Archive for July 20th, 2022

Tweet of the day.

Wednesday, July 20th, 2022

Yeah. I hadn’t thought about it, but it absolutely makes sense that if you need a bunch of movie armor, there are places you can go for that. It sort of surprises me that the places are in India, and it apparently involves “Blacksmiths followed by cargo containers” rather than local rental houses, but that’s the global economy, I guess.

Bonus:

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Obit watch: July 20, 2022.

Wednesday, July 20th, 2022

Dr. Robert F. Curl Jr., professor of chemistry at Rice University and a good Texas boy.

Dr. Curl shared the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1996 (with Dr. Richard E. Smalley and Dr. Harold W. Kroto) for the discovery of buckyballs.

“If Mother Nature is trying to tell you something, you have to listen,” Dr. Curl recalled in a 2016 Rice University interview celebrating the 20th anniversary of his Nobel.
While Dr. Kroto and Dr. Smalley pursued further buckyball research, Dr. Curl soon moved on to other areas of interest. In the 2016 interview, he recalled going to Dr. Smalley’s office and finding his colleague filling up binders with papers about buckyballs.
“I don’t want to be in any field for a full-time job keeping up with the literature,” Dr. Curl said. “That’s why I abandoned that area.”

…

After Dr. Curl won the Nobel, Malcolm Gillis, then the president of Rice, asked him what he wanted, perhaps worried that bigger-name institutions would be looking to hire him away from the university.
Dr. Curl asked for a bicycle rack near his office.

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