If you were to travel 2000 years into the past, how useful would you be in jumpstarting technological advancements? This 10 question quiz will help you figure out your technological usefulness. If you do poorly on the quiz, as most people likely will, then just let that inspire you to study up more on how things work and where raw materials come from.
I got 8/10. I don’t know engines and I didn’t know how to vulcanize rubber.
Get Out of Jail Free: Monopoly’s Hidden Maps
During World War II, as the number of British airmen held hostage behind enemy lines escalated, the country’s secret service enlisted an unlikely partner in the ongoing war effort: The board game Monopoly.
It was the perfect accomplice.
Included in the items the German army allowed humanitarian groups to distribute in care packages to imprisoned soldiers, the game was too innocent to raise suspicion. But it was the ideal size for a top-secret escape kit that could help spring British POWs from German war camps.
The British secret service conspired with the U.K. manufacturer to stuff a compass, small metal tools, such as files, and, most importantly, a map, into cut-out compartments in the Monopoly board itself.
The Poisson/Arago/Fresnel spot, which is a great example of the predictive requirement of science; this one being a binary condition. One implication of the hypothesis is that there will be a spot. Either there isn’t a spot, or there is, and that will or will not falsify the hypothesis.
“If Fresnel’s idea is correct, then the edges of a circular obstruction will act as sources of light waves. Most of these will cancel out and produce a shadow behind the object, as expected. But because the path length from the edge to the middle of the shadow is equal no matter where on the edge you start, the cancellation can’t happen and there has to be a bright spot right in the middle of the shadow. This is self-evidently bogus.”
Letters of Note is an attempt to gather and sort fascinating letters, postcards, telegrams, faxes, and even emails. Scans/photos where possible. Fakes will be sneered at.
Somehow “tweets of note” just doesn’t seem like it would measure up. “That was an epic text message you sent, Carl.” Nah.
Norman Borlaug, 95, Dies; Led Green Revolution
Norman E. Borlaug, the plant scientist who did more than anyone else in the 20th century to teach the world to feed itself and whose work was credited with saving hundreds of millions of lives, died Saturday night. He was 95 and lived in Dallas.
Dot Physics: The development of the atomic model
Ernest Rutherford said one day “hey, I think I will shoot some stuff at atoms.” I am sure his wife said “oh, Ernie” (she probably called him Ernie) “if it makes you happy to play with your little physics stuff, go ahead. I know how much you like it.” So he did. He shot some alpha particles (which are really just the nucleus of a helium atom) at some really thin gold foil.
List of inventors killed by their own inventions
Thomas Andrews (1873 – 1912) died with 1,516 others when his innovative, “unsinkable” design for the RMS Titanic proved to be much more sinkable than he had anticipated.
Kottke: The speed of information travel, 1798 – 2009
The included link is chart showing the time it took for news of various events to reach London, and the resulting speed of that information. Kottke adds a couple of present-day data points to that.
[W]e’re not accustomed to news taking days or even hours to go around the world now, and even when reading history you usually get the impression that events were known immediately. (The dramatic speeding up of news reports around 1880 was a result of the invention and deployment of the telegraph.)
Certainly anyone growing up now, with access to twitter and the like, will have some difficulty appreciating this.
I think it’s easy to forget that it also takes time to gather information, especially for complex events. We have virtually instant access these days with electronic communication, but instant access to what? You can tell me that X happened, but then there’s a whole lot of dead air to fill while you figure out what the details were, and we shouldn’t forget that bad information travels just as fast.
The Onion: Conspiracy Theorist Convinces Neil Armstrong Moon Landing Was Faked
Although Armstrong said he “could have sworn” he felt the effects of zero gravity while soaring out of the Earth’s atmosphere and through space, he now believed his memory must be flawed. He also admitted feeling “ashamed” that he had failed to notice the rippling of the American flag he and Buzz Aldrin planted on the surface, blaming his lack of awareness on the bulkiness of the spacesuit and his excitement about traveling to the “moon.”
“That rippling is not possible in the vacuum of space,” Armstrong said. “It must have been the wind from an air-conditioning duct that I didn’t recognize because you can’t hear a damn thing inside those helmets.”
It’s time to celebrate Helium, that noble gas, once again. Aug. 18, 1868: Helium Discovered During Total Solar Eclipse
French astronomer Pierre Jules César Janssen camped out in Guntoor, India, to watch as the moon passed in front of the sun and revealed the solar prominences. Like other sun-gazers that morning, Janssen discovered that the prominences were mostly made of super-hot hydrogen gas. But he also noticed something extra: Using a special prism instrument called a spectroscope, he determined that the line of yellow light everyone had assumed to be sodium didn’t match up to the wavelength of any known element.
We did this last year, too.