Science Sunday!
Today: a pretty high quality documentary from Rolex, “The Trieste’s Deepest Dive”, about the 1960 descent by Jacques Piccard and Lt. Don Walsh (US Navy) to the bottom of the Challenger Deep.
I actually have a copy of Seven Miles Down: I kept it next to my copy of Half Mile Down because of course I did.
As best as I can tell, Lt. Walsh is still alive.
Bonus: As far as I’m concerned, archaeology is science. “Jamestown Rediscovery…a world uncovered”. Hosted by Roger Mudd.
Science Sunday!
This sits at a weird intersection. “The Land Beneath The Sea” is a US Navy film from 1967, but the subject it covers is the Navy’s oceanographic research programs. That puts it squarely, to me, in the “science” category. But then, I’ve been interested in oceanography ever since my parents gave me one of those “How and Why Wonder Books” on the subject a long time ago (when I was in the single-digit age range).
Bonus: here’s something that may be a little more explicitly science. “Man in Space” from 1955. This is a vintage Disney video: Uncle Walt himself shows up at about the 1:00 mark.
#TheFutureWeCouldHaveHad
I’m bending some rules today:
But: James “Connections” Burke, on “Is The Internet Redefining Knowledge?” Buttons. Pushed.
This was posted in May, but from context clues in the introduction, I think it dates back to 2001 or 2002. I set it to start about two minutes in, skipping the introductions, but you’re welcome to rewind if you wish.
Bonus: This is an episode of “New Mexico In Focus”, I think from 2014 (at least, that’s when it was posted). This one’s only about 21 minutes.
Science Sunday!
Today, I thought I’d reach back to the AT&T Tech Channel again. Let’s start with “Similiarities of Wave Behavior”, from 1959. I set this to start about 1:18 in, skipping the introduction.
And as a bonus, Dr. Walter Brattain on “Semiconductor Physics”. You may remember Dr. Brattain as one of the inventors of the transistor who shared the 1956 Nobel Prize in Physics. (The other two were John Bardeen and William Shockley.)
I really enjoyed “Catch Me If You Can”, both the book and the movie. So here’s something on the long side for you: Frank Abagnale talks at Google.
Shorter bonus: the two red flags to look for.
A quick round-up of obits I’ve been meaning to make note of over the past few days.
Michael Lonsdale, actor. He was “Hugo Drax” in “Moonraker”, but he did a whole bunch of other work. Some of it was in “avant-garde” films, but he also played “Lebel” in the original “Day of the Jackel”, “Jean-Pierre” in “Ronin”, and a long list of other work “with a Who’s Who of directors, including Mr. Spielberg, François Truffaut, Orson Welles, Luis Buñuel, Jean-Jacques Annaud, and James Ivory”.
Pierre Troisgros, famous French chef.
The Troisgros brothers eventually took charge of their parent’s restaurant and transformed it into a gastronomic destination, at the cutting edge of the culinary revolution known as la nouvelle cuisine. That style was influenced by the austere finesse of Japanese cooking and known, at its extreme, for tiny portions on huge white plates, a caricature in which the Troisgros brothers never indulged.
Their contribution was to showcase the innate flavors of seasonal ingredients, and to pare down some of the overblown creations buried in thick sauces that had come to represent French haute-cuisine.
It earned them Michelin stars and top ratings from other guides. And it put the restaurant high on the list for tourists starting in the 1970s, many of whom, like safari-goers ticking off the “big five,” went to France mainly to experience its top restaurants, collecting souvenir menus along the way.
…
The restaurant’s most famous dish was salmon with sorrel sauce (saumon à l’oseille). In the Troisgros kitchen the sauce was not thickened with starch but depended on well-reduced sauce ingredients and a touch of cream. Mr. Boulud pointed out that the dish was cooked in a nonstick pan, noting that Mr. Troisgros was among the first chefs to use one.
Alain Ducasse, the chef and restaurateur who is part of a generation that followed in the footsteps of Mr. Troisgros, Mr. Bocuse and others, said in a statement that the Troisgros brothers had developed the basis for nouvelle cuisine, but that their food was never austere or posed.
Robert Gore, inventor of Gore-Tex.
Mr. Gore’s billion-dollar invention was born out of failure and frustration. In 1969, as head of research and development for W.L. Gore & Associates, the manufacturing company founded by his parents, he was tasked with creating an inexpensive form of plumber’s tape for a client. The tape was made from polytetrafluoroethylene, or PTFE, known commonly by the brand name Teflon.
Mr. Gore sought to make more efficient use of the material by stretching it, not unlike Silly Putty. But each time he heated and stretched a rod of PTFE in his lab, it broke in two.
