This is the day when in 1989 two scientists announced at a press conference that they had succeeded in fusing atoms, using only chem lab benchtop equipment and normal temperatures. Of course, nuclear fusion has been the goal pursued by battalions of physicists working on super-mega-devices, costing you don’t really want to know how much money.Whoever achieves it, if it can be achieved in places other than, oh, say the sun, will have glory, immortality as one of the great Greats and wheelbarrows of cash. The “discoverers”, Pons and Fleischmann, caused a tumult and they enjoyed instant celebrity. Their work couldn’t be replicated and before long people were feeling rather foolish. Hope just got way ahead of the evidence. Their parent institution may have pushed matters along, sensing a tremendous coup and a PR bonanza, without the caution, even skepticism needed in a matter like this. The episode was far from a coup and brought two essentially decent men into disrepute and ridicule. It also added fodder to the anti-science crowd’s maw. Frederick the Great may have urged boldnesss on his generals, ‘l’audace toujours l’audace’, but caution works better in science.

Fusion

Well, the Grey Lady will soon join her namesakes in assessing a charge to those viewers of the web site who read more than a certain number of articles. The New York Times will launch its for pay option on March 28. The paper thus joins the London Times and the Financial Times in efforts to get more money from the people who use the web site at no charge to themselves. FT did this a while ago and the general expectation was that the measure would flop. The idea of free content was too deeply ingrained in webonauts, it was said, and the FT wouldn’t make a nickel. Well, the paper is still around and it’s still influential and lots of people in the money and commerce and gummint biz read it, and they pay. The London paper did the same, last year I think, and now the NYT has decided to join the group. Print subscribers will have unlimited access to the stories, and the terms seem rather generous to me, at least to start out with. We’ll see. Maybe things will be different on this side of the Ocean.

Times Charges

Has there ever been a monarch more written-about, filmed, TVed or generally talked over than Henry, Eighth of That Name? His life has been pawed through by serious historians and Hollywood moguls, to take both extremes of the intellectual spectrum, and turned into a flood of novels, TV series, movies, plays, and so on. I don’t think there has been a Henry VIII comic book, but that can’t be long in coming. So, one would think that we would be quite well versed on the man and the history. I wouldn’t bet a month’s pay on that, especially if you ask Americans. They don’t know their own history, much less any other country’s. But an image of Henry is immediately indentifiable, just as an image of Boris Karloff in his monster make-up will make school kids yell “Frankenstein” and run away, laughing and giggling. So, it comes as a surprise that some researchers are still scraping around in the Henry midden. The results this time are rather interesting, if historically unproveable. The claim is that Henry belonged to the Kell positive blood group. In a match between a K+ father and a K-mother, there is a one in two chance of an immune response by the mother’s body. First born kids are generally OK, but subsequent pregnancies often miscarry. Hank’s first wife, Katherine of Aragon, had a healthy daughter, Mary Tudor. And Anne Boleyn, wife no. 2 gave birth to the girl who would become Elizabeth I. But subsequently both women had troubled pregnancies. Hardly conclusive, I guess we have to say, but still intriguing. Oh, and if that were not enough to worry His Majesty, another theory claims that Numero Otto suffered from a rare disorder called McLeod Syndrome, which accounts for his obesity, depression and paranoia in later life. On the other hand, in the 1500s infant deaths were common, and other medicos have come up with putative diagnoses to cover the King’s ailments. None, however, explain the miscarriages, which is a hole the Kell blood group suggestion plugs.

Henry

Allbert Einstein was born on this day in the year 1879 in the city of Ulm, a nice little town in southern Germany. I was only there once, to change trains, and I walked around the city center for a few minutes, but that was about it for me and Ulm. It’s probably polntless to say anything about Einstein or his work. What more is there to say? Accolades were heaped upon him in his lifetime and people still struggle to understand his work. Calling him the greatest physicist of all time is probably not hyperbole in the least. One odd thing, that would have amused and annoyed him in equal measure, is the emergence of various Einsteins: Einstein the Homey Philosopher, Einstein the Pacifist, Einstein This and That. Maybe the best thing to say is that he never took himself as seriously as some of his followers seem to take him. And, he aways liked a good joke.

ULM

That worthy publication The Economist has a corps of bloggers, each committed to a specialty. Technical matters are addressed in Babbage which has an item on the recent reaction by Google to the apparently rather wide-spread pollution of its search results by “content farms”. Mr. B looks at the recent announcements by the world’s dominant search engine, and notes some cries of despair on the part of critics who claim that Google has lost the battle to keep spammed messages out, and other approaches to searching for reliable content have to be tried. Others are not so sure that it’s time to throw in the monogramed Google towel. Google is search, and they wanted to make that equation completely convertible…Search is Google. To a large measure, they succeeded. If Google managers didn’t reckon on efforts to dethrone the big G or arrogantly refused to consider the possiblity of a “peer power’s” rise, then they deserve a good caning. But take it from me, and you heard it here first: it’s way too early to sell the stock. Google has a bunch of tricks, traps, techniques and methods it can deploy to counter the spam onset. Expect some court action, too. It won’t be easy, and it won’t be cheap. But the company is in the fight for keeps.