johnkemeny.com

Time Magazine has already opened its archives, and now Time/Life and Google have an index to Life Magazine’s photographs. This is great news, because Life chronicled and portraited America in photographs; and no one better than the great photographer Alfred Eisenstaedt. He gave us “the kiss” and Marilyn Monroe.

Apparently, in 1962/3 mathematician/computer scientist Dr. John G. Kemeny was preparing a math book using Eisenstaedt’s portraits of famous scientists. There are over 30 in the archives, including a famous picture of Kurt Godel, a great shot of the wonderful Stanislaw Ulam, and some other facinating portraits.

But who are they?  Is that Eugene Wigner? The captions don’t say. I invite elucidation.

Patrick Moberg illustration. BTW, BHO will be President number 44 = !5 = number of derangements of the set {1, 2, 3, 4, 5}.

Born on this date in 1869 and assassinated 60 years ago, Mahatma Ghandi’s great TRUTH is the possibility of using non-violence to achieve freedom and justice.  He said,

If the mad race for armaments continues, it is bound to result in a slaughter such as has never occurred in history.

On September 26, 1983 it almost happened. As recounted in an upcoming documentary by independent director Slawomir Grünberg, a Soviet Lieutenant in charge of monitoring US missles correctly assessed 5 blips on his radar as system errors, and did not push the red button.  For his courage, Stanislav Petrov was retired early with a $200 per month pension. After the incident was declassified, Petrov won a $1000 award from the Association of World Citizens.

Director Grünberg has been filming in High Def using the Sony HDW-F900, a camera with an MSRP of $100,000 that can be picked up for a mere $40,000 on the street. Recently Canon announced the EOS 5D Mark II at a MSRP of under $2800.  Vincent LaForet demonstrates why this is a revolutionary camera.

Okay, its Autumnal not Vernal, but can’t an Equinox go by without egg balancing, and the obligatory reference to the Bad Astronomer’s explanations.  According to the Astronomy Picture of the Day (available as a Windows background), edited by Robert Nemiroff, who has a free Astronomy course online, and Jerry Bonnell, apparently no.   APOD again published the picture of BA Plait (whose new book is out October 20th) balancing eggs in his kitchen.  The kids above show Phil up by balancing eggs on their (Blefuscudian) small end.

Update: eggPOD

Again.  So Shiva ma Timbas, http://www.talklikeapirate.com/ and buysteal the book.

What is simultaneously the coldest place in the Universe and 100,000 times the temperature of the Sun?  It is also the largest machine ever built – the Large Haldron Collider (LHC) – scheduled for first light beam tomorrow.  Check out the popular rap.  

It will take months to tune the beam to full power, but the LHC’s ATLAS detector should definitively answer the question of whether the Higgs particle exists or not.  Higgs is the famous “God” particle which would explain the reason for mass.  It is the only particle in the Standard Model of Physics yet to be observed. The Atom Smashers is a documentary film of the competition to discover Higgs before the LHC came online.

Equally interesting is the ALICE experiment, pictured above being inserted into the Time Projection Chamber (this is not science fiction!). Instead of smashing protons, ALICE will look at the quark/gluon soup created from smashing something heavier (lead), a recipe that hasn’t existed since shortly after the Big Bang. It may answer questions like why we find the Universe is mostly matter instead of matter/antimatter, and what is that mysterious Dark matter.

You can participate with LHC@home. The voyage begins tomorrow with live video from CERN.

Yesterday Google released their web browser to beta.  It is called Chrome, and, from what I’ve seen, it is great.  Like Joss Whedon’s Serenity, Chrome has an online comic book.   But unlike Whedon’s Firefly-class ship, Chrome is fast – very fast.  And it uses a process per tab instead of a thread per tab – providing better firewalls to thwart security bugs and memory leaks.  This should compete well with IE8 and Firefox 3.

P.S. Joss Whedon’s Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog is now available in hi-resolution for free on Hulu.