Rest in Peace Steve Jobs and thanks for bringing together innovation, design and aesthetics. There might have been other innovators who must have thought of laptops, tablets and phones without any keys and buttons, but you thought about it, designed it and brought those ideas to life.
Comicstrip credit: Abstrusegoose.com
Leave a Comment October 27, 2011
Why is social networking via web so effective as compared to snail-mail, email, TV or phone? The reason lies in the structure of network and connections it allows to form (see the plot below). Take for example television network , it’s a one-to-many type of network and the number of possible connections such a network allows depends on how many people own/watch TV. Such networks are like one-way traffic where users don’t have any capability to interact with other users in the network system. So basically it’s networking capacity scales as a function of N, where N is the number of people (Sarnoff’s Law). Emails and phones allow multiple connection possibilities between people in the network which scales as N^2-N (Metcalfe’s Law). Social networking is just completely another beast which expands exponentially with the size of people in the network as 2^N-N-1 (Reed’s Law). Social networking allows formation of groups and sub-groups and there lies the immensely powerful network effect. In a group of N people, you can from 2^N such groups and thereby the potential networking capacity increases exponentially. That’s what Facebook and other social networking websites are trying to capitalize on. How strong are these networks and connections, that’s a different story and will be subject of my other post sometime later.
Top image credit: Facebook | Paul Butler
Leave a Comment June 17, 2011
Here is one of the coolest anagram I have ever seen. Anagram is basically a play of words where by re-arranging the words or phrases you create another words or phrases, only catch is that you have to use each alphabet just once. Mike Kieth used names of sixty elements from the periodic table to create this magic, 30 elements on each side of the equality. But the anagrammy didn’t end just with the words. If you replace each element with its atomic number, the equality still persists in terms of the sum of the numbers. He won the best Anagrammy award in 1999 for the same. Doubly-true Anagram!
Leave a Comment June 16, 2011
When do you think was the word “photon” first coined? Your first guess might be somewhere around 1900-1910, when Einstein and Planck introduced the idea of light quantum or das Lichtquantas as Einstein called them. But interestingly, neither Enistein nor Planck coined the word photon. The word photon was introduced by chemist Gilbert Lewis in 1926 when he wrote a letter to Nature magazine titled ” The conservation of Photons”. The letter was published in December 1926 issue of Nature magazine. In the letter he introduced his hypothesis “we are dealing here with a new type of atom, an identifiable entity, uncreatable and indestructible, which acts as the carrier of radiant energy and, after absorption, persists as an essential constituent of the absorbing atom until it is later sent out…… I therefore take the liberty of proposing for this hypothetical new atom, which is not light but plays an essential part in every process of radiation, the name photon” You can read the complete letter here. His theory and explanation about light failed but the word ‘photon’ he introduced, survived.
The word photon can be broken down to Greek word phōs, which means light. Phōs can also be related to Sanskrit word bhā or ābhā which means light. Other words originating from phōs were already in use by that time (photo, photograph, photometer). I plotted frequency of occurrence of words -photon and photograph- in books during the years 1800-2000 using Google ngram which gives us an idea of the evolution of both the words. As you can clearly see, photon became popular after 1926 while the word photography was already in vogue by that time. But it’s interesting to see a hump in photon curve during 1900-1910, same time period during which Planck and Einstein presented their idea of light quantum. I don’t have an explanation for that, whether it’s an artifact from Google ngram data sampling or whether the word photon was used sometime even earlier than 1926, but it would be interesting to investigate.
Leave a Comment June 9, 2011
I dont know what algorithm Google uses to send people to my blog when people search for certain keywords, but Google analytics has been very generous to me in directing people especially those who are looking for Demetri Martin or Tim Tebow or Paul the Octopus.I have written just one post on each of them but it seems like people want more of them! People have also been searching Gliese 581g, ununseptium, Gandhi, India, Nobel prize winners and Lammert de Jong (my only blog interview) quite a bit as well. I just created the word cloud (shown above) of recent search words which people have used to reach my blog. Just for fun, I also created another word cloud of the phrases and words I used in my last 10 posts (shown below). It’s fun, you too can create your own word cloud at wordle.net!
Leave a Comment June 6, 2011
I am a bit late posting this amazing picture of space shuttle Endeavour disappearing in the clouds. In case you missed the image, here you go. This beautiful image of Endeavour’s final trip to space was taken by Trey Ratcliff @www.stuckincustoms.com on May 17th.
Leave a Comment May 24, 2011
Marie Curie is one of the finest women scientists whose achievements were well recognized by the scientific community, although the recognition did not come easy. She won two Noble prizes, first one for understanding the phenomena of radiation which was shared with her husband while the second one she won solo for discovery of elements radium and polonium. When she won the second Noble prize, the Nobel committee which comprised mostly of men made attempts so that she could not attend the award ceremony, but she did attend the ceremony anyway. But besides her which other famous women scientists we know of that era. Not many! Did you know about Lise Meitner or Emmy Noether? Lise Meitner was part of the team which worked on nuclear fission project. While Otto Hahn won the Nobel prize working on the project, she was conveniently neglected by the Nobel committee. As a consolation prize, an element Meitnerium was named after her. Zombie Marie Curie wants us to know that there were many other women scientists who made groundbreaking contributions to the field of science but were neglected due to gender bias.
Comicstrip credit: xkcd
Leave a Comment May 24, 2011
If you had googled today, you must have already seen the above Google doodle. This was Google’s way of celebrating 200th birth anniversary of Robert Bunsen who is known as the inventor of ubiquitous Bunsen burner. Anyone who has been to high school has used his namesake invention. It was not like burners didn’t exist before he invented his own version, but for his studies and experiments, he needed a hot, clean and colorless flame which other burners couldn’t provide. So he designed his own. The reason he wanted a colorless flame was because he wanted to study how different elements emit different colors of light when heated in a flame, in short he wanted to perform atomic emission spectroscopy, one of the first systematic spectroscopic studies. He along with Gustav Kirchhoff invented the first spectrograph in which they used prism to split the light emitted from the flame into different wavelengths and thus were able to identify the element present in the flame. He was able to detect Sodium, Lithium and Potassium. He also discovered new elements– Caesium in 1860 and Rubidium in 1861. For studying cesium, he carefully and laboriously distilled 40 tons of mineral water to get 17 grams of cesium! He named these elements based on the color of light they emitted– Caesium after caesius in Latin which means “light blue” and Rubidium after rubidus which means “red.” Caesium today is used in atomic clocks while Rubidium gives the purple color in your fireworks.
Besides pioneering contributions to spectroscopy, he also developed gas- analytical techniques to analyze gases coming out of furnaces, volcanoes etc. He also invented jet pumps, ice and vapor calorimeters and Bunsen battery (predecessor to dry cells we use). He also found antidote to Arsenic poisoning which is still used till day– Iron oxide hydrate. Later in his life he focused mainly to study the problems in the field of geology and mineralogy. Thanks to Google Doodle for making us think about contributions Robert Bunsen made to the field of science and our daily lives in general.
Leave a Comment March 31, 2011
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