Swans on Tea

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 [...]

This is the kind of post I start reading, and I begin to furrow my eyebrows as phrases and sentences pop up that don’t seem right or are obviously wrong. I though it was just bad science journalism, but realized it’s a rant-y agenda piece, with the supposed “science” reporting as a [...]

Particle and wave descriptions of light, duking it out in the early 19th century. What a drag: Arago’s Experiment (1810) over at Skulls in the Stars.
Before 1800, most scientists were proponents of the so-called corpuscular theory of light propagation. In this view, which was championed and solidified by Isaac Newton in his 1704 book [...]

A reminder that the submission deadline for “classic” science posts is coming up on the 15th, and the inaugural compendium of The Giant’s Shoulders will be hosted at Blog Around the Clock

Narrowing down some historical dates with astronomy
Look to the ancient skies…
Marcelo Magnasco and Constantino Baikouzis identified four astronomical events in the epic poem [The Odyssey] and calculated dates within 100 years of the fall of Troy that would fit in with the events described around Odysseus’s return home and the ensuing slaughter of men propositioning [...]

Or at least make it spin a little. A simple motor: battery, magnet and wire.
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Magnetic field sees a changing current and that results in a force, which gives you a motor. Quite similar to the Faraday motor, but then, he was [...]

gg announces that a compendium of classic science, being dubbed The Giant’s Shoulders, has been created and given its own niche in the ether.
The first huddling-up of said Giants will be at Blog Around the Clock