On this day in 1885, French inventors Louis and Auguste Lumiere screened the first ever motion picture to a private audience at the Society for the Encouragement of National Industry in Paris. The Lumiere brothers had been raised in Lyon and both of them worked in their father’s photographic firm, Louis as a physicist and Auguste as a manager. After their father retired, they took over the company and started experimenting with equipment for making motion pictures. Their first film showed workers leaving the Lumiere factory at the end of the day. It was 46 seconds long.

A few months later, the Lumieres conducted the first public film exhibition at the Grand Cafe. The screening consisted of ten films all under a minute. The titles included “fishing for goldfish”, “baby’s meal, and “jumping onto the blanket”. The event was a sensation and the brothers went on tour around the world, with showings in Bombay, London, and New York. And they had a big influence on popular culture, especially their film, “The Arrival of a Train at la Ciotat Station”, which showed a moving train head on. The press reported that audiences screamed and ran to the back of the room in terror on seeing the train coming towards them.

The Lumiere brothers thought that “the cinema [was] an invention without any future” and they declined to sell their cameras. While they went on to produce a series of other inventions, including one of the earliest color film processes, the Lumieres never returned to their work on moving pictures. They sold their company to Ilford in 1962.

It’s the birthday of experimental physicist Robert Millikan, born in Morrison, Illinois in 1868. His father was a preacher and he was raised in rural Iowa. After a brief stint as a court reporter, Millikan went to Oberlin College in Ohio to study classics. As a sophomore, Millikan’s Greek professor convinced him to teach a preparatory class on elementary physics and he fell in love with the subject. He went on to Columbia for graduate school where he became the first student to earn a Phd. in physics.

In 1909, while working as a professor at the University of Chicago Millikan conducted an experiment designed to measure the charge of a single electron. He setup two metal plates a small distance apart, connecting each to one end of a large power supply. He then sprayed tiny drops of oil into a large pot placed on top of the uppermost plate. The drops fell through a small and drifted into the space between the two plates where they were exposed to the electrical charge which caused some of them to drift upwards. By looking through the gap between the two plates Millikan was able to observe the motion of individual oil drops. And by varying the electric charge between the plates and measuring the corresponding movement, he was able to calculate the charge of an individual electron.

The experiment played a major role convincing skeptical scientists, including Thomas Edison, of the existence of discrete sub-atomic particles and Millikan won the Nobel Prize for it in 1923. Ironically, Millikan himself doubted many of the advanced scientific discoveries of the 20th Century including Einstein’s explanation of the photon and his theories relativity. He even including a chapter on the Ether in his textbooks as late as 1927.

In his later life, Millikan became president of Caltech and wrote a series of articles and books on the relationship between his Christian upbringing and his Scientific beliefs. He also became interested in eugenics, working with the Human Better Foundation which advocated compulsory sterilization.

Millikan died in 1953 in San Marino, California.

All information courtesy of Wikipedia except where otherwise noted.

Tagged: tech, podcast, history, lumiere, millikan, film, physics, oil-drop, electron

So, rather than abandoning the project all together (as is my tendency), I’ve decided on a new strategy: I’m just going to do them when they’ll be interesting. For this week that’s Thursday and Friday. This way, I’ll have more time to write other kinds of posts and more time to make the Almanac entries I do produce that much more interesting.

If you were really enjoying the daily routine of the thing, I’d be perfectly glad to read and record (or just package up and post) entries that anyone else puts together.

Tagged: hacker, almanac, tech, podcast, wikipedia

On this day in 1942, the German Military conducted the first test of the V2 rocket in Peenemunde, a small town near the Baltic coast. The test was a failure and the rocket flew only about 2 miles before crashing into the water.

The V2 was designed by German scientist Werner von Braun who’d been recruited for the military out of graduate school at the Technical University of Berlin. Based on the work of American scientist Robert Goddard, von Braun’s rocket used a liquid fuel to propel itself briefly after launch before going into free fall. The onboard navigation system was accurate enough to hit a city from hundreds of miles away.

During the course of the war, about 3000 V2s were built, most of them at a slave labor camp in the Mittelwerk tunnel system near Nordhausen, Germany. The conditions in the camp were terrible and about a third of the 10,000 slaves working there died.

