Swans on Tea

Today was chosen as Talk Like a Physicist Day because it’s Einstein’s birthday, as well as Pi day in the US date format: 3/14 (Just wait 5 years and it will be precision Pi day: 3/14/15). So here’s some Einstein.
The New Yorker: Time Bandits
What were Einstein and Gödel talking about?
Bonus Einstein: [...]

Scott and Scurvy
How the cure for scurvy was found and lost again.
They had a theory of the disease that made sense, fit the evidence, but was utterly wrong. They had arrived at the idea of an undetectable substance in their food, present in trace quantities, with a direct causative relationship to scurvy, but they [...]

Popular Science Puts Entire Scanned Archive Online, Free
You can’t go directly to an issue to browse, but once you have arrived somewhere by search, there are no restrictions on scrolling around. You’ll also find a properly hyperlinked table of contents in each magazine.
Search the PopSci archives

“A Brief History of Pretty Much Everything”
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Starts With a Bang: A Brief History of Time… in the New World!
It was only about a week before people noticed that the Sun and Moon weren’t rising and setting at the times they were supposed to! Apparently, the clock was running at the wrong speed, and was running slow by somewhere around a [...]

Feb. 9, 1870: Feds Get on Top of the Weather
It had been obvious for centuries that weather in North America generally moves from west to east, or southwest to northeast. But other than looking upwind, that knowledge was little help in predicting the weather until you could move weather reports downwind faster than the weather [...]

Busted more than once.
Skulls in the Stars: Mythbusters were scooped — by 130 years! (Archimedes death ray)
About the same time, however, and in an earlier volume of the Proceedings, I found an article with the title, “On the burning mirrors of Archimedes, and on the Concentration of light produced by reflectors,” by John Scott. [...]

World War II computer Colossus that cracked Nazi code
Retired British spy catcher Tony Sale rebuilt Colossus, the world’s first recognisably programmable computer.
Colossus was instrumental in the work of code cracking operations at Bletchley Park in Buckinghamshire during World War II.
It deciphered messages sent by German over the Lorenz Cipher.

(License Plate of a White VW Rabbit)
OK, I am a little embarrassed to be more than fashionably late to the blogohedron party, but this is the 50th anniversary of the laser, and the APS (and some partners) have launched the laserfest website, with lots of stimulating, coherent goodness. Also, Jennifer gives us the festival [...]

National Trust on Google Street View
It has engaged Google to take pictures from all around sites including Corfe Castle in Dorset and Fountains Abbey in Yorkshire, which have then be digitally stitched together to give seamless 360 degree images.
You can visit Stonehenge (as I did in 2001), and go where pedestrians are not normally allowed.

Smithsonian.com: Myths of the American Revolution
[M]uch of what we know is not entirely true. Perhaps more than any defining moment in American history, the War of Independence is swathed in beliefs not borne out by the facts. Here, in order to form a more perfect understanding, the most significant myths of the Revolutionary War [...]

Skulls in the Stars: Lord Kelvin vs. the Aether! (1901)
[T]hese speculations resulted in a number of interesting results. For instance, we have noted previously that Earnshaw’s theorem (1839), an important result in electromagnetic theory, arose from an attempt to determine the forces that hold the aether together. In 1902, Lord Rayleigh attempted [...]