jlynch
Posts by this author
April 30, 2007
Events
1753 - Publication of Species Plantarum by Linnaeus,
1930 - The "planet" Pluto is officially named.
1956 - The polio vaccine developed by Jonas Salk is made available to the public.
Births
1852 - Santiago Ramón y Cajal, Spanish neuroscientist, Nobel laureate
1881 - Pierre Teilhard de…
April 29, 2007
Events
1006 - Supernova SN 1006, the brightest supernova in recorded history, appears in the constellation Lupus.
1993 - The World Wide Web was born at CERN.
Births
1723 - Mathurin Jacques Brisson, French naturalist
1777 - Carl Friedrich Gauss, German mathematician
1829 - Ferdinand von…
April 28, 2007
"The scientist does not study nature because it is useful to do so. He studies it because he takes pleasure in it, and he takes pleasure in it because it is beautiful. If nature were not beautiful it would not be worth knowing, and life would not be worth living."
Births
1854 - Henri Poincaré,…
April 27, 2007
Births
1765 - Sylvestre François Lacroix, French mathematician
1868 - Georgy Voronoy, Russian mathematician
1900 - Jan Oort, Dutch astronomer
1906 - Kurt Gödel, Austrian mathematician
1928 - Eugene M. Shoemaker, American astronomer
1941 - K. Barry Sharpless, American chemist, Nobel laureate…
April 26, 2007
Events
2002 - The last successful telemetry from NASA space probe Pioneer 10.
Births
1755 - Marc-Antoine Parseval, French mathematician
1791 - Samuel F. B. Morse, American inventor
1820 - Herbert Spencer, English philosopher and social evolutionist
1913 - Philip Hauge Abelson, American physicist…
April 26, 2007
So I noticed that visits to the blog ramped up after 2100 EST tonight with traffic increasing ten-fold. And the reason? Grey's Anatomy mentioned this little blighter.
April 26, 2007
I was going to post a note on Shelly's run-in with the Journal of Science of Food and Agriculture regarding fair-use of a published graph. I was going to run a copy of the offending graph. But all
seems to be ok now and the journal has backed down, blaming the issue on "a misunderstanding…
April 25, 2007
Events
1962 - Ranger 4 spacecraft crashes into the Moon.
1994 - Physicists announce first evidence of the top quark subatomic particle.
Births
1774 - Christian Leopold von Buch, German geologist
1785 - John James Audubon, French-American naturalist and illustrator
1879 - Owen Willans Richardson,…
April 25, 2007
I'll admit to spending way too much time lurking at Fark.com. Today the site underwent a re-design and the punters aren't happy. The new layout is ugly (particularly on a wide screen), it loads slooooow, and Firfox extensions no longer work. People on this thread are complaining and things are…
April 24, 2007
Events
1953 - Francis Crick and James D. Watson publish Molecular structure of nucleic acids:
a structure for deoxyribose nucleic acid describing the double helix structure of DNA.
Births
1710 - James Ferguson, Scottish astronomer
1849 - Felix Klein, German mathematician
1874 - Guglielmo…
April 23, 2007
Events
1967 - Vladimir Komarov dies in Soyuz 1 becoming the first human to die during a space mission.
1990 - STS-31: The Hubble Space Telescope is launched by the Space Shuttle Discovery.
Births
1899 - Oscar Zariski, Russian-born mathematician
1947 - Roger D. Kornberg, American chemist
Deaths…
April 22, 2007
Events
1827 - William Rowan Hamilton presents his Theory of systems of rays.
Births
1628 - Johann van Waveren Hudde, Dutch mathematician
1746 - Félix Vicq-d'Azyr, French physician and anatomist
1775 - William Turner, English ornithologist
1792 - John Thomas Romney Robinson, Irish astronomer and…
April 21, 2007
Events
1993 - The web browser Mosaic version 1.0 is released.
Births
1692 - James Stirling, Scottish mathematician
1876 - Robert Bárány, American physician, Nobel laureate
1884 - Otto Rank, Austrian psychologist
1891 - Harold Jeffreys, English astronomer
1904 - Robert Oppenheimer, American…
April 21, 2007
Another semester is drawing to a close. Readers will notice that I've been more-or-less AWOL for the past few months - a combination of deadlines (hit and missed) and teaching have kept me busy beyond belief. The good news is that I expect things to ease off starting sometime next week and to…
April 21, 2007
Events
1994 - Confirmation of the first extrasolar planets (around pulsar PSR B1257+12) is announced by Alexander Wolszczan.
