Fun and Games with Art History and The Stars are Too High

So, this is cool! As I've mentioned here before[1], the painting shown below depicts the namesake of Agnew Hunter Bahnson Jr., (author of The Stars are Too High). I've also mentioned that Agnew's cousin, Dr. Henry T. Bahnson, is named after their shared grandfather that Dr. Agnew, depicted in the painting below, operated on. I've even mentioned that Dr. Bahnson worked with Dr. Blalock who originated the life-saving blue-baby surgical technique along with Dr. Vivien Thomas. Now, here's the cool new stuff! A movie, "Stomething the Lord Made", that treated the relationship between Dr. Blalock, and his surgical assistant Dr. Thomas was produced by HBO. In the scene immediately before the portrayal of Dr's Blalock, and Tomas' groundbreaking surgical technique, the aforementioned, painting appears in the background. As I said, you already knew that Bahnson worked with Blalock, but did you also know that Bahnson traveled with Dr. Blalock as his surgical resident in his tour of Europe subsequent to the groundbreaking surgery? He did! Other cool bits of trivia.:

Bahnson named one his sons Blalock after Dr. Blalock.
In a scifi-esque move worthy of his cousin's imagination, Bahnson once had two parathyroid glands implanted in his abdomen[2] in an experiment to see if they could be encouraged to grow, and produce hormones in a host.

References:

1. Prior mentions of the Bahnson cousins

2. http://pittmed.health.pitt.edu/Oct_2002/houseHankBuilt.pdf

Comments

The Valentine's Day Magnetic Monopole

There's an assymetry to the form of the two Maxwell's equations shown in picture 1. While the divergence of the electric field is proportional to the electric charge density at a given point, the divergence of the magnetic field is equal to zero. This is typically explained in the following way. While we know that electrons, the fundamental electric charge carriers exist, evidence seems to indicate that magnetic monopoles, the particles that would carry magnetic 'charge', either don't exist, or, the energies required to create them are so high that they are exceedingly rare. That doesn't stop us from looking for them though! Keeping with the theme of Fairbank[1] and his academic progeny over the semester break, today's post is about the discovery of a magnetic monopole candidate event by one of the Fairbank's graduate students, Blas Cabrera[2]. Cabrera was utilizing a loop type of magnetic monopole detector. Its operation is in...

Cool Math Tricks: Deriving the Divergence, (Del or Nabla) into New (Cylindrical) Coordinate Systems

Now available as a Kindle ebook for 99 cents ! Get a spiffy ebook, and fund more physics The following is a pretty lengthy procedure, but converting the divergence, (nabla, del) operator between coordinate systems comes up pretty often. While there are tables for converting between common coordinate systems , there seem to be fewer explanations of the procedure for deriving the conversion, so here goes! What do we actually want? To convert the Cartesian nabla to the nabla for another coordinate system, say… cylindrical coordinates. What we’ll need: 1. The Cartesian Nabla: 2. A set of equations relating the Cartesian coordinates to cylindrical coordinates: 3. A set of equations relating the Cartesian basis vectors to the basis vectors of the new coordinate system: How to do it: Use the chain rule for differentiation to convert the derivatives with respect to the Cartesian variables to derivatives with respect to the cylindrical variables. The chain ...

More Cowbell! Record Production using Google Forms and Charts

First, the what : This article shows how to embed a new Google Form into any web page. To demonstrate ths, a chart and form that allow blog readers to control the recording levels of each instrument in Blue Oyster Cult's "(Don't Fear) The Reaper" is used. HTML code from the Google version of the form included on this page is shown and the parts that need to be modified are highlighted. Next, the why : Google recently released an e-mail form feature that allows users of Google Documents to create an e-mail a form that automatically places each user's input into an associated spreadsheet. As it turns out, with a little bit of work, the forms that are created by Google Docs can be embedded into any web page. Now, The Goods: Click on the instrument you want turned up, click the submit button and then refresh the page. Through the magic of Google Forms as soon as you click on submit and refresh this web page, the data chart will update immediately. Turn up the:...

Copasetic Flow

Search This Blog