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
Category Archives: History
Don't Fall Behind
A whole lot about the king of condiments, without getting into shear thinning and thixotropic properties.
It explains why Barenaked Ladies can’t find the fancy dijon ketchup they want in “If I Had a $1,000,000”
What Heinz had done was come up with a condiment that pushed all five of these primal buttons. The taste of Heinz’s ketchup began at the tip of the tongue, where our receptors for sweet and salty first appear, moved along the sides, where sour notes seem the strongest, then hit the back of the tongue, for umami and bitter, in one long crescendo. How many things in the supermarket run the sensory spectrum like this?
The business decision of empowering kids
A typical five-year-old consumes about sixty per cent more ketchup than a typical forty-year-old, and the company realized that it needed to put ketchup in a bottle that a toddler could control. “If you are four—and I have a four-year-old—he doesn’t get to choose what he eats for dinner, in most cases,” Keller says. “But the one thing he can control is ketchup. It’s the one part of the food experience that he can customize and personalize.”
With some multivariable optimization thrown in.
Did Somebody Step On a Duck?
“Is that what you want, Mary? A farter?” Tucker/Norman, “There’s Something About Mary”
To the Royal Academy of Farting, Benjamin Franklin, c. 1781.
That the permitting this Air to escape and mix with the Atmosphere, is usually offensive to the Company, from the fetid Smell that accompanies it.
That all well-bred People therefore, to avoid giving such Offence, forcibly restrain the Efforts of Nature to discharge that Wind.
That so retain’d contrary to Nature, it not only gives frequently great present Pain, but occasions future Diseases, such as habitual Cholics, Ruptures, Tympanies, &c. often destructive of the Constitution, & sometimes of Life itself.
I wonder what the impact would have been on social norms if certain gases weren’t invisible.
Update: Another, erm, voice heard from. Science World toots up on the matter.
Name That . . . Thing!
There’s a movement afoot to make the recent “Classic Papers Challenge” a regular event. Suggestions for naming of both the general effort and an alternative term for “carnival” are being solicited. Go on over to Skulls in the Stars and leave a suggestion.
Back to the Future
The home of the future, from the perspective of 1939
Microwave ovens, electrical appliances, VCRs/DVRs, heat pumps . . .
The Precipitron, however, eliminates more than ninety-five per cent of such air-borne particles by charging them with electricity and then drawing them off to oppositely charged collector plates. Housewives will appreciate what this means in keeping rugs and curtains clean.”
And good old-fashioned sexism. Honey, make me a sandwich.
However,
Alas, they didn’t get everything right:
“In 1928 the average residential power user consumed 460 kilowatt-hours of current a year and paid an average of six and six-tenths cents per kilowatt-hour. In 1938 he used 850 kilowatt-hours and paid only four and two-tenths cents per kilowatt-hour. This saving has been made possible by increased efficiency in the production and distribution of electric power…..Against the reality of such figures and achievements, one dares not place any limits on the possibilities of electricity in the future.”
I think maybe the Great Depression might have had an effect on the costs, too. According to the westegg inflation calculator, in the US, a product costing 7 cents in 1939 (or 9 cents in 1928) would cost a dollar today. So what’s the problem? Residential electricity today is about ten cents per kWh. The cost has generally gone down over time. There’s a graph here from 1960 onward (figure 3, in year 2000 dollars). I’m not seeing the wrongness of the claim, except for using kWh for current.
Classic Science Compendium
The 2008 “Classic Science Papers” Challenge is done. Thanks to gg for coming up with the idea, and making the list of all the posts. I’ve still got one installment left to do, on a second paper, which I should be able to finish up shortly.
