Links for 2010-09-03

"Waits, who made his proper recording debut with 1973's Closing Time, inspires music writers' wild, Charles Bukowski-fueled imaginings because his work has always been about the losers, the freaks, the slow 3 a.m. drunks who fumble change out of their pockets for the broken jukebox; the lurching, homeless fools who mark out their days with piano wire and broken bottles; the lovers for whom love is the only lie still worth living for. He is by turns macabre, melancholy, cynical, and optimistic, a heap of broken images left rusting in the morning sun. Which is all well and good if you're into that sort of thing, but for the outsider, the verbiage can get off-putting, as can the hobo-with-a-heart-of-something image. To put it another way, there's a reason the Ancient Mariner had to grab people and force them to listen. Not everyone wants to spend time with the lost."

"On 10 July 1908, in his laboratory at Leiden University, the great Dutch physicist Heike Kamerlingh Onnes (1853-1926) experienced the most glorious moment of his career. That was the day he first liquefied helium and thus opened an entirely new chapter in low-temperature physics. [...]

In a triumphant report to the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW), Kamerlingh Onnes documented his achievement in great detail. Therefore it is remarkable that reliable details about his serendipitous discovery of superconductivity three years later have been hard to come by. Lack of information has led to speculations about the discovery. In particular, it has perpetuated an apocryphal tale about the role played by a sleepy young apprentice in Kamerlingh Onnes's lab.[...] There have even been rumors of the possible disappearance of Kamerlingh Onnes's laboratory notebooks."

"There's an age old question that mankind has pondered. I'm sure that noble heads such as Aristotle, Newton, and Einstein have pondered it. I myself have raised it a few times. The question is: do you get more wet running or walking through the rain? Now, I know that this question was mythbusted a while back. So this is one of those situations where I know the result I want to get to with my calculation: according to mythbusters running is better. Still, I think formulating the question mathematically will be fun, plus if I fail to agree with experiment everyone can mock me mercilessly."