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Heinrich Hertz Birthday

On February 22 in 1857 Heinrich Rudolf Hertz was born in Hamburg, Germany. His work in electromagnetism was important in advancing the state of physics at the end of the 19th century. In particular his modifying of Maxwell’s equations was instrumental in advancing the study of radio waves. Hertz’s experiments proved predictions made by Faraday and Maxwell and showed that radio waves move at the speed of light.

In recognition of Hertz’s great contributions, the SI unit for frequency was named hertz in 1960. The hertz replaced cycles per second (cps) and is now so common that most people are familliar with it as a unit of measurement.
The Wikipedia biography I found to be exceptionally well done with good links to further reading. The one addition I have is a link to an English translation of his book Electric Waves: Being Researches on the Propagation of Electric Action with Finite Velocity. This translation contains a preface written by Lord Kelvin.

Repost of last years birthday post

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Happy Birthday Count Volta

Alessandro VoltaToday is the birthday of Count Alessandro Giuseppe Antonio Anastasio Volta. He was born February 18, 1745 in Como, Lombardy, Italy to Filippo Volta and Maria Maddalena Inzaghi. Volta became the first professor of physics at the University of Pavia in 1779 and held that position for much of his adult life. In March 1800 Volta announced his invention of the voltaic pile, the first electric battery. In recognition of Volta’s scientific contributions, the SI unit for electric potential difference (aka, electromotive force) was named the volt in 1881.

Biographies:

Wikipedia SI unit – volt

Re-posted from last years birthday celebration

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James Thomson's Birthday

James Thomson was born February 16, 1822 in Belfast Ireland, he was the first son of James and Margaret Thomson. His mother, Margaret Gardner Thomson died in 1830 so his father James raised their seven children alone. In 1832 his father took up the Chair of Mathematics at Glasgow University and two years later at the age of twelve James and his younger brother William began studying at the university. James graduated in 1839 and began his apprenticeship as a civil engineer but do to health reasons decided he was not cut out for the hard physical labor common to civil engineers of the day. So beginning around 1843 he devoted himself to inventing machines and theoretical studies making many contributions to physics and engineering. He was living in Belfast when in 1857 he became Professor of Civil Engineering at Queen’s College. He stayed in Belfast until 1873 when he accepted the Glasgow University Regius Chair in Civil Engineering. He remained at the University of Glasgow until 1889 and died May 8, 1892.

While James Thomson had many achievements including helping his brother William (Lord Kelvin) he caught my eye because of the radian. The term radian was used in print for the first time by James on June 5, 1873 in examination questions he wrote at Queen’s College. He also helped spread the adoption of this unit of measurement in consultations with other scientists and engineers. (See A History of Mathematics By Florian Cajori, page 484) He is also credited with the invention of the non-SI unit the poundal.

The radian is the SI derived unit of measurement for a plane angle. Most people are more familiar with degrees for measuring angles however, the radian is extremely important because it encapsulates the value of PI. PI, the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter is an irrational real number that can create a mess in formulas when degrees are used for the angle measurement.

So, lets raise a glass and toast James Thomson, MA, DSc, LLD, FRS for being a giant on who’s shoulders we can all stand!

References and further reading:
Biographies
Wikipedia
Dictionary of Ulster Biography
Who, Where and When: The History & Constitution of the University of Glasgow [pdf]
His father
1911 Encyclopedia Britannica
1911 Encyclopedia Britannica

The radian
Wikipedia
Angle measurement
Radian Measure
A History of Mathematics By Florian Cajori
Origin of Radians

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Latest News on the Teacher Fired for Wizardry

Via a Google Alert I have seen some news about the Jim Piculas story. Mr. Piculas’ attorney has prepared the complaint for the court. This article from the St. Petersburg Times indicates to me that the School Boards’ attorney hasn’t looked carefully at the the potentially very damaging documents that I wrote about previously.

School Board attorney Dennis Alfonso said he had not seen the lawsuit. He acknowledged that the district made no effort to deal with Piculas after receiving his legally required notice to sue back in July.

“We stand by the internal investigation that there was nothing inappropriate in his termination,” Alfonso said.

