johnkemeny.com

Guess which book I’m reading!  There is a lot of mumbo jumbo about the golden ratio (Φ) in the book, so I think it is interesting that the Mona Lisa hanging in the Louvre is ~4% too wide in aspect – compare first Mona above to “Φ ratio-ed” second.  The third Mona is a contempory’s copy of the original, showing the original original may have been wider yet – note columns on sides - a full ~31% too wide for Φ.

The three Mona Lisa variations to the right of the pentagram are: Dali’s self-portrait, my favorite – check out the 30(?) pieces of silver he/she is holding in his/her hand;  MAD Magazine cover art;  and an eye test.  Can you see what’s wrong with the last Mona, aside from the obvious?

    

The Flag of Earth was first raised May 17, 1970, the creation of James W. Cadle.  He made it because, despite being a great patriot, he was disappointed that an American flag was planted on the moon in July 1969; after all we had won the Moon race, wasn’t it time for a more universal symbol? 

The Flag of Earth flies at many SETI locations around the world. It symbolizes the fact that SETI is carried out on behalf of humankind as a whole. The yellow part of the flag represents the sun, the blue circle the Earth, and the small white circle the Moon.

Below is an original picture of Buzz Aldrin on the Moon (notice the dirt on the suit), and a remarkable computer reproduction by Andrea Bertaccini of the Life Magazine cover based on that picture.  Maybe he will make one of Buzz saluting the Flag of Earth?

              

Egressing Black History Month, I thought I’d publish my intersection with famous Blacks in the Riverdale section of the Bronx (yes, it is in the Bronx). 

First, and foremost, I met the great Jackie Robinson at PS 81 on a campaign stop for Hubert H. Humphrey (the “Happy Warrior” who lost to Nixon).  This was less than a year before Jackie’s death (at my current age!).  There was something so very majestic about him – a much larger man than I expected, with white hair, and nearly blind. 

Apparently, Willie Mays lived in Riverdale for a time.

I met Stokeley Carmichael (later known as Kwame Ture), the father of “Black Power,” in an English class at the Bronx High School of Science.  He had graduated Science 10 years earlier, so what he was doing sitting in class I’ll never know – he didn’t talk to anyone.

Graduating Science in 1976, Neil deGrasse Tyson is an astrophysicist and distinguished Director of the American Museum of Natural History‘s Hayden Planetarium.

Best known for his books popularizing science, including the fun “Mr. Tompkins” series and the terrific One, Two, Three…Infinity (I have them all – I am a Gamow book collector!), George Gamow, in 1928 explained radioactive decay, in the 30s, after defecting from the Soviet Union (successfully after 2 failed attempts by kayak!), created what became known as the  “Gamow factor” which explains how fusion is possible, in 1948 published the famous science joke (its history can be found here) quantifying the processes that formed the Big Bang, and later predicting the Cosmological Background Radiation 17 years before it was discovered, and, for grins, in 1954 formed the RNA Tie Club and proposed how to crack the genetic code by using triplets of nucleotides.  Obviously an overachiever.

His son, Igor, an iconoclastic inventor, was fired from a University position  under strange circumstances, and has a movie about it on his website.

Want to send a large file to someone – too big to email?  You can use yousendit to send a file up to 100 MB (1 Gb with $4.99/month subscription) in size.  The recipient gets an email with the download location.  So send me that large file.

Of course, the logo will never win any paper airplane contests.  But you can use NASA lesson plans and software to design your own paper airplane.  You could learn something like:

You are flying an F-117A fully equipped, which means that your aircraft weighs 52,500 pounds. You want to maintain equilibrium in straight and level flight at an altitude of 30,000 feet, cruising at 400 knots to conserve fuel. The aircraft’s wing area is 1,140 square feet. At what angle of attack should the F-117A be set to maintain equilibrium?

              

Born on this day in 1564, Galileo Galilei (more) published his Starry Messenger in 1610, in which he used his newly perfected telescope to discover, among other things, the ‘Medicean stars‘ (new revisionist book on Galileo’s rise and fall), or, as we know them, the Galilean Moons.  

In the history of science, the Starry Messenger:

• provided the first direct evidence that not everything orbited the Earth (geocentricity),
• provided an explanation for the retrograde motion of the planets, and
• indicted that a theory of Copernicus might be correct. 

It took only 346 years for the Catholic Church to apologize for persecuting him (‘The Galileo Affair‘) – I guess science and religion can coexist in the long run. 

    

Although we were both born in Budapest, both of Jewish heritage, and both have a keen interest in computers & mathematics, I am only related to the famous Professor John Kemeny by name.  I did meet him once – he had a fine Hungarian accent.  I have read two of his books, Introduction to Finite Mathematics (pdf) and Man and the Computer.

Jonathan Rotenberg, who founded the Boston Computer Society at age 13, once told Bill Gates, who had started discussing John Kemeny, that “We have our own John Kemeny.”  I was leading the Timex-Sinclair group at the time.

Where in the World is the World’s first World Sudoku Championship going to be held?  In Lucca, Italy!  Thanks to puzzles.com, here is where you can sign up for a chance to go.