Half of the V2s were fired at Antwerp, Belgium and the other half at London. Since the rockets traveled faster than the speed of sound, they were inaudible in their target cities until after they hit making them a constant terror for the population. Their speed also made them invulnerable to counter-measures or electronic detection.

After the war, von Braun and a number of other German rocket scientists were recruited to work in the US. Von Braun became the father of US rocketry, working on long range nuclear weapons and the space program.

It’s the birthday of software developer and political activist Richard Stallman, born in Manhattan in 1953. In high school, Stallman loved math and science and worked as an assistant in a biology lab at Rockefeller University. After graduating, he got a summer job with IBM at the New York Scientific Center where he wrote his first program before heading off to Harvard to study physics.

During his freshman year, Stallman took a programming job in the MIT AI lab where he discovered a community of like-minded hackers and eventually enrolled as a graduated student. At MIT, Stallman published a paper on artificial intelligence and worked on a series of tools for programmers including the Emacs text editor and the Lisp Machine Operating System. He gained a reputation as a critic of all restrictions on computer access and when the administrators of a computer lab he used installed a password control system, Stallman broke in and blanked all the passwords.

In 1980, Xerox donated one of their first laser printers to the lab, but didn’t send along the source code so the programmers couldn’t modify it to notify them of paper jams and completed jobs as they’d been able to do with earlier printers. After a few months of hunting, Stallman eventually tracked down the author of the code, Robert Sproull, a former Xerox employee now teaching at Carnegie Mellon. When he asked Sproull for the source code to the printer, Sproull refused explaining that he’d signed a non-disclosure agreement with Xerox.

Stallman was shocked. In academic computer science departments, program source code was almost always shared freely with colleagues so it could be commented on, improved, and adapted for local use, just like other academic publications. This was Stallman’s first encounter with the new software industry, which kept its source code secret in order to make money selling compiled binary versions of its programs.

Over the next few years, one by one, most of Stallman’s colleagues at the MIT AI lab left to join commercial software companies and Stallman’s resistance to the trend grew more stringent. And in 1985, he left MIT to start the Free Software Foundation, an non-profit dedicated to creating an operating system and other programmer tools that would not be subject to the restrictions imposed by the commercial companies. Stallman published a manifesto explaining his ethics of software publishing: all programs must be free to copy and redistribute, all source code must be available for study, and programmers must be allowed to modify, improve, and redistribute existing code.

The main focus of the Foundation was on creating an operating system called ‘GNU’, which stood for ‘GNU’s Not Unix’, a play on its functional similarity to the Unix system used widely on college campuses. In the 1990s, the Foundation combined its code with Linux, another freely licensed project, and the resulting operating system has been wildly successful. Stallman is often caught up in debates over credit for the project, insisting that it be called GNU/Linux to acknowledge the role of the Foundation in its creation.

Nowadays, the Foundation works mostly to provide legal support to programmers working on free software. One of its most important jobs is maintaining the GNU Public License, the legal contract under Linux and many other free software projects are licensed.

Stallman’s position at the Foundation is unpaid and he supports himself with speaking fees and prize money from awards. He lives out of his office on the MIT campus where is an honorary ‘research affiliate’.

All information courtesy of Wikipedia except where otherwise noted.

Tagged: tech, podcast, history, V2, rocket, ww2, vonBraun, Richard+Stallman, rms, gnu, linux, fsf

In the meantime: Be well. Do good work. And Keep in touch.

It’s the birthday of physicist Albert Einstein, born in Wurttemberg, Germany in 1879. Einstein did well in school from an early age despite having a speech impediment, but when he was 15, his father’s business failed and his family moved to Italy, leaving him behind to finish high school and Einstein started getting into trouble and eventually dropped out. He took the entrance exam for the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, but failed it and was refused admission and so had to go back to finish high school.

After eventually graduating from the Institute in mathematics, Einstein spent two years unsuccessfully searching for a professorship before taking a job in the Swiss Federal Office for Intellectual Property evaluating patent applications where he was passed over for promotion because his boss thought he had not “fully mastered machine technology”. He continued working on math and physics in his spare time.

