Let me be the ~20,000th blog (here, here, here, here, slashdot) to moan the death of the great Don Herbert (NY Times obituary) just shy of his 90th birthday. We celebrated his 89th here in this blog. Thank you Mr. Wizard (official website).
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An MIT research team reported last Thursday in Science Express (pdf available to Science subscribers) a novel method for transmitting power through the air. They are calling it WiTricity (pronouned “why” not “we” – why?), and there is a web site (witric.com) to follow events. It reports the spectacular rise from zero to over a million google results in the last 5 days.
Sending power through the air is certainly not new. It goes back at least to Nikola Tesla’s coils, which you can buy from Resonance Research if you are a science museum. But they aren’t safe! At high frequency high voltage your body’s nerves will not register a painful ZAP from the sparks – but damage to cells can occur. Indeed, Tesla coils have been the basis for death rays. WiTronics uses magnetic fields to transmit power. This has been studied extensively, since it is used in the medical procedure MRI, and is much safer.
Safety aside, the other innovation is using resonance to efficiently transmit the power. Without resonance the power would either dissipate in all directions, or need to be focused in a direct line of sight to the target device. Resonance allows the target device to selectively pluck power from the air, while intervening objects would not be affected. A prototype can transmit 60 watts across 2 meters with people in the airspace between the devices (see picture)…miniaturization TBD.
Tonight is the second full moon of the month. In 1946 Sky & Telescope magazine mistakenly created the myth that this moon is called a blue moon. They have recently corrected that to say what the Maine Farmer’s Almanac really said – that the third full moon in a season with four full moons is called blue. The almanac picked that nominalism simply because they needed an extra name. After all, the monthly full moons all had a name:
But sometimes the moon really appears blue, like on May 20-21 in Hungary when fine dust from the Sahara desert blew over the country. Ãgnes Kiricsi, whose Hungarian/English blog is Atmospheric Optics (not to be confused with the UK’s Atmospheric Optics website), captured the scene over Budapest. Her friend, Noli, captured an equally rare event with the same cause, a solar Bishop’s ring as well as an iridescent cloud (which has nothing to do with Saharan sands, but is very pretty).
 
Web 2.0 is all about community. WetPaint introduced a service which makes creating Wikis a snap. It’s free (they provide the google ads). So I created a Wiki called Combinational Mathematics for the combinatorists and recreational math ethusiasts among you (the URL: http://cmath.wetpaint.com/ is simpler than the title). For starters there is a book list (7, including 2 online pdf books [1], [2]); a links list (9); and a list of other math Wikis (8).
I also used a web widget from OUseful Info‘s blog to create a “carousel” of similar books. It’s really simple. Just enter the URL: http://blogs.open.ac.uk/Maths/ajh59/similarCarousel.php?isbn=ISBN&size=3 , substituting the ISBN code, which can be found here or here.  The size is the width of the carousel.
In short, it is already a fun site! Check it out. And by all means don’t contribute . . . NOT! You can buy the beautiful French plates here. Go figure how it helps you slice a pie.
Been to any good science museum(blog)s lately?
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Time.com calls him a Sudoku Olympian. Finishing second last year, Thomas Synder (pictured left, blog, puzzles by) brought home the 2007 Sudoku World Championship from Prague, Czech Republic. This is all the more remarkable an accomplishment considering he was the only top 10 finisher from last year to make it through a tough field into this year’s finals. Yuhei Kusui (pictured right) from Japan finished second. Japan finished first in the team competition, which included a team from first-time participant China. The puzzles (pdf) are hard! Next year, Goa, India.
The first ever Cambridge Science Festival is on this week, with many many events, most free, all over Cambridge. Presented by the MIT Museum in collaboration with the City of Cambridge, Cambridge Public Library, Cambridge Public Schools, Harvard University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Museum of Science, and WGBH (see WGBH’s Science City), there are performances, exhibitions, and activities for all ages (search for them here). I wish I had the week off.
Also, last week marked the re-opening of Boston’s Children’s Museum, including the famous giant Milk Bottle, built in Taunton in 1930 as an ice cream stand, later bought by Hood and donated and moved to the museum 30 years ago. Here are some other giant milk bottles.
    
    
On Pi Day, 1879 Albert Einstein was born. In 1921 he won the Nobel Prize in Physics, primarily for his pioneering work (pdf) completed March 17, 1905 explaining the photoelectric effect - a couple of months before he wrote about Special Relativity during his Annus Mirabilis. Coincidentally, 2 other Nobel Prize winners were born within a month of Einstein: Otto Hahn, the father of nuclear chemistry, and Owen Willans Richardson, who also studied the photoelectric effect and explained the sea of electrons in metals. In 1905 Einstein wrote:
According to the assumption considered here, when a light ray starting from a point is propagated, the energy is not continuously distributed over an ever increasing volume, but it consists of a finite number of energy quanta, localised in space, which move without being divided and which can be absorbed or emitted only as a whole.
In 7th grade I won a first prize in the Bronx county Science Fair with a project called How Does a Photelectric Cell Convert Light Energy into Electrical Energy. The setup was a photocell connected in series to a microammeter and a standard light source aka a candle. I spoke to the particle nature of light, but what I measured was the inverse square law for light. I had the help of a neighbor, who was a physicist, in designing the experiment. The funny part is I thought my experiment was too simple to be any good. I envied the nuclear battleship model, and other such elaborate things. In 7th grade I knew nothing about Einstein’s Nobel Prize, or the elegance of physics.
Today, in what is described as an experimental masterwork, French physicists claim to be able to trap a single photon in an “Einstein box.”
Incidentally, Einstein got an average performance review in 1905.