"Whosoever shall be found observing any such day as Christmas or the like, either by forbearing of labor, feasting or any other way . . . shall pay for every such offense five shillings, as a fine to the county."

1659, Massachusetts General Court

Google logo says today: "Happy New Year & 25 years of TCP/IP"

A full switchover to TCP/IP on the ARPANET took place January 1, 1983.

Let's celebrate this!

Один из номеров International Journal of Theoretical Physics находился в спецхране Ленинской библиотеки. Вот страшная крамола, которую он содержал ( Read more... )

Manuscripts of Sir Isaac Newton - never before revealed to the public - are on show at the Jewish National and University Library at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem until July 17:

The manuscripts include details of Newton's alchemy experiments, his interest in ancient history and apocalyptic prophecies. Furthermore, they reveal his decipherings ( Read more... )

A nice collection: the English translation of the orginal "On a new kind of rays" by Röntgen and a number of other seminal papers (each no longer than 5 pages, the typical length is 2-3 pages, all are in English):

http://deutsche.nature.com/physics/

Virgin Megastore in the Frank Gehry building on the corner of Newbury Street and Massachusetts Avenue is closing this weekend.

( details, links, links to pictures )

http://grani.ru/Society/History/m.108718.html

Ей и ёё коллегам Юлий Ким посвятил "Адвокатский вальс".

I only knew Fréchet as a mathematician, who came up with the notion of derivative in normed vector spaces, which made sense to me. It turnes out that he is behind a number of fundamental definitions we are using today.

Maurice Fréchet introduced metric spaces in his work Sur quelques points du calcul fonctionnel, Rendic. Circ. Mat. Palermo 22(1906 ( Read more... )

http://www.randomuseless.info/gasprice/gasprice.html

Birthday: Empire State Building: 75 years

50 years ago Nikita Sergeevich Khrushchev delivered the secret speech "On the Cult of Personality" at the XX Congress of CPSU. Here is its English translation ( Read more... )