I still cannot think of any rational explanation for the big discrepancies in those documents. Hopefully, Mr. Piculas won’t take an out of court settlement and let this issue be buried without any explanation. All the local news reports I’ve seen on the web are still not saying anything about the suspicious docs.

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Ampère's Birthday

andremarieampereAndré-Marie Ampère was born in Lyon, France on January 20th, 1775. He was a physicist, mathematician, chemist and natural philosopher who made significant contributions in all these fields. Ampere’s work in understanding electromagnetism are recognized by naming the SI unit of electric current the ampere.

Biographies:
Wikipedia
University of St Andrews
Catholic Encyclopedia
National Imports LLC
@ Google Books:
A Short History of Natural Science …
Derivation of Practical Electrical …

Ampere Portraits:
University of St Andrews
Wikimedia Commons

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Martin Luther King Day

Today we honor one of the greatest men of the 20th century, the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. I feel the best way to celebrate this day is to read some of his writings and listen to some of his speeches. Visit The Martin Luther King, Jr., Research and Education Institute to read some papers or see my previous post with selected quotes from the King papers, MLK Jr., Science, Darwin & Intelligent Design. GrrlScientist has posted two excellent MLK videos in honor of this holiday.

Living the Scientific Life (Scientist, Interrupted): The Reason for this Holiday

Living the Scientific Life (Scientist, Interrupted): I Have A Dream

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Cell Phone Jammer News

The District of Columbia Department of Corrections received special temporary authority (STA) from the FCC to conduct a demonstration of a directional cell phone jammer designed for prisons. The STA allowed a test on January 8th for 30 minutes sometime between 11:30 a.m. and 1 p.m. However the DC DoC cancelled the demonstration on 1/7 with no official statement why the test was cancelled.

My hope is that the DC DoC realized that using technology to render a smuggled item useless is stupid compared to preventing the smuggling in the first place. Whatever route is being used to smuggle cell phones into prisons also allows weapons to enter a prison. Even if the DC DoC hadn’t stopped the test on their own, the test would likely have been stopped by the courts.

CTIA seeks to block cell phone jamming demo at DC jail

Operation of such jamming technology is flatly illegal under Section 333 of the Communications Act, and the commission lacks the statutory to authorize violations of this congressional directive protecting the rights of authorized users of the wireless spectrum, stated CTIA in a petition filed at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. Moreover, the decision to authorize the demonstration  made without notice to the public or affected parties, without opportunity for comment, without consideration of any evidence regarding the potential consequences to legitimate transmission of operating the contemplated technology, and with no exigent public-safety need is the very essence of arbitrary and capricious decision-making.

CTIA went to court after failing to get regulatory relief from the FCC.

While we believe that prisoners should not have access to wireless phones while incarcerated, there are other, non-interfering and legal ways to find and take the phones out of their hands, said Christopher Guttman-McCabe, VP of regulatory Affairs at CTIA. There are several companies that provide wireless detection systems that can be used by jails to identify and confiscate phones, and that do not interfere with wireless communications. As the FCC previously acknowledged, Congress has been clear in prohibiting the use of jammers in state prisons.

For the manufacturers spin on this story read this article, they don’t think that prison officials should stop the cell phones from being smuggled into the prison or find and confiscate the phones that are there. Instead the prisons should buy their equipment to make the cell phones not work, vested interest much. My feeling is that if prison officials can’t stop the smuggling of cell phones into a prison they also can’t stop the smuggling of weapons, money and other banned items into prisons. What kind of insanity does it take to think that prison officials don’t need to stop weapon sized items from being smuggled into prisons. The public will be vastly safer if all smuggling of contraband into prisons is stopped.

Assuming prison officials aren’t going to stop the phones getting into the prisons, why don’t they take advantage of the situation. They should use the currently available legal gear to monitor cell communication of prisoners, trace the call to the recipient and then have the recipient arrested for the crime being done. The recordings of the calls would be great evidence in a court to prosecute the criminals that are helping prisoners intimidate witnesses or perform other illegal activities. Nah, they’ll never do that since it would require actual work rather than flipping a magic switch like a commenter on a previous post wanted.