And in 1905, Einstein published four papers in the Swiss physics journal, Annalen der Physik. The papers introduced a series of breakthrough ideas on a broad range of topics including inventing the photon, demonstrating that Brownian motion was evidence for the existence of atoms, explaining the effect of relative motion on observations of time and velocities, and proposing the equivalence of matter and energy. Einstein was 26 years old and the papers launched his career as a physics professor in the German-speaking world, although it would be another three years before he was able to quit his job at the Intellectual Property Office.

In 1911, while working to generalize his theory of relative motion, Einstein published a paper about the effects of gravity on light. The paper predicted an observable shift towards the red end of the spectrum in light moving away from a massive body such as a star and challenged astronomers to detect this shift during a solar eclipse.

On the eve of World War I, Einstein took a job in Berlin, leaving his wife and children in Zurich. During the war, the Central Powers prohibited their scientists from publishing outside the alliance and so Einstein’s work was not widely known until after the war.

When the war did end, observatories around the world began testing Einstein’s red shift prediction. After two observatories in California had failed to find evidence of a red shift, in 1919, a British astronomer named Arthur Eddington took a series of photographs of a solar eclipse in Brazil, which finally proved its existence and so confirmed Einstein’s general theory of relativity. When the news hit the popular media, Einstein became a world-wide celebrity.

In 1921 he won the Nobel Prize for his invention of the photon, which had since been strongly supported by experimental evidence.

After the observational confirmation of general relativity, Einstein spent the rest of his life trying to broaden his theories in an attempt to unify the fundamental laws of physics. He increasingly became isolated from other scientists and more of his time was occupied by politics and the requirements of his public fame.

Einstein was Jewish and a strong supporter of Zionism so he left Germany in 1932 as the Nazi regime was rising to power. He renounced his German citizenship, moved to the US, and took a position at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. During the war, Einstein worked to aid refugees from Europe by writing affidavits and raising money. After it ended, he was offered the presidency of the state of Israel, but declined.

In the 50s, Einstein worked with a number of other prominent academics and scientists to lobby against nuclear proliferation. He also was active in the civil rights movement, joining the Princeton chapter of the NAACP.

Einstein died on On April 18, 1955 at Princeton Hospital from a aortic aneurism. Hospital Pathologist Thomas Stoltz Harvey removed Einstein’s brain for preservation so that future neuroscientists would be able to discover what made him so intelligent.

Tagged: tech, podcast, history, einstein, physics, hacker’s, almanac

All information courtesy of Wikipedia except where otherwise noted.

On this day in 1986, Microsoft conducted its Initial Public Offering. Ten years earlier, Harvard Student Bill Gates had started the company by writing an implementation of the programming language BASIC for the Altair 8080, on of the first computers cheap enough to be owned by individuals. Gates sold the language to Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems, the company that made the Altair, and dropped out of Harvard to go into business.

Microsoft’s real success came a few years later when it signed a contract with IBM to provide an operating system for the upcoming IBM Personal Computer. Microsoft bought the rights to QDOS, the Quick and Dirty Operating System, from Tim Paterson of Seattle Computer Products, and then turned around and sold IBM a license to use it on the PC.

Since Microsoft had managed to retain exclusive rights to the operating system in the IBM deal, the company made a fortune licensing it to the great number of computer manufactures that went into business a few years later, flooding the market with clones of the wildly successful IBM machine.

In 1985, shortly before its IPO, Microsoft released the first version of Windows, which is still the most popular graphical user interface today.

At the end of its first day of trading, the company’s stock closed at $28 per share.

On this day in 1925 Tennessee passed the Butler Act banning public schools from teaching the theory of evolution. The campaign to pass the act was led by progressive democratic politician William Jennings Bryan who was known as a great public orator and had served as Secretary of State under Woodrow Wilson. As a populist, Bryan was offended by the elitism of social darwinism, which was not well distinguished from the theory of evolution at the time. And as a devout Presbyterian, he feared that Darwinism would overturn morality and lead people to denounce Christianity.

