Ever since the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) went online in 2008, physicists have been conducting experiments, hoping to finally prove or disprove the existence of The God Particle, otherwise known as the Higgs Boson. Today, researchers working at CERN (which operates the LHC) announced that they think they’ve finally found it. In case you’re looking for a primer on The God Particle, we’re bringing back a video we first posted in April. Here we have Daniel Whiteson, a physics professor at UC Irvine, giving us a fuller explanation of the Higgs Boson, mercifully using animation to demystify the theory and the LHC experiments that were used to confirm it.
Looking to bone up on physics? Find 31 Free Physics Courses in our Collection of 500 Free Courses Online. They’re all from top universities — MIT, Stanford, Yale and the rest.
The Star-Spangled Banner became the national anthem of the United States in 1931, thanks to Herbert Hoover. And, ever since, the anthem has had its detractors. The Kennedy Center acknowledges on its website:
Some Americans complain that it celebrates war and should be reserved for military ceremonies. Others simply grumble that it is too hard to sing with a range that is out of reach for the average vocalist [anyone remember Carl Lewis giving it a try?]. Suggested replacements have included “America the Beautiful,” “God Bless America,” and “This Land is Your Land.”
And don’t forget that singers, amateur and professionals alike, often have difficulty remembering the complicated lyrics. Yes, The Star-Spangled Banner has its critics. But the great Isaac Asimov wasn’t one of them. In 1991, Asimov wrote a short piece called “All Four Stanzas” that staked out his position from the very start. It began:
I have a weakness–I am crazy, absolutely nuts, about our national anthem.
The words are difficult and the tune is almost impossible, but frequently when I’m taking a shower I sing it with as much power and emotion as I can. It shakes me up every time.
I was once asked to speak at a luncheon. Taking my life in my hands, I announced I was going to sing our national anthem–all four stanzas.
This was greeted with loud groans. One man closed the door to the kitchen, where the noise of dishes and cutlery was loud and distracting. “Thanks, Herb,” I said.
“That’s all right,” he said. “It was at the request of the kitchen staff.”
I explained the background of the anthem and then sang all four stanzas.
Let me tell you, those people had never heard it before–or had never really listened. I got a standing ovation. But it was not me; it was the anthem….
So now let me tell you how it came to be written.
And, with that, he takes you back to The War of 1812, which started 200 years ago. It’s largely a forgotten war. But it did leave us with our most enduring song. Perhaps you’ll find yourself singing it in the shower today too.
In 1984, Jon Stewart graduated from The College of William & Mary. In 1999, he began hosting Comedy Central’s news program The Daily Show. In 2004, he returned to his alma mater, immeasurably more influential than he’d left it, to give its commencement address. Despite a dated crack or two — this was the heyday of George W. Bush, the President who arguably gave Stewart’s Daily Show persona both its foil and raison d’être — the speech’s core remains sound. You, Stewart tells the massed graduates, have the power to become the next “greatest generation,” though the chance appears especially clear and present because of how the last generation “broke” the world. “It just kind of got away from us,” he half-jokes, his grin compressed by seriousness. That admission follows a stream of self-deprecation hitting everything from his tendency toward profanity to his unusually large head as an undergraduate to how his presence onstage devalues William & Mary’s very reputation.
Whether or not you find the world broken, or whether or not you believe that a generation could break or fix it, Stewart still packs a number of worthwhile observations about the place into fifteen minutes. He perhaps delivers his most valuable words to these excited, anxious school-leavers when he contrasts the world to the academic environment they’ve just left: “There is no core curriculum. The entire place is an elective.” Stewart communicates, as many commencement speakers try to but few do so clearly, that you can’t plan your way directly to success in life, whatever “success” might mean to you. He certainly didn’t. “If you had been to William and Mary while I was here and found out that I would be the commencement speaker 20 years later, you would be somewhat surprised,” he admits. “And probably somewhat angry.”
As we roll into the 4th of July holiday, let’s take a nostalgic look back at Andy Griffith as he tells the story of the American Revolution on his classic 1960s TV program, “The Andy Griffith Show.” Griffith died Tuesday at the age of 86. In the eight years “The Andy Griffith Show” was broadcast–from 1960 to 1968–Griffith was a humane and rational presence in American homes. His character, Sheriff Andy Taylor, was surrounded by eccentrics yet always managed to keep things in perspective, embodying what the show’s producer, Aaron Ruben, once described as “this Lincolnesque character.” It’s a fitting phrase, and a good way to remember Griffith as we enjoy the holiday.
One of the scariest things about air travel is the seating assignment. You never know who you’ll end up next to. This classic 1968 advertising campaign from Braniff International Airways lets you imagine what it would be like to find yourself elbow-to-elbow with Andy Warhol and Salvador Dalí.
In the commercial above, Warhol tries to explain the inherent beauty of Cambell’s Soup cans to heavyweight boxer Sonny Liston. Below, Dalí and major league baseball pitcher Whitey Ford compare notes on the knuckleball versus the screwball. The commercials were part of Braniff’s ambitious “End of the Plain Plane” rebranding campaign, which completely revamped the company’s stodgy image. Advertising executive Mary Wells Lawrence hired architect and textile designer Alexander Girard to redesign everything from airplane fuselages to ash trays. Italian fashion designer Emilio Pucci created flamboyant uniforms for the stewardesses, or “Braniff girls.” And in 1968 Lawrence brought in art director George Lois to oversee the “When You Got It, Flaunt It!” advertising campaign for print and television.