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My Web Year in Review

I’ve had my web site up for over a decade now and I added the WordPress CMS to the site in October 2005. Until Q4 2007 I hadn’t bothered much about tracking usage on my site but Google analytics made the job so easy I started using it. Since 2008 was the first whole year with data I figured it would be fun to take a look at the stats. This sparked my memory of some of the events over the past year that I thought would be good to review while my memory is still reasonably fresh.

First up the basic stats, around 20,000 unique visitors came from 128 countries/territories and viewed about 35,000 pages. The main browser used by visitors was Firefox (65%) with Internet Explorer a distant second place (26%). Traffic source rankings were, referring sites 68%, search engines 26%, and the remaining 6% were direct traffic.

I want to send a big thank you to the following referring sites for sending visitors my way (ranked by visitors sent):

  1. Phil Plait of Bad Astronomy sent 1,181 visits from this post to my follow up post about the teacher fired for wizardry. This also was the main reason that 7/15 & 16 set the first and second place all time records for my biggest days of unique visitors, 1109 & 621 respectively. There was a mandatory 6 month wait before Mr. Piculas could file his lawsuit so there should be some news about this in the coming month. I’m watching this story and will post any information I find. It still bugs me that no local Florida journalists noticed the likely forged documents and followed up on them, even after I and then Mr. Piculas’ lawyer pointed them to the docs.
  2. Orac from Respectful Insolence sent 131 visits via my comment on his Dr. Katz post. I hope people had a good laugh at my funny granting of Dr. Katz’s wish on June 18th.
  3. Martin the Lay Scientist sent 129 visits when he hosted the 92nd Skeptics’ Circle and included a post of mine in that edition of this great blog carnival on July 31st.
  4. Bug Girl sent 93 visits when she thanked me with a link for letting her know about the PBS Nature 2007 season opener. Although Bug Girl’s post and mine where at the end of October 2007 the visits where from January through April 2008, go figure.
  5. Phil sent 56 visits to me from his old site on May 12th when he gave a tip o’ the sonic screwdriver to me for pointing out the BBC overreaction to some knitting patterns from May 12th.
  6. Tyler from PowerUp sent 54 visits spread pretty evenly throughout the year.
  7. Greg Laden sent 38 visits from his post to my post about the chemist in Marlborough on August 20th.

A thank you also goes out to ER for using my old demotivator in an October post at Evolved and Rat/i/onal, I like to see someone make use of one of my creations. That image is responsible for nearly a third of my total page views, I guess ranking fourth in a Google image search helps. Finally thanks to all the Bloggers in my Blogroll for giving me a year of entertaining and informative reading.

Next up the content that was most popular for 2008, I’m excluding the pages that contain the popular image I mentioned above. (value is unique page views)

  1. The main site and blog home pages combined had 2865 views.
  2. “What’s up with that school wizard story“, 2022.
  3. “Happy Birthday Michael Faraday“, 882. I think this was more for the picture than the text.
  4. “Full Screen Playback of a Whole YouTube Playlist“, 516.
  5. “The Linksys NSLU2, aka the Slug, has been discontinued“, 334.
  6. “A professional chemist doing for profit chemistry is not a hobbyist“, 294.
  7. “Spectacular Windmill Failure“, 291.
  8. “A Quack who admits it“, 189.
  9. “An Acrobat Reader alternative“, 180.
  10. “Cell Phone Jammer Foolishness“, 162.

The pages that visitors spent the most time on where: (value is time in seconds)

  1. “Full Screen Playback of a Whole YouTube Playlist“, 339.
  2. “A professional chemist doing for profit chemistry is not a hobbyist“, 231.
  3. “Custom quick launch pop-up menu for XP“, 211.
  4. “What’s up with that school wizard story“, 181.
  5. “The Linksys NSLU2, aka the Slug, has been discontinued“, 156.
  6. “Embarrassing Engineers #3“, 149.
  7. “Cell Phone Jammer Foolishness“, 148.
  8. “A Quack who admits it“, 148.
  9. “Happy Birthday Michael Faraday“, 130. Hmm, maybe someone is reading the text.
  10. “Freedom of speech under attack by Joseph Chikelue Obi“, 117.