Remember yesterday’s mention of Les Horribles Cernettes, the spoof rock band made up of physicists?  Well today we have the real deal — an actual rock star in a real band, and he’s also a physicist. I’m talking about Brian May, the guitarist for Queen, whose 77th birthday is today. He was born in Middlesex,… Continue reading

Happy 32nd anniversary! Of what? It’s the 32nd anniversary of the first photo posted to the World Wide Web, of course! It was a photo of Les Horribles Cernettes (The Horrible Cernettes), a spoof rock band (“the one and only High Energy Rock Band”) made up of employees at CERN when Tim Berners-Lee was developing… Continue reading

The laws in effect, and that concern you personally, depend on where you are. On land, at least. Mostly. When you step on a boat, though, especially if you go any distance, things get a bit more complicated. There’s a body of law called maritime or Admiralty law that governs nautical issues. But this doesn’t… Continue reading

Everybody has probably heard of “the British Empire.” In the 19th and early 20th centuries it was the largest empire in history, and for much of that time was the military “superpower” of the world. It began in the 1400s when Europeans, initially from Portugal and Spain, began exploring the world by ship. The European… Continue reading

Especially if you live in North America, you’re familiar with direct mail advertising, money-back guarantees, free delivery, “buy one get one free” deals, illustrated product catalogs, and the like. And if you’ve paid attention at Amazon, or even in physical stores like WalMart or Home Depot, you may have noticed that many of the products… Continue reading

Today is the 106th anniversary of the birth of Venetia Katharine Douglas Burney, who was born in Banstead, England. She came from an educated family; her father was a professor at Oxford, her grandfather was the librarian at the Bodleian Library at Oxford, and her uncle was Science Master at Eton.  Burney studied economics, and… Continue reading

Kathleen Booth One of the founders of the digital computer era is someone you’ve likely never heard of: Kathleen Booth. She was born July 9, 1922 in Worcestershire, England and attended the University of London, where she earned undergraduate and PhD degrees in mathematics. While she was studying at the University of London she was… Continue reading

You’ve heard of Zeppelins, the huge dirigibles that were the leading aviation machines until the Hindenberg disaster in 1937 convinced people that flying around underneath a large amount of hydrogen might not be the best idea. Oddly, although the photos are shocking, there were 97 people on board the craft and only 35 fatalities. Airliner… Continue reading

Good morning! Computers are now an inextricable part of medicine. It wasn’t always that way, though. One of the leaders in using computers in medicine and biomedical research was Robert Ledley who was born June 28 in New York City. You may have heard of him; he was “the only physicist who could pull your… Continue reading

These days it’s not too hard to find academicians who are very independent-minded and stand up to things like traditions, university bureaucracy, and political niceties. But in the first half of the nineteenth century it was much more unusual. One example, though, is Augustus De Morgan, who was born June 27, 1806 in Madras Presidency.… Continue reading