"Chemistry or physics set in your past" poll

Did you have a chemistry or physics set in your past?

Yes...3
No...1

Not quite the same as the old days. Tis a pity for the one who voted "No"...missed opportunity to experiment beyond the manual: Obnoxious odors, explosive gasses, acid/alkali burns, learning to defy the admonitions of parents and teachers, performing experiments involving grams not milligrams...

Those Were The Days

Mary Hopkin

1968

A. C. Gilbert "U-238 Atomic Energy Lab"

Chemistry sets...back?

Mr. Wizard...missed mentor

Mr. Wizard--more

New Book..."Illustrated Guide to Home Chemistry Experiments..."

Some fun...some science toys

The home chemist...long gone

"Watch Mr. Wizard"--1954 episode


Check out XUMP for chemistry and physics sets and related materials...and many other science items.

Deceased--Craig Dunlap Culbert

Craig Dunlap Culbert
1927 to March 27th, 2009

Probably not well-known but a fine example of a dedicated educator.

"Craig D. Culbert Chemistry professor, 82"

April 4th, 2009

Philadelphia Inquirer

Craig Dunlap Culbert, 82, of Merion, who taught chemistry at Arcadia University for 30 years, died of cancer March 27 at his home.

Professor Culbert joined the faculty of then-Beaver College in 1963. He was devoted to his students and spent hours giving them extra help, his wife, Mary Wilson Culbert, said. In 1977, he received the Lindback Award for Distinguished Teaching. After retiring in 1993, he continued to supervise the chemistry lab at Arcadia until 1999.

A graduate of Lower Merion High School, Professor Culbert earned a bachelor's degree from Haverford College and a master's degree in chemistry from Temple University. He completed course work for a doctorate in chemistry from Bryn Mawr College.

He was a timpanist for 25 years with the Merion Concert Band, until 2006. His wife was the band's conductor. He and his wife, who plays French horn, first met while performing in an amateur orchestra and married in 1954.

Summers...potential ethics issue?

Is this a cause for some concern? Is there a conflict of interest...however subtle? Frankly, the Goldman Sachs fee of $135,000 is a bit exorbitant. When I gave lectures, I got a meal in the school cafeteria and a T-shirt. I should have charged more.

"Financial Industry Paid Millions to Obama Aide"

by

Jeff Zeleny

April 3rd, 2009

New York Times

WASHINGTON - Lawrence H. Summers, the top economic adviser to President Obama, earned more than $5 million last year from the hedge fund D. E. Shaw and collected $2.7 million in speaking fees from Wall Street companies that received government bailout money, the White House disclosed Friday in releasing financial information about top officials.

Mr. Summers, the director of the National Economic Council, wields important influence over Mr. Obama's policy decisions for the troubled financial industry, including firms from which he recently received payments.

Last year, he reported making 40 paid appearances, including a $135,000 speech to the investment firm Goldman Sachs, in addition to his earnings from the hedge fund, a sector the administration is trying to regulate.

The White House released hundreds of pages of financial disclosure forms, which are required of all West Wing officials. A White House spokesman, Ben LaBolt, said the compensation was not a conflict for Mr. Summers, adding it was not surprising because he was "widely recognized as one of the country’s most distinguished economists."

Mr. Summers’s role at the White House includes advising Mr. Obama on whether - and how - to tighten regulation of hedge funds, which engage in highly sophisticated financial trading that many analysts have said contributed to the economic collapse.

Mr. Summers, a former president of Harvard University, was Treasury secretary in the Clinton administration. He appeared before large Wall Street companies like Citigroup ($45,000), J. P. Morgan ($67,500) and the now defunct Lehman Brothers ($67,500), according to his disclosure report. He reported being paid $10,000 for a speaking date at Yale and $90,000 to address an organization of Mexican banks.

While Mr. Obama campaigned on a pledge to restrict lobbyists from working in the White House, a step intended to reduce any influence between the administration and corporations, the ban did not apply to former executives like Mr. Summers, who was not a registered lobbyist. In 2006, he became a managing director of D. E. Shaw, a firm that manages about $30 billion in assets, making it one of the biggest hedge funds in the world.

"Dr. Summers was not an adviser to or an employee of the firms that paid him to speak," Mr. LaBolt said.

He added, "Of course, since joining the White House, he has complied with the strictest ethics rules ever required of appointees and will not work on specific matters to which D. E. Shaw is a party for two years."

