Notices by Robert McNees (mcnees@mastodon.social)

Hard to believe the tech companies weren’t being completely honest with us.

https://futurism.com/the-byte/ai-datacenters-worse

Physicist Ernest Rutherford was born in Brightwater, New Zealand #OTD in 1871.

He discovered the nucleus, proton, and α and β particles; explained nuclear decay; and was the first person to successfully transmute one element into another.

Image: George Grantham Bain Collection, LOC

Happy π day! Here’s a color-coded representation of the first 10,000 digits.

Read it left-to-right, top-to-bottom. #PiDay

The Mouse can’t remember when he first stepped onto the boat, or how he got there, or the name of the cursed river. All he knows is that there are always new souls lined up on the shore, waiting to be ferried across, coins plucked from their eyes to pay the way.

Happy #QuantumDay to all who celebrate!

Max Planck presented work on blackbody radiation to the German Physical Society #OTD in 1900. His novel “quantum hypothesis” suggested that matter emits and absorbs light with frequency f only in discrete chunks of energy E=hf.

Image: AIP

Gravitational waves were first detected by LIGO #OTD in 2015, 100 years after they were predicted by Einstein.

This discovery, announced the following February, marked the beginning of gravitational wave astronomy.

The description of what was discovered and how it happened fits in a short post. It is simultaneously so amazing and so preposterous that some people who hear it will want to spend the rest of their lives understanding how it could be true and what we can learn from it:

Karl Jansky invented the field of radio astronomy #OTD in 1932.

During a solar eclipse he saw no change in the faint radio hiss he'd been monitoring, which ruled out the sun as a source. He soon attributed this "star noise" to large ionized gas clouds near the center of the Milky Way.

Astronomer Henrietta Swan Leavitt was born OTD in 1868.

She established the period-luminosity relation for Cepheid variable stars, an essential tool for understanding the scale of our Universe.

Image: Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics

This is probably the best thing I ever posted on Twitter. The memory is pretty dear to me; I'm sharing it here so it still exists somewhere if that place collapses.

Tim Berners-Lee proposed a hypertext system that would sit atop the internet #OTD in 1989, and now we all live in it.

Happy 34th birthday to [sweeps arm in a grand gesture, revealing this Hieronymus Bosch tableau of the damned all around us] the Web.

Image: Tim Berners-Lee / CERN

Hungarian mathematician Rózsa Péter was born #OTD in 1905.

She was one of the founders of Recursion Theory – also known as Computability Theory – along with Gödel, Church, Turing, and Post.

Sister Mary Kenneth Keller was born #OTD in 1913. She worked with John G. Kemeny and Thomas E. Kurtz on the design and implementation of Beginner’s All Purpose Symbolic Instruction Code — BASIC — and was the first woman in the US to earn a PhD in Computer Science.

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