"Classic" Timekeeping, Part II
(Part I)
The state-of-the-art timekeeping technology a century ago was comprised of pendulum clocks. Refinements were made in the areas of obvious problems, such as the mechanical escapement which robs the system of energy, the vulnerability to changes in length from temperature and humidity, and vibrations. The culmination of this was the clock of W. H. Shortt, which had two pendulums, a master and a slave. The master oscillator was a free pendulum, and as it did no work to drive any mechanism, it was able to keep very precise time. The pendulum was made of invar, a material that had a very low thermal coefficient of expansion, and was encased in a chamber that was evacuated to several millitorr of pressure. The chamber was bolted to a wall that typically rested on a massive platform of the type used for telescopes, which minimized effects from vibrations. The pendulum was given an occasional boost to keep its amplitude roughly constant. The slave pendulum, which did the mechanical work of the system, received periodic electronic impulses from the master clock to correct its motion. This type of clock could keep time to better than a millisecond a day. A shortcoming (as it were) was in the measurement of the time; as Loomis notes
This remarkable result is accomplished through the possibility of averaging a large number of observations. A single impulse from a master Shortt clock has an uncertainty of 1 or 2 milli-seeonds. The master pendulum carries a small wheel. The impulse arm rests on this wheel, and as the pendulum swings out the pallet on this arm travels down the edge of the wheel, finally falling clear . It then trips an arm which falls, making the electric contact . If the small wheel is not exactly circular the arm will fall at slightly different times as the wheel is given a small turn with each fall. These variations are entirely smoothed out when a series of sparks are averaged.
So while the clock is precise in the long-term, the system of measuring it (described below) is limited at shorter durations.
New Exhibit at the Physics Museum
The gallery of failed atomic models, 1903-1913 from Skulls in the Stars.
[H]ow many atomic models were there?
A lot. Most people in physics are taught Thomson’s ‘plum pudding’ model of the atom, but a little investigating turned up no less than eight distinct pictures of atomic structure.
The late 1800s and early 1900s was the breakthrough period of atomic research. A number of tantalizing pieces of experimental evidence suggested a nontrivial internal structure to the atom.
We are taught (and teach) the Bohr model because it has some use, even though it is wrong/incomplete. But it’s useful to remember that in the presence of fragmentary information there are going to be failed attempts at explaining the underlying phenomenon. As more data is uncovered the false theories can be weeded out, because they will not have predicted the event or will have predicted a phenomenon that was never observed, despite a reasonable expectation of doing so.
Toys in the Office: Gettin' Medieval
Bought this trebuchet as a kit several years ago, and put it together over the Memorial day weekend back then. I had seen a NOVA special about some men who built two using in-period tools, and then knocked down a wall with them. When I ran across the kits on the intertubes, I couldn’t get my wallet out fast enough. It came with what looked to be ~50 caliber musket shot, which is not exactly conducive to indoor testing, so I substituted balled-up aluminum foil. It’s a favorite of some visitors, including the safety inspector(!).
Here’s a Trebuchet Challenge for testing your mad siege engine skillz.
"Classic" Timekeeping, Part I: Introduction
Following the suggestion and subsequent reminder (nothing like a deadline to get the creative juices flowing) from gg at Skulls in the Stars, I’ve got two “old” papers that I’m going to summarize.
I recommend choosing something pre- World War II, as that was the era of hand-crafted, “in your basement”-style science. There’s a lot to learn not only about the ingenuity of researchers in an era when materials were not readily available, but also about the problems and concerns of scientists of that era, often things we take for granted now!
These are from 1931, fulfilling the pre-WWII criterion, when you still had individuals engaging in research that were self-financed or supported by a patron and much of the equipment was self-manufactured. The science in this case was largely self-funded, and as for the “basement,” well, it’s a pretty fancy basement as you’ll see, as one might suspect of someone who can fund his own science. But classic nonetheless. There’s a bit to do, and I’m going to break it up into more manageable chunks.
The papers in question are from the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, Vol. 91, published in 1931, and are “The Precise Measurement of Time” by Alfred L. Loomis (p. 569-575) and “Time, Analysis of records made on the Loomis chronograph by three Shortt clocks and a crystal oscillator” by Brown, E. W. & Brouwer, D. (p.575-591). (I, know, I know. They sound like tabloid headlines, don’t they?) The first paper describes various apparati used, and the second describes a particular measurement that was of interest to me.