Shortly after the Butler Act passed, the ACLU started searching for a Tennessee teacher to act as a defendant to challenge it in a court. A group of businessmen in Dayton, Tennessee decided that bringing the case to their town would make for good publicity and so they recruited local high school football coach and substitute teacher John Scopes. In May, Scopes taught a class at the high school on evolution using a textbook required by the state’s own curriculum, George Hunter’s Civic Biology. He was indicted two weeks later, but never taken into custody.

Scopes’ upcoming trial quickly became a media sensation drawing celebrity lawyers on all sides. A Christian fundamentalist organization recruited Bryan to argue against Scopes and the ACLU brought in acclaimed lawyer Clarence Darrow who had defended the teen killers Leopold and Loeb the year before.

During the course of the trial, the defense called a series of evolution experts in an attempt to argue that there was no conflict between religious belief and the study of Darwinism, but the judge discounted most of the testimony as irrelevant. In an unorthodox move, the defense then called Bryan himself to the stand as an expert on the Bible. Darrow asked Bryan a series of questions meant to show that a literal belief in the Bible was unreasonable. Bryan quipped that Darrow was trying “to cast ridicule” on believers to which Darrow responded: “We have the purpose of preventing bigots and ignoramuses from controlling the education of the United States.”

The debate was widely seen as a victory for the defense and an embarrassment for Darrow, but the judge refused to admit it into the record, again ruling that it was irrelevant. After deliberating for nine minutes, the jury found Scopes guilty and he was ordered to pay a one hundred dollar fine. Bryan offered to pay it on his behalf.

Darrow and the defense lawyers appealed the decision to the Supreme Court of Tennessee which upheld the Butler Act, but overturned Scopes’ conviction on a technicality. The state did not seek a retrial. The Butler Act remained in effect until 1968 when the US Supreme Court ruled that such bans violate the clause of the Constitution prohibiting the establishment of an official state religion.

William Jennings Bryan died five days after the completion of the trial.

All information courtesy of Wikipedia except where otherwise noted.

Tagged: tech, history, podcast, microsoft, IPO, bill, gates, scopes, trial, darwin, darrow, bryan, aclu

It’s the birthday of German physicist, Gustav Kirchoff, born in Königsberg, Prussia in 1824. His father was a lawyer and a Prussian patriot and expected him to join the civil service. Kirchoff was a gifted student and wary of bureaucracy. Luckily, university professorships were held by officers of the state at the time and so Kirchoff was able to enter academia. He went to the Albertus University of Königsberg where he studied math and physics.

At the university, Kirchoff formalized a series of laws governing the behavior of circuits that are still widely used today. He’d begun work on them while still in secondary school and didn’t complete them until finishing his doctorate. He derived the laws through mathematical and physical logic based largely on the work of Georg Ohm. Taken together, his laws make it possible to calculate the current, voltage, and resistance in electrical circuits with multiple loops and are the basis for the circuit simulation software that is used to design most modern electronic products.

After graduating, he married Clara Richelot, the daughter of one of his professors and moved to Berlin. The city was in an uproar. Many of the German states were in rebellion against the monarchy and there was fighting in the streets. After a few years, Kirchoff moved to take a post in Heidelberg where he met the chemist Robert Bunsen. The two quickly became friends and collaborated on a series of experiments to study the chemical composition of the sun. In the process, they discovered two elements caesium and rubidium. Kirchoff had earlier completed a series of observations of the light emitted by incandescent objects which he compiled into the Laws of Spectroscopy, a major building block in the invention of quantum mechanics.

Kirchoff suffered from a disability that confined him to a wheelchair for most of his life and by 1875 he was no longer physically able to conduct experiments and so he took up the chair of theoretical physics at Berlin University where he spent the rest of his life working on a four volume treatise on mathematical physics that became a standard in German universities for the next fifty years.

Kirchhoff died in 1887, and was buried in the St Matthäus Cemetery in Schöneberg, Berlin only a few meters from the graves of the Brothers Grimm. (Kirchoff biography)

It’s the birthday of astronaut Wally Schirra, born in Hackensack, New Jersey in 1923. Schirra’s father had been a pilot during World War I and after the war he worked as a barnstormer, touring the country performing aviation tricks along with his wife, Florence, who worked as a wing walker. Schirra was flying his father’s plane by the time he started high school.

