Category Archives: History

A Monument to Falling Up

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Odd Things I’ve Seen: Anti-Gravity Monuments

To market the mission of the [Gravity Research Foundation], Babson made large donations to various colleges with the stipulation that they each set up one of these strange monuments. Curiously, none of the three colleges that he founded have anti-gravity monuments, those colleges being Babson College in Wellesley, MA; Webber International University in Babson Park, FL; and Utopia College in Eureka, KS. Utopia College has a bit more of an excuse, though, since while the other two still exist, it went defunct years ago. Naturally, no place with a name like that can operate for long without irony, self-consciousness, or feelings of inadequacy rotting it from the inside.

A list of the monuments located in New England is given, with a short description

Tufts University in Medford, MA: Located between Barnum Hall and Ballou Hall at the north corner of the President’s Lawn, this stone has actually been incorporated into a campus tradition. Students who graduate with degrees in cosmology kneel at this stone while professors drop an apple on their heads. Once again, gravity-related humor is so underrated.

Watch Out, Winnie the Pooh

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The History of the Honey Trap

The trade name for this type of spying is the “honey trap.” And it turns out that both men and women are equally adept at setting one — and equally vulnerable to tumbling in. Spies use sex, intelligence, and the thrill of a secret life as bait. Cleverness, training, character, and patriotism are often no defense against a well-set honey trap. And as in normal life, no planning can take into account that a romance begun in deceit might actually turn into a genuine, passionate affair. In fact, when an East German honey trap was exposed in 1997, one of the women involved refused to believe she had been deceived, even when presented with the evidence. “No, that’s not true,” she insisted. “He really loved me.”

Bad Name for a Medical Partnership

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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 thought of it in terms of a poison to avoid. In one sense, the additional leap required for a correct understanding was very small. In another sense, it would have required a kind of Copernican revolution in their thinking.

I find this fascinating: the application — almost — of the scientific method, only to fail at the crucial falsification stage. And how the wrong answer propagates because of this failure.

It's Easy When Someone Else Does It

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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 minute per day. This brilliant clock, which was accurate to within two seconds a day in Holland, must have broken somehow during the journey.

So what were the colonists to do? There was no clockmaker (or clock repairman) in the new world, and this clock was handmade and very valuable. They had no choice; the clock needed to be shipped back to Europe for repair.

So they ship the clock back to Europe, and they go to take the clock into the clockmaker, and it does the exact thing that your car does when you take it to the mechanic because it’s making a noise. It starts behaving like it’s perfectly fine. The clockmaker winds up the clock, and it immediately starts working properly, and keeps time to within two seconds per day!

The needed to appreciate the gravity of the situation, of course.

A very nice story, up until the last sentence:

So go ahead and take your standardized time for granted, but remember that it wasn’t always as easy as it is today!

Easy for whom? The dragons currently live at several picoseconds per day instead of several seconds per day. Scientists doing research are always trying to be on the part of the map that says “Here be dragons.”

On Top of It, Sort Of

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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 itself was moving.

The telegraph finally made that possible. The Smithsonian Institution in 1849 began supplying weather instruments to telegraph companies. Volunteer observers submitted observations to the Smithsonian, which tracked the movement of storms across the country. Several states soon established their own weather services to gather data.

Knowledge is power, but it doesn’t prevent mother nature from kicking our ass, as Snowmageddapocalypse 2010 has shown. Though we can at least try and prepare for how hard she’s going to kick it.

I didn’t know how many of them it was going to take to kick my ass, but I knew how many they was going to use. Ron White

Double Jeopardy Does not Apply

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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. This article is also an investigation of a myth that would be tackled some 130 years later by the MythBusters! Apparently the 1870s-1880s were a good era for ‘busting!