I wonder if they ever gave a Physics Nobel to a person who held a patent! People like Graham Bell never got recognized by the Nobel people. I get the impression that Physics Nobel prizes were more or less given only to University professors. They didnt seem to particularly care for people with grease on their hands
I don't really know what I'm talking about, but weren't there like 9 Nobel prizes awarded to Bell Labs engineers for physics? One of which (I think) being the invention of the transistor, which presumably had a patent.
You make several good points. However I'm not sure if Bell Labs people were different from university people in terms of their academic background. All three, Shockley, Bardeen and Brattain were Physics PhDs, two of them from elite universities. I was trying to say that brilliant engineers do not disproportionately figure in the list of Physics Nobel prize. In fact they are hardly to be seen.
A post from yesterday, complaining about Musk not receiving a prize despite (according to the author of that post) deserving it, has had me thinking about that too. Folks like Bell, Musk, Bezos etc are in many ways similar to Alfred Nobel, highly successful and very controversial businessmen, where their contributions to the world have had great positives and great negatives.
Putting aside the fact that it's also entirely reasonable to say that Musk, Bezos etc, while having changed the world, have not really personally made breakthroughs in fundamental science of the level as to deserve a Nobel prize; I wonder if the Nobel Foundation avoids figures like that because of the parallels.
Currently I'd flat out refuse to give any sort of prize to musk, that could be a tipping point for his mental "stability" completely breaking down. The last few years really had a toll on him. Fallen from idol to conspiracy rightwing idiot crashing his companies more and more.
Philipp Lenard had a patent on cathode ray tubes, Marconi on wireless telegraphy, Dalén had plenty of patents on the automatic lighthouse regulator he got the prize for, and many others.
Awesome story. If black currants are so much richer than oranges in Vitamin C, why didnt the long distance sailors of the Age of Discovery, like the Portuguese going to India or the Spaniards going to the New World, not carry them? They only carried oranges. Puzzled.
The link between Scurvy and Vitamin C was not established until the early 1900s. Before that, pretty much only experimental evidence was able to establish what helped with scurvy, with various things found to be useful, including certain animal meats for arctic expeditions and sauerkraut, and lots of things that definitely didn't cause scurvy were blamed for it, like bad hygiene, tinned meats, alcoholism, etc.
For the British, things were especially bad. Numerous captains and sailors had personally demonstrated and convinced themselves that scurvy could be prevented with fresh citrus, but were unable to convince the "classically trained" physicians who made Naval policy, who were still pushing things like "you need more air in your tissue". One of captain Cook's expeditions had good results with malt and wort preventing scurvy, so that was official practice even as navy admirals demanded lemons.
The connection between citrus and Scurvy was finally proven in an animal model in the early 1920s, before we even understood what "Vitamins" where.
Very informative summary. A stupid question follows though, so request your patience. Did Michael Ventris really ask the question 'what if Linear B encoded some form of Greek'? Didn't Alice Kober already ask and answer this question, without seeming to do so. The fact that the underlying language was an inflected one and that it seemed to have singular, dual and plural forms for nouns etc - wasn't that enough? Was it academic carefulness that prevented Kober from proclaiming it was ancient Greek?
Kober was very determined that systematic analysis of the text would eventually work. She rejected the idea that you could just hypothesize what language it was. Because so many people had tried and failed that way.
Maybe at some point she had this idea. But you really must understand how bad of a fit classical Greek, and even the early Greek dialects, really is. Like.. a few words work out here and there. What convinced Chadwick were the place names, some names of Gods, and one particularly long 13 symbol patronymic. But for anything more you had to start adding, removing, reinterpreting characters and assuming that the original text got them wrong.
Also Kobler was missing most of the text since it hadn't been published yet, in her small corpus this would have been ever worse.
Even after people saw the decoding the main sticking point for years was that you need to make so many changes for it to work out in Greek that you're just making up the text. It took decades of work to make the decoding work and many of the decodings Ventris put forward were found to be wrong.