Tim Ray's latest poetry entry

The muse has come and gone and assisted Tim with the following...

i am sitting on a corner bench

watching the light turn green to yellow to red

regulating the vehicles of the doppelganger coterie

remembering Ronald Reagan, his creeping senility

for no particular reason

and i wonder, is there reason in our ratiocination

his wife's use of astrology in political decisions

Romans are the ones who widely spread this ignorance

and i wonder amongst these motorists

if anyone really knows who is at the wheel

there is a point to epiphenomenalism

reasons we derive norms from naturalistic fallacies

folk knowledge is in sad shape

one can prove a negative

there are no dragons in the fossil records

the motives between ought and is
leave me uneasy

why there have been no new anatomical designs

since the Cambrian explosion

our common alpha

evidently evolution became bored

possibly a limit to creations creativity

i suffer ennui at times too

maybe i reflect that here on the bench

humanity wandering in wonder

at times leaving it all to unpredictable factors

or assign to some deus ex machina

novelist or poet

scientist or artist

while others try and improve their lot

by having some croupier as a personal savior

altho they have never seen the rewards of this gaming table

or personally the croupier

yet all seem quite sure of just what is the game

a handwritten outline of the rules

that is not reflected in mere human musings

a product of some sort of afflatus

that seems never to wont for rules

inspired by some inner vague voice

and as St. Anselm trying to move from there

into some subjective objective answer to it all

failing i feel

yet they build monstrous casinos

fill the air with pleas and exhaust fumes

which is absurdity to me, but who am i

speak not of this to the height of encephalization

for they have mastered the green to yellow to red

studying the stars while mindlessly destroying their earth

exploring the universe, abandoning the one within

and in inner whispers they try to hide

to thine own selfishness be true

there is possibly a grand scheme to all of this

and i can't see the puzzle for the pieces

sitting here on the bench i wonder does anyone really know

just who or what minds the wheel

of a million scenarios that could have been

realms meant to be but a passing phase

with the night upon their lips, a niche no more

extinction and the rising sun in their eyes

our common omega

i am sitting on the bench pondering

the sound of a supernova

the sonorous moonlight

fog reboanting against the trees

didn't somebody else say that

in the end does it really matter

isn't this where St. Thomas Aquinas chose to exit

i am pondering once again

the obsessive intent of the leaf cutter ants

who pass by in the silence

green to yellow to red

sitting on this burnished throne reasoning it all

having burnt the anthropocentric altar in a futile attempt

to remove myself from the equation

failing in its verjuice communion

wishing all a good day

having come to an understanding

entropy and extinction follow similar laws

yet life raises its head

lives all the more, leaf and jaw

the wraith, smiling in a Spinoza knowing, moves on

our common omerta

Fergus Falls 96

Dedicated poetry on science/philosophy of science

"400 Years of the Telescope" on PBS this Friday

Mark your calendar for this Friday night [April 10th] PBS will air "400 Years of the Telescope".

"PBS documentary turns lens on 400 years of telescope"

by

William Loeffler

April 3rd, 2009

TRIBUNE-REVIEW

He filmed the world's most powerful telescopes on five continents. But what really moved Kris Koenig was looking through the primitive instrument that started it all.

During the making of the PBS documentary "400 Years of the Telescope," Koenig visited the Institute and Museum of the History of Science in Florence, Italy. There, he was permitted a peek through the telescope that Galileo used to gaze skyward in 1609.

The instrument that sparked a scientific revolution was a humble, dented cylinder roughly a yard long, with a lens pocked with air bubbles.

"It's impressive that he was able to do the discoveries he did," Koenig says. "It's a very difficult telescope, optically, to look through. He was obviously a very patient man."

"400 Years of the Telescope," which premieres at 10 p.m. Friday on WQED, examines how the telescope altered man's relationship with the universe, from Galileo through the Hubble Space Telescope and beyond.

Aided by the magnifying power of the telescope, Galileo discovered the four largest moons of Jupiter, the phases of Venus and the mountains of the moon. His observations also led him to support Nicolaus Copernicus' theory that the Earth revolved around the sun and not vice versa -- a supposition that eventually led to his conviction as a heretic by the Roman Catholic Church.

"The telescope helped prove that the Earth wasn't the center of the universe," says Tom Reiland, founder and director of the Nicholas E. Wagman Observatory in Deer Lakes Park, "It wasn't even the center of our solar system."

Koenig wrote, produced and directed "Telescope" through his California-based company, Interstellar Studios. He interviewed cosmologists and astronomers from around the world, including Wendy Freedman, director of the Carnegie Institute Washington Observatories, and Chris Corbally, vice director of the Vatican Observatory in Rome. The documentary includes footage of the dormant volcano Mauna Kea in Hawaii, which has 13 observatories.

While it added inestimably to our body of knowledge, the most profound effect of the telescope might have been to show us how little we really know of the universe, Koenig says.

"In reality, '400 Years of the Telescope' is less about the history of the telescope and more about the future of the telescope," Koenig says. "What we are trying to show is that we are as ignorant today in our understanding of the universe as Galileo was 400 years ago."

The documentary explores new theories, such as dark energy, a mysterious force that is accelerating the expansion of the universe, and provides a glimpse of a new generation of super-telescopes, which will have lenses the size of football fields. One is the European Extremely Large Telescope, or EELT. It will most likely be built on a mountaintop in Chile, where atmospheric turbulence is minimal.