After college, he joined the Navy in time to serve during the final months of World War II, but didn’t see combat. He was one of the first pilots trained on jet aircraft and so he was loaned to the Air Force when the Korean war started. During the course of the war, Schirra flew 90 combat missions and won the Distinguished Flying Cross.

In 1959, Shirra was one of the first seven astronauts selected for the space program. He spent three years in intensive training before his first launch in the Mercury 8 capsule. The capsule was orbited around the earth six times over about 9 hours before splashing down in the Pacific Ocean.

He went on to command Apollo 7, the first manned American flight to successfully make it into space. Apollo 7 spent eleven days in orbit during which time Schirra caught a cold. He took Actifed on the advice of a NASA surgeon and later worked as a spokesman for the company. During the flight, the Apollo 7 crew conducted the first television broadcast from space, for which Schirra won an Emmy. He said,

“Feeling weightless . . . it’s so many things together. A feeling of pride, of healthy solitude, of dignified freedom from everything that’s dirty, sticky. You feel exquisitely comfortable . . . and you feel you have so much energy, such an urge to do things, such an ability to do things. And you work well, yes, you think well, without sweat, without difficulty as if the biblical curse in the sweat of thy face and in sorrow no longer exists, As if you’ve been born again.”

(Space Quotes)

Schirra is retired and lives in Rancho Santa Fe, California.

All information courtesy of Wikipedia except where otherwise noted.

It’s the birthday of Italian explorer and cartographer Amerigo Vespucci, born in Florence, Italy in 1454. He came from a prominent family and went to work for the Medici clan, which ruled the city. The Medicis sent Vesupcci to Seville, Spain to run their merchant operations and he helped supply the Spanish exploration fleets.

After undertaking some earlier voyages as a navigator under Alonso Ojeda, in 1499, Vespucci was ordered by King Ferdinand to take command of an expedition around the southern horn of Africa and into the Indian Ocean, but Vespucci sailed so far west that their first landfall was in Guyana in South America. At that point the fleet split up, with Vespucci leading half of it further south and discovering the mouth of the Amazon river before turning back towards Spain.

Vespucci made another voyage to South America a few years later on commission from Portugal and a letter he wrote to the Medicis on returning to Lisbon was published throughout Europe. In the letter, Vespucci described the lands he visited as a “New World”. Unlike Christopher Columbus, Vespucci believed they were not part of Asia, but instead a new fourth continent.

A number of other letters providing colorful versions of Vespucci’s voyages were later published in his name. One of these, which described an apocryphal voyage of 1497, predating Columbus’s visit to the New World, inspired cartographer Martin Wardseemuller, to label the new continent “America” in Vespucci’s honor.

In 1508, Vespucci was named Pilot Major of Spain by King Ferdinand and given the responsibility of training pilots for ocean voyages. He died in Seville in 1512 of malaria.

It’s the birthday of computer pioneer Howard Aiken, born in Hoboken, New Jersey in 1900. When he was a teen his family moved to Indianapolis and fell on hard times. His father left home and so Aiken dropped out of high school to go to work to support his mother and grandparents. Eventually, he got a night job at the Indianapolis Light and Heat Company which let him go back to school. Aiken stayed in the utilities business all through college and after graduating, he became chief engineer for the Madison Gas Company.
(The History of Computing Project)

In 1935 he went to Harvard to get a PhD. in physics. His dissertation on space-charge conduction in vacuum tubes required a long string of tedious mathematical calculations. And so, inspired by British mathematician Charles Babbage’s unfinished ‘analytical engine’, which was stored in the attic of Harvard’s science center, Aiken came up with a design for a machine to perform the calculations for him, which he later described as “only a lazy man’s idea”.
(feature in the Harvard Gazette)

Aiken took the idea to IBM, which agreed to fund and build the machine. They officially named it the IBM Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator, but everyone ended up calling it the Mark I. With the arrival of World War II, the project ended up taking seven years, much longer than anyone expected. When it was done, the machine was 55 feet long, seven feet high and weighed five tons. You controlled it by inserting pre-punched paper tape and it could carry out long strings of operations including addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, logarithms and trigonometric functions. Data was stored mechanically on wheels and the output was displayed on an electric typewriter. It took three seconds to perform a single multiplication operation. Its construction marked the beginning of the era of the modern computer.
(about.com)

