Video: The race to Absolute Zero

  This is the story of Dewar and Kamerlingh Onnes race to liquify gases.  The ultimate challenge was helium.  Dewar gavce up after hydrogen as he found it difficult to get helium and had all along gone light on equipment whilst Onnes used a more industrial approach,.  Onnes received the Nobel prize for doing this.  The unfortunate thing is that later superconductivity and superfluidity was found by Onnes.  Had Dewar persisted he might have found superconductivity and got the prize anyway! The ultimate acheivement detailed is the creation of an Bose Einstein condensate in 1995. If you like science / physics Read more…

Video: How Scotland Came to be Gaelic

Before the Scots there were the Picts.  The Picts were so called because they have tatoos on their bodies. ( pictures ).   They pursued a strategy of fighting and then falling back into the rough Scottish country side.  It appears that without sufficiently friendly environment the agressors would fall back.  Thus their strategy was someone passive agressive.  

Video: Castles episode #1: How to supplant a ruling class – A historical guide to the stroke of state – coup d’etat

This is episode 1 of the series on English castles.  Castles were most useful shortly after the 1066 Norman invasion of England.   They were called "mottes and baileys".  Shown in the picture below the motte is not the ditch around the hill but the hill.  Perhaps that is how the word moat got its start.   Imagine you had 30,000 men and you wanted to conquer an island nation of 4 million people.  What would you do?  A direct warfare would not result in the outcome you want.  You need to supplant the existing ruling class.   To start off with you invade Read more…

Video: The Origin of Mass and the Feebleness of Gravity – Frank Wilczek

Original Video Page  – other videos available here “The way you write equations suggests different things. … Right from the very beginning, Einstein was thinking about the question of whether he could get rid of the concept of mass in favor of the concept of energy.” A stunning roster of awards all identify Frank Wilczek as one of the most profound and influential theoretical physicists alive today. This lecture proves the point, as Wilczek goes after one of the deepest questions in science: What is the origin of mass? Rewriting Einstein’s famous equation as m=E / c2 dramatizes that energy is Read more…

When pondering that societies in aggregate act like a herd of dumb cows

  In regards "sheeple"….I found this comment on the internet.  Literally I think it is true about the human race. The scary thing about your cattle response is my family has raised cattle for generations and the first thing you learn is get rid of the smart cows quick.   We had a few that were smart enough to get through gates and every small hole in the fence. You can’t afford for them to show the rest how to do it so you get rid of them. Sometimes I am starting to feel like a smart cow. Next time you are screaming Read more…