"These telescopes that are coming online are 10- to 100-fold better in light gathering and resolution than we have today," Koenig says. "Our view of the universe today will not be our view in 20 years."

Two new survey telescopes that are in the planning stages, the Pannstarr and LSST (Large Synoptic Survey Telescope), will enable scientists to detect asteroids up to 30 years before their possible collision with Earth.

"They'll be online in another five to 10 years," Koenig says.

Galileo built his own telescope after hearing about the new novelty "spyglass," a tube-shabed object that magnified distant objects. That telescope had less power than a pair of modern-day opera glasses, says Peter Machamer, professor of history of philosophy and science at the University of Pittsburgh and an authority on Galileo.

Galileo's discovery that the moon had mountains and craters also disproved Aristotle's theory that matter in space was physically different from that on Earth.

"There's just one kind," Machamer says. "When he looks at the moon, when he finds mountains, this is the support that there's only one kind of matter in the universe."

"400 Years of the Telescope" is part of the International Year of Astronomy 2009, a global celebration of astronomy and its contributions to society and culture. It was created by UNESCO and the International Astronomical Union, the same world body that demoted Pluto from its status as a planet in August 2006.

It is the first PBS documentary to be filmed on 4K digital cinema technology. The process renders a picture with more than five times the pixels of standard high definition.

"400 Years of the Telescope" [PBS]

CARLA BEFERA PUBLIC RELATIONS [many photographs available]

"Popular scientists of the past" poll

Who is your choice for "popular" scientist of the past?

Albert Einstein...4
Carl Sagan...1
Don Herbert [Mr. Wizard]...1
Philip Morrison...0

Well, I must say, I expected billions and billions of replies. Though I did not vote for him, I figured that Einstein would be the favorite. Actually, Einstein never did that much popularization of science. It's kind of strange but the populace fell for him and did the promoting. Sagan...I guess people became tired of him. He certainly did inspire a lot of people though. I lost interest when he started chasing aliens. And I thought that a few old codgers would vote for Don Herbert as I did. Morrison is not a household name but he did a lot to promote science including his wife Phyllis who did a lot of work with crystallography.

Albert Einstein:

Many links here...

Albert Einstein's birthday

Deceased--Martin J. Klein

Carl Sagan:

NASA, Sagan, extraterrestrial life

Don Herbert [Mr. Wizard]:

Mr. Wizard...missed mentor

Mr. Wizard--more

"Watch Mr. Wizard"--1954 episode

Philip Morrison:

PSSC Physics

Philip Morrison...physicist


Popularization of science

Joseph Priestley House--shuttered?

Looks like the Joseph Priestley House will be closed do to lack of interest and funds. Maybe the ACS will come to the rescue.

"Priestley House May Be Shuttered"

Pennsylvania state budget cuts could cease operation of ACS Historic Chemical Landmark

by

William G. Schulz

April 1st, 2009

Chemical & Engineering News

State budget cuts may force closure of the Joseph Priestley House, an ACS Historic Chemical Landmark in Northumberland, Pa., as early as this summer. An internal review by the Pennsylvania Historical & Museum Commission (PHMC), the state agency that runs the site, has recommended it be shuttered due to low visitation and limited growth potential.

Priestley is widely known for his 1774 discovery of oxygen in England. There are no other existing historical sites associated with Priestley, who was also known for political and religious activism upon his immigration to the U.S.

Five other historical sites in Pennsylvania were recommended for closure by the PHMC internal review because of budget cuts expected in the coming fiscal year.

"When we say 'close,' in each case we are trying to find other solutions for the site," PHMC Executive Director Barbara Franco says. "We're not going to walk away from it and let it deteriorate," she says of the Priestley House and other sites. "We are asking ourselves, 'Who cares about this site? Who will help us solve this problem?' " She says PHMC will hold a public meeting at the Priestley House at 7 PM on April 9 when stakeholders may voice their concerns.

But Amanda Kessler, director of the nonprofit Friends of Joseph Priestley House (FJPH), feels blindsided by the PHMC closure recommendation. She says her group, which helps operate and raise money for the site, hasn't been given enough notice to find alternatives to state funding.

"I hope they follow through," Kessler says of Franco's search for solutions. "Actions speak louder than words."

Both organizations have looked to ACS for help. The PHMC internal review, for example, suggests that FJPH should enter a management agreement with ACS and Pennsylvania State University to manage the Priestley House.

But ACS is noncommittal at this stage. ACS Director of Public Affairs Glenn S. Ruskin says his office is working with society members in Pennsylvania to make sure there is a strong show of support at the April 9 meeting to keep the site open.

"We want to see if we can reverse the PHMC decision," Ruskin says. "Would ACS support the site if it is closed? I don't know. That would have to be decided further down the road."

Joseph Priestley House [Home page]

Joseph Priestley House

Priestley Society