The machine was completed in 1944 and was put into use by the US Navy for gunnery and ballistics calculations. Aiken had a falling out with IBM over credit for the machine and the military became the chief sponsor of his work. He built three more computers at Harvard, the last of which, the Mark IV, was all electronic and was one of the first computers to use magnetic core memory. He went on to found Harvard’s computer science program, the first ever in the world.

Howard Aiken died on March 14, 1973 in St. Louis Missouri.

All information courtesy of Wikipedia except where otherwise noted.

Tagged: tech, podcast, amerigo, vespucci, italian, explorer, howard, aiken, harvard, Mark1, IBM, computer, history

On this day in 1978, the original Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy radio series premiered on BBC Radio 4. Author Douglas Adams had proposed doing a show called ‘The Ends of the Earth’, where each episode would end with the destruction of the planet. Adams needed a device to provide context for the conceit and so he introduced the character of Ford Prefect, an alien correspondent reporting on earth for a traveler’s guide.

A few years earlier, Adams had been hitchhiking around Europe with a copy of the Hitch-hiker’s Guide to Europe and, while lying drunk in a field in Innsbruck, Austria and looking up at the stars, he thought it would be a good idea for someone to write a hitchhiker’s guide to the entire galaxy. The idea ended up becoming central to the series and Adams decided only to destroy the earth in the first episode.

Despite premiering in a late-night time slot, the show got a good reaction and it slowly became popular. It combined sharp satire of the absurdities of daily life with a purposefully preposterous plot centering on the adventures of a hapless Englishman, Arthur Dent, who is the only surviver after the earth is destroyed to make room for a “hyperspace bypass”.

The next year, Adams released a book based on the first four episodes, which was an immediate hit, topping the book charts and selling 250,000 copies in the first few months. Gradually, Hitchhiker’s Guide grew into a phenomenon with TV, film, stage, and video game adaptations and book sales in the millions.

Adams wrote three sequels, the first of which, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, he based on the second series of the radio show. For the third book, Life, The Universe and Everything, Adams adapted an un-produced treatment he’d written for a Doctor Who movie. Like the final two installments, it was later adapted for radio by the BBC.

It’s the birthday of German chemist Otto Hahn, born in Frankfurt in 1879. His father was a glazier and entrepreneur and he had a sheltered childhood, doing science experiments in the laundry room. His father wanted him to study architecture and take up management of the family’s properties, but Hahn had his heart set on industrial chemistry

After graduating from the University of Munich, Hahn took a post at University College London under Sir William Ramsay who was famous for discovering the existence of inert gases. Hahn started work in the new field of radiochemistry, where he soon made a name for himself by discovering a series of new radioactive elements including mesothorium I, now called ‘radium 228’, which has wide medical use.

During World War One, Hahn was drafted into a special unit of the German army for chemical warfare. He worked along with other notable German scientists to produce poison gas weapons like chlorine, which killed thousands of French, British, and Candian troops by asphyxiation.

In 1938, when Nazi Germany invaded Austria, Hahn helped his longtime research partner Lise Meitner flee to Holland. Meitner was an Austrian Jew and so feared for her life. Hahn and Meitner had been in the process of conducting a series of experiments with radioactive elements, which Hahn continued. Later that year, He bombarded a uranium sample with neutrons and found trace elements of barium in the resulting sample. He concluded that the uranium neucleus had “burst” into multiple atomic nuclei of lesser weight. Hahn had split the atom and discovered nuclear fission.

Sadly, Wilhelm Traube, a Jewish chemist, who assisted in the experiment was later arrested and, despite Hahn’s attempts to rescue him, he died from abuse in prison in Berlin in 1942. Hahn quietly opposed the Nazi regime throughout the war, using his lab to shelter colleagues who faced deportation. His wife, Edith, collected food for Jews hiding around Berlin.