Lois later said he came up with the slogan before the celebrities were cast. In addition to the Warhol/Liston and Dalí/Ford pairings, the campaign included ads with another odd couple: pulp writer Mickey Spillane and poet Marianne Moore. In an interview with the New York Daily News earlier this year, Lois remembered that Warhol had trouble with his lines. “Andy had to say, ‘When you got it, flaunt it.’ But I ended up having to dub his voice. Later, after I sent him a copy of all the commercials, he told me that he said the line better than anybody.” The ads were a product of Lois’s gut-instinct approach to advertising. “Those ads,” he said in another interview, “would have totally bombed in ad tests. As things turned out, it tripled their business.”
When Ruth Finnegan published Oral Literature in Africa in 1970, she was awarded an Order of the British Empire for her exhaustive and pioneering research on the history of storytelling in Africa. Unfortunately, the book was so expensive that it was largely out of reach for African readers.
Now it’s out of print, but the book and many of the audio recordings Finnegan made in her research will soon be available through unglue.it, a kickstarter-style campaign to release out-of-print books.
Unglue.it raised $7,578 from 259 supporters—mostly in the library world—to make the book available “on any device, in any format, forever.” The money will help offset the costs of producing the e‑book and a digital archive of recordings and photographs taken during Finnegan’s fieldwork. In addition to the ebook, the publisher, Open Book Publishers, will produce free, downloadable pdf editions of the work.
Unglue.it has three other titles in fundraising mode: Love Like Gumbo by Nancy Rawles, a set of young reader books and the autobiography 6–321 by Michael Laser. Using the kickstarter-style model, Unglue.it is trying to raise an agreed-upon fair licensing fee to release the books under Creative Commons licensing, completely liberated from digital rights management technology.
Yesterday we featured UC Santa Cruz’s new Grateful Dead Archive Online. There you’ll find a wealth of materials about the band from their inception in 1965 until their disbandment in 1995. But over the past 17 years, the surviving members of the Dead have pursued all sorts of fascinating projects, musical and otherwise. Mickey Hart, the group’s drummer between 1967 and 1971 and again between 1974 to the end, has put out a particularly unusual new album that takes its basic materials from the heavens. As both a musician and musicologist, Hart has established a precedent for such sonic experiments. Crafting his 1989 album Music to Be Born By, he recorded his yet-unborn son’s heartbeat within the womb — the most natural of all percussion, you might say — and recorded tracks on top of it. For his latest record, Mysterium Tremendum, he listened not to the core of a human being but as far in the other direction from humanity as possible, collecting and composing with “cosmic sounds” made in outer space.
To make music like this, you need some unusual collaborators. Hart went to NASA, Penn State, and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, working with scientists like George Smoot, winner of the 2006 Nobel Prize in Physics with John C. Mather. They helped convert light, radio waves, and other electromatic radiation into sound waves that Hart and his band could put to musical use. After getting a sample of the resulting extraterrestrial grooves in the videosabove, you might consider listening to this recent interview with Hart on KQED’s Forum. Why go to all the trouble of sampling the billons-of-years-old sounds of the infinite universe? Because the Big Bang, Hart thinks, marked the very first beat. “Four words: it’s the rhythm, stupid,” he explains. “That’s what I always say to anyone, and myself as well. It all goes back to that. We are rhythm machines, embedded in a universe of rhythm.” Spoken like a true drummer.
It was 75 years ago today that Amelia Earhart vanished. The famous American flier and her navigator, Fred Noonan, took off on July 2, 1937 from Lae, Papua New Guinea in a custom-made Lockheed Electra 10E airplane on the most perilous leg of their attempted round-the-world journey.
Their goal was to reach tiny Howland Island in the central Pacific Ocean, more than 2,500 miles from Lae. As Earhart and Noonan neared the end of their 20-hour flight (it was still July 2–they had crossed the International Dateline) they planned to make contact with the U.S. Coast Guard cutter Itasca, stationed just off the island, and use radio signals to guide their way in. Howland Island is only a half mile wide and a mile and a half long. The communications crew of the Itasca heard several radio transmissions from Earhart, but for some reason she and Noonan were apparently unable to hear the ship’s responses. “We must be on you,” Earhart said, “but we cannot see you. Fuel is running low. Been unable to reach you by radio. We are flying at 1,000 feet.” They never made it.
The prevailing assumption is that Earhart and Noonan simply ran out of fuel and crashed into the Pacific. But there is some evidence to suggest they may have made it to Gardner Island (now called Nikumaroro), some 350 nautical miles southeast of Howland. Tomorrow an expedition to Nikumaroro will set out from Hawaii on a mission to explore the ocean floor around the small island, searching for evidence of Earhart’s plane. Expedition organizers hope to finally solve the mystery. In the meantime you can learn more about Earhart’s extraordinary achievements, including her triumphant 1932 solo trans-Atlantic flight, by listening to Earhart herself (above) in a fascinating newsreel. And below you can watch the very last footage of Earhart, made as she and Noonan took off from Papua New Guinea on that fateful day exactly 75 years ago.
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