This would be a good place to remember Moses Schönfinkel, who invented Combinatory Logic as a student of David Hilbert at Göttingen in 1920. His life was tragic: after his return to his native Russia he became mentally ill, and he died in Moscow in poverty. According to Wikipedia, "His papers were burned by his neighbors for heating".
For me, with a STEM background (and, I, suspect for many people here) the science episodes were never the most informative (though I would still learn a great deal about the history of the subject)
I'm not sure whether someone with a background in arts or history would say the same about the other episodes.
For those who want something entirely outside the STEM-heavy HN sphere of interest, there is another great BBC podcast about social science: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thinking_Allowed
Likewise - I always skip the science episodes and wondered whether there were hordes of historians tutting their way through the other episodes. It feels to me like there are two types of science episodes though - one where it's pure science, and one where it's the history of a particular branch of science. Like you, the second I could generally stick for the historical perspective, but I always wondered why they have the first type on what is ostensibly a programme about history.
Janson created more than just the Moomin stories. Check out her murals: https://tovejansson.com/gallery/murals/. I don't see much darkness there... (there is even a small Mumintroll in "Party in the City", in front of the woman smoking a cigarette, a self-portrait of Janson)
There also was a "German Physics" movement that tried to discredit relativity theory and quantum mechanics as essentially Jewish. Heisenberg was called a "white Jew" in a SS periodical. The movement didn't have much success, and Heisenberg eventually became the leader of the (unsuccessful) German effort to develop an atomic bomb.
> When the German scientists heard about the Hiroshima bomb, Heisenberg admitted that he had never calculated the critical mass of an atomic bomb before. When he subsequently attempted to calculate the mass, he made serious calculation errors. Edward Teller and Hans Bethe saw the transcript, and drew the conclusion that Heisenberg had done it for the first time as he made similar errors as they had. Only a week later Heisenberg gave an impressive lecture about the physics of the bomb. He correctly recognized many essential aspects, including the efficiency of the bomb, although he still underestimated it. For Popp, this is proof that Heisenberg did not spend time on a nuclear weapon during the war; on the contrary, he avoided even thinking about it. ...
> The Farm Hall transcripts reveal that Heisenberg, along with other physicists interned at Farm Hall including Otto Hahn and Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker, were glad the Allies had won World War II.[114] Heisenberg told other scientists that he had never contemplated a bomb, only an atomic pile to produce energy. ... On the failure of the German nuclear weapons program to build an atomic bomb, Heisenberg remarked, "We wouldn't have had the moral courage to recommend to the government in the spring of 1942 that they should employ 120,000 men just for building the thing up."[117]
In 1942, Heisenberg became the director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Theoretical Phiysics, where research into nuclear physics was conducted (on a small scale) and a Uranmaschine (small experimental reactor) was built. At that point, Heisenberg indeed didn't believe anymore in the possibility of building a fission bomb. But a year before that, Heisenberg had told Niels Bohr that he believed that such a weapon was possible.
So, you're right: although there was an "atomic weapons program" in Germany, it became an "atomic energy program" quite early on, and that happened before Heisenberg became a leading figure in it. The Allies came to know this only after 1945.
From "Heisenberg's war : the secret history of the German bomb", Heisenberg realized in mid 1941 that what he thought was "safe" work in nuclear reactors could be used to produced bombs. https://archive.org/details/heisenbergswarse0000powe/page/11... and by that summer thought it was widely enough known to be a concern.
"Whenever Heisenberg spoke of the visit [to Bohr] he always placed one question at the center of his concerns: what should the German scientists do? The dilemma was quite stark: if it would be wrong to give a bomb to Hitler, was it also wrong to ‘‘work’’ on bomb-related research? The answer was not easy. They might preserve their moral integrity by refusing to do research on fission, but in that event the Heereswaffenamt might only find other, more willing physicists to do the job. By continuing to work on the project, Heisenberg, Weizsicker and Wirtz would maintain a degree of control over its direction—so long as the military authorities made no decision to embark on a full-scale program to build a bomb. Any decision of that kind, Heisenberg knew, would deliver control of the project into military hands.”' - https://archive.org/details/heisenbergswarse0000powe/page/11...