At the end of the war, Hahn was interned in England along with a number of other prominent German scientists suspected of working on nuclear weapons. While he was there, American forces dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and Hahn fell into a deep depression.

That fall, Hahn won the Nobel prize for the discovery of fission, but didn’t attend the ceremony. He spent much of the rest of his life organizing prominent scientists in opposition to the use of nuclear weapons and was repeatedly nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts, but never won it.

Hahn died on July, 28th, 1968 at the age of 89 in Göttingen, Germany.

All information courtesy of Wikipedia except where otherwise noted.

Tagged: tech, podcast, history, otto, hahn, atomic, fission, germany, poison, gas, hitchiker’s, guide, douglas, adams, bbc

On this day in 1973, the Kohoutek Comet was first sighted by Czech astronomer, Luboš Kohoutek. The comet’s pending arrival was highly anticipated. The media even deemed Kohoutek the “comet of the century” because scientists suspected that it came from a theoretical collection of comets about a light year away, called the Oort Cloud, and so would be highly gaseous which would create a spectacular display in the night sky.

But Kahoutek was a let down. When it arrived in December, it turned out to be too rocky to have been from the Oort Cloud. And even though it was brighter than most comets, it was nicknamed ‘Comet Watergate’ because of the scandal caused by its failure to meet the press’s expectations.

Kahoutek won’t be seen again from Earth for another 75,000 years.

On this day in 1994, the Supreme Court issued its ruling in the landmark copyright case of Campbell v. Acuff-Rose Music, Inc. The case began when controversial rap act 2 Live Crew released a parody of Roy Orbison’s 1964 hit “Oh, Pretty Woman” that included a sample of the original song without permission. The record sold 250,000 copies and Orbison’s label, Acuff-Rose, took them to court.

The case went all the way to the Supreme court which ruled in favor of 2 Live Crew establishing the precedent that commercial parody can count as fair use and is protected under the Constitution. And the decision went further, arguing that mechanical sampling can also be protected when used as part of a parody. On behalf of the unanimous court, Justice David Souter wrote,

“Parody’s humor, or in any event its comment, necessarily springs from recognizable allusion to its object through distorted imitation. Its art lies in the tension between a known original and its parodic twin. When parody takes aim at a particular original work, the parody must be able to ‘conjure up’ at least enough of that original to make the object of its critical wit recognizable. What makes for this recognition is quotation of the original’s most distinctive or memorable features, which the parodist can be sure the audience will know.”

(read the full decision)

In the last few years, the Acuff-Rose decision has been cited by critics of contemporary copyright law who argue that digital copy protection technologies restrain free speech by preventing artists from using fragments of original works in their parodies.

It’s the birthday of biologist David Baltimore, born in New York City in 1938. Balitmore first discovered his love of biology in high school when he spent a summer in Bar Harbor, Maine working on the seaside at Jackson Memorial Laboratory. He studied at Swarthmore and Rockefeller University and eventually got a job at MIT.

In the 1970s, Baltimore discovered an enzyme called “reverse transcriptase” that transcribes RNA into DNA, which was previously thought impossible. The enzyme plays an important role in the reproduction of HIV and the growth of cancer and Baltimore won the Nobel Prize for the discovery.

His later career has been hounded by scandal. In 1986, Baltimore published a paper on immunology in the journal Cell and one of his co-authors, Thereza Imanishi-Kari, was accused of fabricating the underlying data. Baltimore stood by his colleague while being investigated by the National Institutes of Health, the Congress, and even the Secret Service. Eventually, the NIH ruled against them and Baltimore was forced to resign from Rockefeller University where he was President. In 1998, he signed a letter retracting the paper. The case was widely discussed throughout the scientific community and has been the subject of at least three books.

Baltimore is now Robert A. Millikan Professor of Biology at the California Institute of Technology where he was president from 1997 to 2006. In 2002 a main belt asteroid discovered at the Palomar Observatory in San Diego was named after him: 73079 Davidbaltimore.

All information courtesy of Wikipedia except where otherwise noted.

Tagged: comet, kohoutek, oort, cloud, 2 live crew, copyright, parody, supreme, court, david baltimore, RNA, DNA, nobel, tech, podcast, hacker, almanac,