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2013 February

HAPPY LUNAR NEW-YEAR!
Marysville, California
February 1925
[Film from Prelinger Archive, edited by Ghrenn;
Music "Sooner or Later (Featuring Christina Courtin)" by Amanyth]

• THIS MONTH'S BLOG ENTRIES:
  • 2013 Feb. 18: The Sky Falls on Benares
  • 2013 Feb. 11: Leviathan: The 19th Century War Between Physics and Biology, Part 4
  • 2013 Feb. 04: Scenes from the Life of Miss Sydney Margaret Hamilton
  • 2013 Jan. 28: Dimitry Mendeléeff and the Elements Lighter Than Hydrogen

• FEATURED ADDITIONS of particular interest:
  • An Edinburgh Eleven: Pencil Portraits from College Life by J. M. Barrie [London: Holder and Stoughton, 1896] The author of Peter Pan remembers his old professors, including P. G. Tait and George Chrystal.

• INTERESTING ITEMS ELSEWHERE:
  • The Giant's Shoulders #56 Roundup of History of Science blogs, 2013 February.
  • James Clerk Maxwell: Building the Cavendish and time at Cambridge by Isobel Falconer [2013/02]
  • William Rankine on Entropy, Love and Marriage A very, very good blog-post about Rankine's pre-Clausius discovery of entropy, followed (for dessert, I suppose) by Rankine's poem "The mathematician in love", a typical Victorian science-humour piece about marriage as the integral of love dt. [Carnotcycle 2013 Feb. 1]
  • The unlikely rise of masking interferometry: leading the way with 19th century technology by Peter G. Tuthill [Proc. S.P.I.E. 8445, 02 (2012)]
  • This Month in Physics History: First pneumatic powered subway line in New York City. [APS News II 22, No. 2, 2 (2013 Feb.)]
  • The Great Meteor Procession of 1913 featuring eye-witness artwork by Gustav Hahn. [APOD]
  • Build your own analemma by Charles H. Holbrow [2013/02] "Earth's analemma is the lopsided figure eight marked out over a year by the position of the Sun in the sky observed at the same clock time each day."
  • Technology of the Edo Period [Voyages Extraordinaires, 2013 February 6] Japan under the shōgunate developed some remarkable devices, including electrostatic generators, clocks, automata ...

• NEW ENTRIES: PEOPLE:
  • Ernst Chladni: Pioneer of acoustics; one of the first people to understand the nature of meteorites; an academic outsider. [METEORITICS; SOUND]
  • Adolphe Ganot: He wrote one of the most widely-read introductory physics-textbooks of all time. The page here includes links to a few of the many versions of "Ganot" published between 1859 and the Second World War, including the 1899 Marathi translation. [PHYSICS]
  • Nevil Maskelyne: Remembered chiefly for his role in the bitter controversies over the measurement of longitude, he was also a pioneer of experimental gravitational-research, and the (alleged) ancestor of a famous family of Victorian/Edwardian magicians. [ATMOSPHERE; GEOMETRY; GRAVITATION; LONGITUDE; OPTICS; PLANETS; STARS; SUN; TIDES; TRANSITS OF VENUS]

THE NET ADVANCE OF PHYSICS --- RETRO