Swans on Tea

Why “Daisy” in 2001: A Space Odyssey?
Possibly because a Bell Labs computer sang it years earlier, in a demo of voice synthesis and voice recognition.

Ten ancient observatories spied from space
Image taken by GeoEye’s Ikonos satellite at 400+ miles above earth.

August 18, 1868. Jules Janssen “invents” helium. (At least, according to principal Skinner. “Curse the man who invented helium! Curse Pierre Jules César Janssen!)
Janssen was observing an eclipse and measured an emission line with a wavelength of 587.49 nm, which didn’t correspond to any known element. Norman Lockyer also observed the [...]

TS2 on Target – view from the LOQ cabin
A brief overview of some neutron history
Since it carries no charge, one could not “weigh” a neutron directly in a mass spectrometer, but had to estimate its mass from the difference between deuterium and hydrogen. However in 1935, more accurate measurements allowed Chadwick to derive a neutron [...]

is up at The Lay Scientist

Sat-nav for flappers
Sat-Nav wristwatches have been around since 1920.
OK, the idea of a small chart scrolling on one’s wrist is clever, but the “sat” part of “sat-nav” stands for satellite, as in artificial satellite. What artificial satellites are involved here?
Yes, I have a peeve about using acronyms and abbreviations where one obviously doesn’t know [...]

From our “Plan of the Week”
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August 12 & 17 1877 - Asaph Hall discovers the moons of Mars. From Halls’ notebooks: I repeated the examination in the early part of the night of [August] 11th, and again found nothing, but trying again some hours later I found a faint object on the following [...]

That had a crooked vane
Solving its crooked behavior
Became a crooked pain
Light Mills
A fairly comprehensive discussion of the wrong and (probably) right answers for the rotation of a Crookes radiometer.
via Fine Structure

No one knows why anyone does anything.
Why did I choose these socks today?
Trinity +1: the Decision to Use the Bomb, 17 July-6 August, 1945
The truth of the matter was that it was a very complex issue, an easily misunderstood tapestry of circumstance and consequence. The major issue of course was that the Japanese would [...]

Physicists of the 20th Century on Banknotes (pdf)
Feynman on the $20! Feynman on the $20!
It’ll never happen. We’re too stodgy about this in the States, and we do some ugly things with our currency.
a reminder, via Kottke

Via Kottke, The Economic Organisation of a P.O.W. Camp
Stories circulated of a padre who started off round the camp with a tin of cheese and five cigarettes and returned to his bed with a complete parcel in addition to his original cheese and cigarettes; the market was not yet perfect. Within a week or two, [...]

Survival of the Sudsiest, or George Will happens upon the fifth law of thermodynamics.
“The search for unpolluted drinking water is as old as civilization itself. As soon as there were mass human settlements, waterborne diseases like dysentery became a crucial population bottleneck. For much of human history, the solution to this chronic public-health [...]