“Everything I seemed to do worked worse than what we were already doing,” he told the Science History Institute in a short film. “So I decided to give one of these rods a huge stretch, fast — a jerk. I gave it a huge jerk and it stretched 1,000 percent. I was stunned.”
…
Mr. Gore became president and chief executive of W.L. Gore & Associates in 1976 and pursued new applications for his invention. He would stand in a rainstorm to check garments and footwear for waterproofness, and he filled his home with prototypes. He called the company’s 800 numbers to make sure the customer service was up to par.
“Bob was the guy who made things happen,” Bret Snyder, the chairman of W.L. Gore & Associates and Mr. Gore’s nephew, said in a phone interview. “He had a passion not just for the theoretical, but how the products worked in customers’ hands.”
Science Sunday!
The SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory has a YouTube channel. (The SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory was formerly known as the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, so I guess this is now the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center National Accelerator Laboratory, unless SLAC is now one of those acryonyms that doesn’t stand for anything.)
“Here Be Monsters: Tales of the Hot Universe”.
Bonus: Here’s a lost art: “The Slide Rule (The “C” and “D” Scales)”.
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“hardly any encryption, authorization or authentication”. I bet you can guess what happens next. Yes! Hilarity ensues!
The write-up is much, much longer and more detailed: I’m just trying to hit the high points here.
Bonus:
(Hattip: Hacker News on the Twitter.)
Science Sunday!
I thought I’d do another assortment today, instead of a single theme.
First up: “Shaping Things to Come”, with Professor Eric Laithwaite of Imperial College London. Professor Laithwaite sounds like an interesting guy: he was one of the pioneers of maglev technology, did a lot of work on electric motors (specifically linear induction motors)…and had some rather eccentric ideas about gyroscopes and moths.
I just love the way this video opens. I don’t know how you could get more British than this.
Bonus: for something a little different, Alan Holden of Bell Labs explains crystals.
It didn’t take long to find something even stupider than “Mean Girls” toaster pastry.
In the interest of fairness, note the “said” above:
But it’s not an official jar of Bella Delphine bathwater. “I know it’s disappointing,” Josh Wilkinson, the case’s designer, told Motherboard on the phone. “It’s like 400 bucks on Ebay. The more official reason is that these cooling loops, if it was just normal water they wouldn’t hold up after a while.”
Liquid cooled PCs reduce temperatures of a machine with a liquid that’s a mix of distilled water and additives that prevent corrosion. Using Delphine’s dirty bathwater to cool down a machine is probably hazardous to the machine’s health.
Science Sunday!
Here’s something a little off the beaten path for you: “The Story of Dr. Lister”, a 1963 dramatization from Warner-Lambert Pharmaceuticals, about the life of Dr. Joseph Lister.
For those of you who aren’t big medical history buffs, Dr. Lister was one of the pioneers of antiseptic surgery.
Lister promoted the idea of sterile surgery while working at the Glasgow Royal Infirmary. Lister successfully introduced carbolic acid (now known as phenol) to sterilise surgical instruments and to clean wounds.
Applying Louis Pasteur’s advances in microbiology, Lister championed the use of carbolic acid as an antiseptic, so that it became the first widely used antiseptic in surgery. He first suspected it would prove an adequate disinfectant because it was used to ease the stench from fields irrigated with sewage waste. He presumed it was safe because fields treated with carbolic acid produced no apparent ill-effects on the livestock that later grazed upon them.
Bonus: I spent some time trying to find a decent video about Ignaz Semmelweis, but couldn’t. So for a change of pace, please enjoy an Army Air Corps video from 1944 on what is rapidly becoming a lost art: “Celestial Navigation”.
(Yes, even though this is a military training film, I do think understanding the relationship of celestial objects to one’s position on the Earth does count as science.)
Science Sunday!
An assortment today. Sort of like a box of chocolates. (I’ll let you decide which one is the “Spring Surprise“.)
A short one: vintage video of the flight of the Gossamer Albatross.
(“Albatross!“)
Somewhat longer: by way of the San Diego Air and Space Museum Archives, a lecture from the “Convair Lecture Series” by George Gamow on “Stellar Evolution”.
This is an interesting oral history from Marvin Stern, who worked at Convair at one time, which touches briefly on the Convair Lecture Series.
Longest: “Nuclear Reactor Construction and Operation” from MIT “MIT 22.01 Introduction to Nuclear Engineering and Ionizing Radiation, Fall 2016”.
This is lecture number 16 in the course, but I feel like it is fairly stand-alone. Y’all know how I am about nukes and nuke stuff.