Fear of a Female Planet

I set up a RSS feed for the History News Network (historynewsnet), in case anyone is interested. This is a tidbit I found out through them today:

NYT TimesSelect To Be Free For College Students, Faculty
Source: Staci Kramer at http://www.paidcontent.org (3-12-07)

In January ‘06, NYT.com began offering its premium TimesSelect for half price to academics. It seemed like a pretty good deal at the time, yet when I did the math last August, the academic subscriptions accounted for less than 2 percent of the paying subs—about 3,800 total then. Now the site is taking a new approach: TimesSelect will be free to registered college students and faculty with an .edu email address. Current students subs will get pro-rated refunds.

The lost art of the letter
Robert P Crease, Physics World, January 2007

Until quite recently, letters were the most common way – and often the only way – for scientists to communicate informally with each other. It is not surprising therefore that science historians have long relied on letters as invaluable sources of information.

A dramatic illustration concerns the now-famous meeting between Werner Heisenberg and Niels Bohr in Nazi-occupied Denmark in September 1941 during which the two physicists, talking in private, sought to eke out the other's view on progress towards a nuclear bomb. At first, the principal account of the mysterious visit came from a letter that Heisenberg sent in 1955 to the German science writer Robert Jungk. But among Bohr's papers were several drafts of letters that Bohr wrote but never sent to Heisenberg after reading the latter's account of the meeting. In 2002, when the Bohr family made the drafts public, the letters served as a corrective to Heisenberg's version, showing it to be deceitful and self-serving.

Roles of letters

Now that e-mail has replaced letter writing as the principal means of informal communication, one has to feel sorry for future science historians, who will be unable to use letters and telegrams to establish facts and gauge reactions to events. In addition to the Copenhagen episode, another example of the role of letters is Stillman Drake's startling conclusion, based on a careful reading of Galileo's correspondence, that the Leaning Tower event actually happened. And of all the reactions to the discovery of parity violation in 1957, the simplest and most direct expression of shock came from Robert Oppenheimer. After receiving a telegram from Chen Ning Yang with the news, Oppenheimer cabled back: "Walked through door."
( Read More )

Polishing the Good Housekeeping Seal
By KATHARINE Q. SEELYE, The New York Times, November 20, 2006

Want a television in the kitchen, without adding clutter? There are now refrigerators with a TV built right into the door.

But do they work? Can they chill the milk and show “Desperate Housewives” at the same time? Will the electric bill go through the roof?

Such modern-day domestic quandaries are sorted out at the Good Housekeeping Research Institute, the updated version of the magazine’s test lab, which opened last month in the glassy new Hearst tower in Midtown Manhattan. The lab issues the Good Housekeeping Seal to advertisers that can pass its tests and also conducts original research on household products for the magazine.

The seal was first introduced in 1909, when there was little regulatory oversight of consumer products. The phrase “of approval” is not officially part of the name, but it became part of the American vernacular. With time however, the seal’s profile had ebbed.

“If you’re not a Baby Boomer or older, you don’t really know what the seal is because they haven’t done anything to re-energize its importance,” said Marshal Cohen, chief analyst of the NPD Group, which specializes in consumer behavior.

That is changing. Good Housekeeping, owned by the Hearst Corporation, is undergoing a broad-based effort to overhaul the image of its century-old brand. Its biggest selling point, Good Housekeeping says, is its years of accumulated trust, based on the lab and the seal, which, it says, set it apart from other magazines.
( Read More )

I'm just a news junkie this morning. It helps kill time while I copy a cagillion articles.

In historiography our class generally accepted the concept that race is socially constructed. (I believe it was in a discussion of Barbara Field's piece on "Ideology and Race in American History") In medicine its a little more complicated: certain ethnic groups are prone to genetic mutations/variations that cause particular diseases. I thought this was a nice exploration of the issue:
( Is Race Real? )