> In a report prepared for the Heereswaffenamt, Diebner and his associates—Friedrich Berkei, Werner Czulius, Georg Hartwig and W. Herrmann—claimed that a bomb might be built with an ‘‘explosive effect a million times greater than the same weight of dynamite’’ using either uranium-235 or the ninety-fourth element, produced in reactors.” By what route the general knowledge of plutonium reached Diebner and the Heereswaffenamt, and how long it took, is not known,” but it was discussed clearly in the report by Diebner’s group completed in February 1942. The report, Energiegewinnung aus Uran (‘‘Energy Production from Uranium’’), said 10 to 100 kilograms of fissionable material would be required for a bomb—the lower figure was in fact about right—and urged that the program be transformed into a major industrial project. The report did not minimize the effort required, confessing frankly that separation of U-235 was still beyond reach, and that the details of plutonium production remained to be worked out.
I believe your "Heisenberg indeed didn't believe anymore in the possibility of building a fission bomb" is best interpreted in the larger context of "in the timeframe the military wanted".
When you say "atomic weapons program" and "leader of the (unsuccessful) German effort to develop an atomic bomb", what specifically do you mean? "Diebner, throughout the life of the nuclear weapon project, had more control over nuclear-fission research than did Walther Bothe, Klaus Clusius, Otto Hahn, Paul Harteck, or Werner Heisenberg." says https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_nuclear_program_during_... and https://archive.org/details/heisenbergswarse0000powe/page/14... gives more about what he did in developing that report.
A humble vegetable flowering so spectacularly was bound to get the attention of H.C. Andersen, who was always interested in ugly ducklings, like himself, turning out to be beautiful and noble swans after all. From his story "Gartneren og Herskabet" ("The Gardener and the Noble Family"):
One day the gardener brought a large crystal bowl; in it floated a water-lily leaf upon which was laid a beautiful blue flower as big as a sunflower.
"The lotus of Hindustan!" exclaimed the family. [...]
"We have been looking for it in vain," they said. "We have been in the greenhouses and round about the flower garden!"
"Oh, no, it's not there," said the gardener. "It is only a common flower from the vegetable garden; but, look, isn't it beautiful! It looks like a blue cactus, and yet it is only the flower of the artichoke!"
I have in front of me a reprint of Pellegrino Artusi's famous "la Scienza in cucina e l'arte di mangiar bene" (1891). It has a recipe for "Pizza alla napoletana" (recipe #609) which is a shortcrust filled with a cream of "ricotta, sweet almonds, sugar, lemon peel or vanilla, milk", about which he comments "... a me sembra che questo riesca un dolce di gusto squisito" - a dessert of exquisite taste.
He mentions two other pizze: "Pizza a libretti" and "Pizza gravida", both of them sweet. "Our" pizza is completely absent.
It is intriguing that the above 19th century "pizza" recipe is called alla napoletana given that Wikipedia states that "... modern pizza evolved from similar flatbread dishes in Naples, Italy, in the 18th or early 19th century."
It mentions one of my pet peeves with bracketed paste:
(Although most terminal emulators are designed to emulate xterm) ... there are no terminfo/termcap capabilities for the feature. Vim's variables assume that a termcap description might provide different values (omitting the “t_” prefix), but other editors simply use hard-coded strings
For example, the readline library just checks whether $TERM == 'dumb' and outputs the control codes if not (provided enable-bracketed-paste is set, of course) . Can anyone help me understand why there is no terminfo entry like setbp=\E[?2004h and unsetbp=\E[?2004l ?
After buying a decent espresso machine (or whichever method you prefer) and grinder, the thing that will improve your coffee immeasurably is home roasting (like I started to do 15 years ago, and never looked back)
It is not difficult (although I occasionally over- or underroast a batch) and great fun. Green beans keep for a long time (at least a year) so it is easy to buy in bulk, which is cheaper. Also, I'm never out of coffee....
A skillet will work, but results in a very uneven roast (which you may like, but I didn't)
I started with a popcorn roaster I bought second-hand for €10. Those work already surprisingly well, but will spread chaff (the thin membrane around the bean) around the house.
Then I graduated to a simple roaster (aorund €100) , which basically does the same thing (blowing hot air upwards through the beans) but with a chaff filter, and allows for larger batches.
Now I use the Gene Café, which stil uses the same principle (hot air) but has a rotating drum and lets you regulate the temperature.
Most roasters have a timer, but I never use it, it is important to stay around and look at (and smell) the beans. The whole process takes at most 20 minutes.
Googling for "best home coffee roaster" will tell you all you need to know, and then some.