Births
1652 - Michel Rolle, French mathematician
1774 - Jean-Baptiste Biot, French physicist
1882 - Percy Williams Bridgman, American physicist, Nobel laureate
1889 - Paul…
April 19, 2007
Roll call is reporting that the FBI has raided a business tied to Rep. Rick Renzi (R-Ariz.) as part of an ongoing investigation into the lawmaker. Knowledgeable readers may remember that there are suspicions that Paul Charlton, the former U.S. Attorney in Arizona, was deep-sixed by Alberto Gonzalez…
April 19, 2007
Events
1862 - The first pasteurization test completed by Louis Pasteur and Claude Bernard.
1902 - Pierre and Marie Curie refine radium chloride.
Births
1745 - Philippe Pinel, French physician
1904 - George Stibitz, American scientist
1918 - Kai Siegbahn, Swedish physicist, Nobel Prize laureate
1927…
April 18, 2007
Events
1971 - Launch of Salyut 1, the first space station.
Births
1874 - Ernst Rüdin, Swiss psychiatrist, geneticist, and eugenicist
1883 - Richard von Mises, Austrian-born mathematician
1912 - Glenn Seaborg, American chemist, Nobel Prize laureate
Deaths
1567 - Michael Stifel, German…
April 17, 2007
Organic life beneath the shoreless waves
Was born and nurs'd in ocean's pearly caves;
First forms minute, unseen by spheric glass,
Move on the mud, or pierce the watery mass;
These, as successive generations bloom,
New powers acquire and larger limbs assume;
Whence countless groups of vegetation…
April 16, 2007
I don't really have much to add to what people are saying about the terrible tragedy in Virginia. Suffice it to say, that any of us involved in education felt the sheer mindless unexplainable stupidity of it. As I stood in-front of my class of 150 (mostly) soon-to-be graduating seniors at 3pm…
April 16, 2007
Births
1598 - Giovanni Riccioli, Italian astronomer
1794 - Carl Friedrich Philipp von Martius, German botanist
1798 - Ãtienne Bobillier, French mathematician
1863 - Augustus Edward Hough Love, English mathematician
1866 - Ernest Starling, British physiologist
1946 - Georges J.F. Kohler, German…
April 15, 2007
Events
1943 - Albert Hofmann discovers the psychedelic effects of LSD.
Births
1495 - Petrus Apianus, German mathematician
1660 - Hans Sloane, British collector and physician
1728 - Joseph Black, Scottish chemist
1823 - Ferdinand Eisenstein, German mathematician
Deaths
1783 - Christian Mayer, Czech…
April 15, 2007
Events
1923 - Insulin first became generally available for use by diabetics.
Births
1452 - Leonardo da Vinci, Italian Renaissance polymath (above)
1552 - Pietro Cataldi, Italian mathematician
1641 - Robert Sibbald, Scottish physician
1707 - Leonhard Euler, Swiss mathematician
1710 - William…
April 13, 2007
Requiem
When the last living thing
has died on account of us,
how poetical it would be
if Earth could say,
in a voice floating up
perhaps
from the floor
of the Grand Canyon,
"It is done."
People did not like it here.
Kurt Vonnegut
April 13, 2007
Events
1956 - Videotape is first demonstrated at the NARTB (now NAB) convention
1958 - The Soviet satellite Sputnik 2 falls from orbit after a mission duration of 162 days.
1970 - One of Apollo 13's oxygen tanks explodes, causing a cancelled moon mission.
1981 - The first operational space shuttle…
April 13, 2007
About the only thing I bother to make time to watch on the TV is The Sopranos which has just entered its final season of nine episodes. Here's what has happened in the previous seasons:
April 12, 2007
Births
1771 - Richard Trevithick, English engineer and inventor
1780 - Alexander Mitchell, Irish engineer
1802 - Leopold Fitzinger, Austrian zoologist
1850 - Arthur Matthew Weld Downing, British astronomer
1887 - Gordon S. Fahrni, Canadian physician and President of the Canadian Medical…
April 11, 2007
Events
1633 - The formal inquest of Galileo Galilei by the Inquisition begins.
1937 - Sir Frank Whittle ground-tests the first jet engine designed to power an aircraft
1961 - Yuri Gagarin becomes the first man to fly in space.
Births
1748 - Antoine Laurent de Jussieu, French botanist
1852 -…
April 11, 2007
This is sad. Kurt Vonnegut has died. Pessimist, existentialist and damn great writer. As he said in God Bless You Mr Rosewater:
"Hello, babies. Welcome to Earth. It's hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It's round and wet and crowded. At the outside, babies, you've got about a hundred years…
April 10, 2007
Events
1905 - Einstein reveals his Theory of Relativity.
Births
1705 - William Cookworthy, English chemist
1755 - James Parkinson, English physician
1798 - Macedonio Melloni, Italian physicist
1953 - Andrew Wiles, British mathematician who found a proof for Fermat's Last Theorem
Deaths
1626 - Marin…