Eventually Kober maybe would have worked with Chadwick or someone similar who knew a more archaic variant or maybe Chadwick himself would have noticed it.
Homeric Greek had only sporadic use of the dual. It was apparently a matter of metrical convenience. Classical Greek had all but lost the use of dual. Dual ws lost in Latin. Whereas in Mycenaean Greek, the dual number was mandatory for both verbs and nouns. Like in Sanskrit. It is well known that Miss Kober traveled at considerable personal expense (?) and effort to travel from New York to New Haven to learn advanced Sanskrit. I feel there is every reason to believe that Miss Kober already guessed Linear B encoded a form of archaic Greek and her triplets more or less spoke to this informed guess. Just my 2c
The modern cop novel was a formula popularized in England by Edgar Wallace already in the 1915-20 timeframe. His novels show great command of police procedure incl crime scene analysis, lab work, post mortem, ballistics, finger printing etc.. He is said to have written some 170 novels, not all of them were police thrillers. Later in life, he went to Hollywood and wrote screenplays.
I guess his earlier work is not very well-known in the US.
Museums, as a concept, rest on a supply chain of plunder and pillage in the past and now increasingly, on theft, dubious commercial transactions etc.. No one can deny that local people and shady businessmen have been hand in glove with art collectors, dubious art historians and international smugglers, for thefts to happen on such a large scale.
The situation can improve if ordinary people feel within their hearts that museums by and large house stolen art from, usually, poorer countries. People should really stop visiting museums like the Met and LACMA. Otherwise they would just be encouraging past patterns of behavior.
Denise Schmandt-Besserat, a true American genius, develops the idea of writing from accounting for objects of common value like olive oil, wine, flour etc. She traces the development of literacy to an earlier phenomenon called numeracy - skill in counting and calls both literacy and numeracy as sources of power for the person who possessed those skills.
The following reference may be of help:
How Writing Came About. By Denise Schmandt-Besserat. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1997. Pp. xii+193; figures, notes, index. $19.95.
This book is a summary of her earlier two volume study called 'Before Writing'.
I haven't read this book, but the earliest written signs we have are pictographic, and don't seem to have a relation to numbers per se, but are much closer in character to ancient cave drawings. The argument is interesting from the perspective of numeracy as ancient Egyptian magical stories often involved numerical quantities, the Tao Te Ching is another example of magic involved with numbers, but I think that would come from a later period of development of civilization, whereas the origins of writing itself probably predate something like an advanced agrarian economy such as Egypt, China, the Indus River Valley civilization and the Mayan civilization.
If Vikings imitated/emulated the Romans in their funerary practices, arguably they did the same in their living practices too. If that's the case, why are the Vikings persistently dissed, at least in popular culture, as uncouth, violent, hard drinking, fornicating barbarians?
As a resident of New Jersey, I feel for the Vikings.
It's not dissing. The people who portray them as such like them as such, thinking it's badass.
The past is a foreign country, as they say. It may be oddly familiar in some ways, it may even feel better in a few ways, but most of all it's strange. Alien, even, when we're talking as long as go as the Norse Vikings lived. It can never be a home.
It's safe to say that those Norse people who built the faux Roman, faux ancient grave 1000 years ago, were as naive about this as Viking idolizers are today.
Rome was a warrior culture too, especially in the beginning. Even their sports were bloody and gruesome, with people being maimed and dying for the enjoyment of the population.
It is true that ideals have decayed. US government did not retaliate strongly enough against the Tienanmen Square massacre back in 1989. Trade was much more important. Now US is critical of all the surveillance and other repressive things that the Chinese government does. But they missed the bus more than 20 years ago.
To take the story to its origin, President Nixon's presiding over the opening to China back in 1972 effectively killed the Tibetan resistance movement. As part of signalling their good intentions, the US withdrew all support to the Tibetan resistance movement from one day to the next. All the Tibetan freedom fighters fled overnight to India.
Now governments and media talk about human rights in Tibet. The opportunity to do something about it was lost long back.
Read 'The Noodle Maker of Kalimpong' by the Dalai Lama's older brother.
