100 Historical Things, Number 27

Well, yesterday we had the wonderful announcement that the Higgs Boson particle has been discovered. Well, it needs confirming, but very probably. The existence of the particle was predicted in 1964, and for me the best part of the reporting on the discovery was the clip of Peter Higgs looking so chuffed that it ( Read more... )

( Social contact survey )

There's this interesting survey about how contacts - i.e. how and when you meet people in person. The aim is to help scientists (the link having been supplied by a scientist I know personally) to understand how infections might spread.

You can take the survey hereP.S. I haven't taken it yet because I've been laid up with a VNL[1], but when I ( Read more... )

A combination of watching too much Spooks, rewatching Indy 4, and being passively interested in physics (esp. QM - I got as far as slits and Schrodinger's Cat) through watching FlashForward, has got me interested in something...

How do we know what a nuclear explosion looks like close-up?I'm thinking of things like A bombs specifically. You see, ( Read more... )

You know about the Antikythera Mechanism? Some people refer to it as a sort of astronomical calculator, and it was a way advanced piece of 2nd century BC kit (see?).

Well, there was a message to the Aegeanet list about some new work on it, and I thought you geeky types might be interested :)

( That Message )

I think I liked that Dr Who.

( Screaming on the screen, and other spoilers )

I also had a random mad thought: why don't they decimalise time? It seems to me that these are the only units that made using calculaters awkward any more (well, apart from kilobytes et al, I suppose).

In fact, this was attempted in the French Revolutionary Calendar, but it never caught on. There were various shortcomings (though it was amazingly ( Read more... )

Didn't sleep very well last night. This resulted in my reading a rather insightful article by Jan Driessen (in English, thank God) - read approximately between 4 and 5am. Then today I read more Carlier (in French dammit[1]).

By the way, do you object to my talking about work stuff (i.e. Classics, Mycenaean, etc.) uncut on my LJ?


( Read more... )