s nothing here.” That’s my kind of science.
Bonus #3: I wanted to do some biology last week, but compromised. Here’s something that comes closer to what I wanted to do: a 1954 film about the virtues of antibiotics.
Obit watch: April 28, 2021.
Wednesday, April 28th, 2021Michael Collins, Apollo 11 astronaut.
When the lunar module Eagle, descending from Columbia, touched down on the moon on July 20, 1969, Colonel Collins lost contact with his crewmates and with NASA, his line of communication blocked as he passed over the moon’s far side. It was a blackout that would occur during a portion of each orbit he would make.
“I am alone now, truly alone, and absolutely isolated from any known life,” he wrote in recreating his thoughts for his 1974 memoir, “Carrying the Fire.”
“If a count were taken, the score would be three billion plus two over on the other side of the moon, and one plus God only knows what on this side,” he added. “I like the feeling. Outside my window I can see stars — and that is all. Where I know the moon to be, there is simply a black void.”
Ole Anthony, one of those interesting characters you may never have heard of.
Mr. Anthony was trained in electronics, and in 1958 he was sent to an island in the South Pacific, where he was supposed to watch a small nuclear test many miles away. But the explosion was much larger than expected, and the radiation left him with scores of knobby tumors throughout his body.
He left the military in 1959 and took a job with Teledyne, a defense contractor. In a 2004 profile in The New Yorker, he told the journalist Burkhard Bilger that he had continued his work for the Air Force, sneaking behind the iron and bamboo curtains to install long-range sensors to detect Chinese and Soviet nuclear tests, though a later investigation by The Dallas Observer, a weekly newspaper, called that claim into question.
He went on to become active in Republican politics and became rich. Then in 1972, he found Jesus, but with a twist: he built his own religious community and specialized in taking down scam evangelists.
He specialized in what he called garbology — rooting through dumpsters for evidence of legal or spiritual fraud by televangelists like Robert Tilton, Benny Hinn and W.V. Grant, just three of the more than 300 he went after during his nearly 35-year campaign.
He compiled the results in long reports that he fed to reporters, and he made frequent appearances on shows like “Primetime Live” and “Inside Edition.” His work was largely responsible for the implosion of Mr. Tilton’s $80 million-a-year empire and Mr. Grant’s 1996 imprisonment for tax evasion. In 2007, he worked with the U.S. Senate Finance Committee in its own investigation into televangelists.
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At first, Mr. Anthony tried to gather his flock among the Republicans and Rotarians of wealthy Dallas. But his abrasive style — he talked about his sex life in Bible study and was permanently barred from Pat Robertson’s “700 Club” TV show — turned off the well-to-do.
Mr. Anthony didn’t seem to mind. With no religious training, he was teaching himself theology, and he became obsessed with the austere mysticism and doctrinal fluidity of first-century Christianity. He incorporated Jewish practices into Trinity’s evolving creed: The group celebrated Passover and insisted on having a minyan (at least 10 people) for Bible study.
As word about Trinity got around, it began to attract disciples from the margins of Dallas society: addicts and ex-hippies, disaffected students and people who otherwise found themselves at a dead end — as well as the occasional curious blow in.
I cannot tell a lie: “permanently banned from the ‘700 Club'” is what hooked me. (And “often obscenity-laced, sometimes violent Bible study sessions”. And “a Trinity member who, like Mr. Anthony, had taken a vow of poverty before acquiring a private investigator’s license”.)
Among those “margins of Dallas society” he attracted: Joe Bob Briggs.
Noted: DEFCON is holding an online memorial for Dan Kaminsky on 2021/05/02 at 12 PM PDT. Link to the Discord is at the top of the DEFCON page.