Sunday, April 24, 2011

RIP Bill Lipscomb

I heard an interesting piece on NPR about Harvard chemist Bill Lipscomb, who recently passed away. Lipscomb won the Nobel prize for chemistry in 1976. Now that is pretty impressive, of course, but that's not what caught my attention. Lipscomb was a student who worked with multiple-Nobel prize winner and all-around smarty pants Linus Pauling (the only person ever to win two Nobels). Bill Lipscomb learned to think big and tackle hard problems. To whit:
Prof. LIPSCOMB: Its not a disgrace in science to publish something thats wrong. What is bad is to publish something thats not very interesting.

Here's the really cool part. Three, count them, three former students of Lipscomb's went on to win Nobel prizes of their own. That is both amazing and ridiculous. One count argue that teaching at an elite school like Harvard, Lipscomb would have access to a higher caliber of students that someone toiling away at a smaller, lower-tier school. But that doesn't even come close to explaining how one could be an inspiring enough teacher that three of your students win Nobels on their own. That shows a rare gift for teaching and inspiring others.

Thursday, April 07, 2011

Chart porn


I saw the term "chart porn" in the comments of the Economist's Daily Chart feature. I thought to myself, "Hey, what a great name for a blog!" A quick google search revealed that someone else thought so too, thus: http://chartporn.org/.

I can already tell from a few minutes perusal that I love the author of this site. The second post from the top is a collection of charts on geologic time.


Larger version of the graphic at top is available at: http://pubs.usgs.gov/gip/geotime/time.html