Category Archives: History

Evidence of Things Not Seen

Posted on by

Until you do a CAT scan.

NYT: Autopsies of War Dead Reveal Ways to Save Others

Col. Howard T. Harcke, a 71-year-old Marine Corps radiologist who delayed retirement to read CT scans at Dover, noticed something peculiar in late 2005. The emergency treatment for a collapsed lung involves inserting a needle and tube into the chest cavity to relieve pressure and allow the lung to reinflate. But in one case, Colonel Harcke could see from a scan that the tube was too short to reach the chest cavity. Then he saw another case, and another, and half a dozen more.

In an interview, Colonel Harcke said it was impossible to tell whether anyone had died because the tubes were too short; all had other severe injuries. But a collapsed lung can be life-threatening, so proper treatment is essential.

Colonel Harcke pulled 100 scans from the archives and used them to calculate the average thickness of the chest wall in American troops; he found that the standard tubing, five centimeters long, was too short for 50 percent of the troops. If the tubing was lengthened to eight centimeters, it would be long enough for 99 percent.

“Soldiers are bigger and stronger now,” Colonel Harcke said.

The findings were presented to the Army Surgeon General, who in August 2006 ordered that the kits given to combat medics be changed to include only the longer tubing.

This reminds me of a story, possibly apocryphal, of a study done in WWII. The army wanted more armor on bombers to protect them, but needed to be selective about where it was placed, lest the speed and/or range suffer too much. And they didn’t really want to take planes in production to test them, since they were all needed in battle. So some people analyzed the damage pattern of planes that returned from missions. They assumed that anti-aircraft bursts were basically random, so the pattern of damage from returning aircraft indicated non-critical harm, and were areas that didn’t need reinforcing — it was the gaps in the pattern which indicated the fatal hits. and that was where additional armor would do the most good.

Harrison Wasn't a Solo Artist?

Posted on by

‘Lone’ longitude genius may have had help

The story of John Harrison the “lone genius” who solved the problem of finding longitude at sea is in urgent need of a rewrite.

Discoveries made during repairs to Harrison’s first successful “sea clock” – completed in 1735 – suggest that others contributed to his pioneering timepieces. “Harrison is always cast as a self-taught lone genius pitted against the establishment. The truth is, that is a great over-simplification,” says horologist Jonathan Betts of the Royal Observatory, Greenwich, London.

I think the idea that equating “lone genius” with “never talked to anyone about their work” is quite a reach. It’s been a while since I read Longitude, but I don’t recall having the impression that Harrison never sought out others to learn things. At what point are you no longer working alone? If you have a bottle-washer? If you don’t smelt your own brass?

Baby's First Transistor

Posted on by

Landmarks: Birth of Modern Electronics

In June 1948, the Physical Review published a description of a novel electronic device that “may be employed as an amplifier, oscillator, and for other purposes for which vacuum tubes are ordinarily used.” That statement hardly begins to capture the importance of the transistor, which made possible technology unimaginable at the time. But the first transistor design never saw commercial success. A different design, unveiled two years later by a colleague and rival of the original authors, spawned the modern microelectronics revolution.

It's All Greek to Me

Posted on by

Easy as α β γ ?

The brilliant young PhD student Ralph Alpher working with his advisor George Gamow were about to publish a major work about the origins of the elements after the Big Bang. In a burst of inspiration, Gamow invited the physicist Hans Bethe to include his name on the paper, even though he had not contributed to it at all. That way the paper would have been authored by Alpher, Bethe, Gamow, a play on the first three letters of the Greek alphabet alpha, beta, and gamma. It was a delightful pun, and their one page paper serendipitously ran in the April 1st issue of Physical Review Letters.

Littering … and Creating a Nuisance

Posted on by

On July 11, 1979, the space station Skylab re-entered the atmosphere, broke up and rained down over Western Australia and the Indian Ocean. (Ah, yes, I remember going to a Skylab-is-falling party) The Shire of Esperance fined NASA $400 for littering.

Littering fine paid

ALMOST 30 years after fining NASA for littering the local area with debris from abandoned space station Skylab, the Shire of Esperance has received a $US400 cheque. American radio station Highway Radio paid the fine on NASA’s behalf, raising the funds on variety breakfast program Barker and Barley in the Morning.

Who Watches the Watch, Man?

Posted on by

Who Watches the Watchman?

Let’s say you own a big building full of valuable stuff. How do you make sure that the night watchman patrolling your factory floor or museum galleries after closing time actually makes his rounds? How do you know he’s inspecting every hallway, floor, and stairwell in the facility? How do you know he (or she) is not just spending every night sleeping at his desk?

If you’re a technology designer, you might suggest using surveillance cameras or even GPS to track his location each night, right? But let’s make this interesting. Let’s go a century back in time to, say, around 1900. What could you possibly do in 1900 to be absolutely sure a night watchman was making his full patrol?

Mumbo, Meet Jumbo

Posted on by

Skulls in the Stars: Levitation and diamagnetism, or: LEAVE EARNSHAW ALONE!!!

It’s hard to tell if the author is being snarky or really looks upon mathematical physics as a “mumbojumbo” that impedes progress. Taking the statement at face value, it highlights an important and semi-common misunderstanding of many physics theorems, and so I thought I’d take a qualitative stab at explaining Earnshaw’s theorem and its relationship to diamagnetic materials and magnetic levitation.