That Time People Sent a Cat Through the Mail Using Pneumatic Tubes
[T]he pneumatic tubes of New York City’s General Post Office, when they launched in 1897, ended up whisking away … a cat. Yep. A live cat. A black cat. A probably quite indignant cat.
A grumpy cat, no doubt.
Cat-turning: the 19th-century scientific cat-dropping craze!
One thing I’ve learn from studying the history of science is that scientists are human beings. Often incredibly weird, weird human beings. For example: in the mid-to-late-1800s, an exciting era in which the foundations of electromagnetic theory were set and the electromagnetic nature of light was discovered, a number of the greatest minds in physics were also preoccupied with a rather different problem.
Dropping cats.
The History of the Rube Goldberg Machine
Goldberg’s carefully designed machines employed birds, monkeys, springs, pulleys, feathers, fingers, rockets, and other animate or inanimate tools to create intricate chain reactions that completed basic tasks like hiding a gravy stain, lighting a cigar while driving fifty miles an hour, or fishing an olive out of a long-necked bottle. As Goldberg himself put it, his cartoon inventions were a “symbol of man’s capacity for exerting maximum effort to accomplish minimal results.”
The Best Space Images Ever Were Taken by Apollo Astronauts With Hasselblad Cameras
Starting with Apollo 8, astronauts carried a Hasselblad EDC with them on their lunar journeys. Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin each had one during their brief but historic romp on the moon on July 20, 1969. Subsequent men also took Hasselblads, 12 of which are now sitting on the moon’s surface, left behind to save weight on the return trip. Only the film magazines returned to Earth.
Surely not.
Just ran across this, from 2005: The Feynman File, by his daughter Michelle
… do not include studying the habits of highly successful people
The Misconception: You should study the successful if you wish to become successful.
The Truth: When failure becomes invisible, the difference between failure and success may also become invisible.
In general, the lesson that once you’ve applied a filter to your sample, you usually don’t have a normal distribution anymore. Taking those numbers as typical is like gathering anecdotal evidence.
Also, the story about analyzing bomber damage in WWII is one I’d heard before and liked. I’m glad it’s actually be true.
I ran across this story about Canadian counterfeiters, and I was interested because of the quote below,
“Because the polymer series’ notes are so secure … there’s almost an overconfidence among retailers and the public in terms of when you sort of see the strip, the polymer looking materials, everybody says ‘oh, this one’s going to be good because you know it’s impossible to counterfeit,'” he said.
“So people don’t actually check it.”
which is an interesting comment on the mindset of people. If you’ve read Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman you might see there’s some similar commentary on people thinking things were safe just because (there’s a safe, or a fence) but when it came down to the details, people were pretty stupid about actually leveraging the features that would have made the systems secure. (Though Feynman explains it from a different perspective than that).
With this presumably false sense of security, there are actually some counterfeit bills in the system
Pound said since the polymer series was announced in 2011, police have confirmed 56 polymer counterfeit notes across Canada, out of about 500-million polymer notes in circulation.
But then it occurred to me that the article didn’t actually mention any context for these numbers, and context is important. Is the system failing — is ten bills out of a million a big number? With a little searching I ran across an even more interesting article on how Canada got to the point where they decided to use polymer (don’t call it plastic!) currency.
By [2004] Canada’s counterfeit rate had ballooned to 470 PPM. That year alone, 552,692 forged banknotes were passed, a record number. Canada’s PPM level was as much as 100 times the ratio of some G20 countries.
Which means that the 10 PPM 0.1 PPM for the polymer bills is a huge improvement and even lower than Canada’s rate in 1990, which was just 4 PPM. The article says that 50 PPM is considered the threshold for having a counterfeiting problem. So while the complacency might be a problem, the new system is working pretty well.
edit: Fixed the last paragraph. A little mathlexia.
Who’s the greatest American physicist in history?
[T]he sparse list of great homegrown American physicists makes two things clear. Firstly, that America is truly a land of immigrants; it’s only by including foreign-born physicists like Fermi, Bethe, Einstein, Chandrasekhar, Wigner, Yang and Ulam can the list of American physicists even start to compete with the European list. Secondly and even more importantly, the selection demonstrates that even in 2013, physics in America is a very young science compared to European physics.
Ciudad Blanca, Legendary Lost City, Possibly Found In Honduran Rain Forest
Ciudad Blanca, or “The White City,” has been a legend since the days of the conquistadors, who believed the Mosquitia rain forests hid a metropolis full of gold and searched for it in the 1500s. Throughout the 1900s, archaeologists documented mounds and other signs of ancient civilization in the Mosquitias region, but the shining golden city of legend has yet to make an appearance.
…
“We use lidar to pinpoint where human structures are by looking for linear shapes and rectangles,” Colorado State University research Stephen Leisz, who uses lidar in Mexico, said in a statement. “Nature doesn’t work in straight lines.”
HOW BING CROSBY AND THE NAZIS HELPED TO CREATE SILICON VALLEY
How Bing and his influence in the recording industry helped to enable modern technology.
Bonus commentary on how the new “crooning” was a bad influence on the young. Nothing ever changes.