Pocket reading list : Week 2 of March

When U.S. air force discovered the flaw of averages : Humans come in a wide variety of sizes, shapes, colours and so on. So, for the sake of simplicity, designers and manufactures would like to know what the average human looks like, in order to tailor their design around those dimensions. It so happens that no human will tick all the boxes an average human is defined by. This fact is recounted in two instances, one in which the air force needed to modify it's cockpit dimensions to fit its pilots and the other in which the female body was being compared and commented upon against a hypothetical *average* woman.

The Wildly Misunderstood Aeronautics Event Captured in This Photograph : Most of us have seen this picture at some point or the other, especially if we are in and around the engineering discipline and people's perception of what caused this phenomenon is, apparently, wrong. This is an account of what really is happening in the picture.

The Golden Age of Weird Papers : While people debate now-a-days as to what counts as a scientific publication, this article recounts how the early days of scientific publishing were and gives a few examples of what were published in the first editions of now-world-renowned journals.

The Most Amazing Lie in History : For those of you who know your history, the D-Day invasion of Normandy by the Allied forces was a turning point in the WW-II. Surprisingly, the Allied forces didn't meet with much resistance on the beach and even on the days following the invasion,  reinforcements weren't sent to Normandy by Hitler. This story is about how one man conned the German military into thinking that the D-Day invasion on Normandy was a diversion and thus contributed greatly in reducing the human casualty the Allied forces had to suffer by the end of the war.

The Lawyer Who Became DuPont’s Worst Nightmare : We use a lot of petrochemical and synthetic products on our day-to-day life. The chemical industry has toiled away to come up with newer materials and compounds that can be infused into the things we use everyday. Teflon is one such product, one which most of us are familiar with. And this story is about how DuPont, one of the manufacturers of this compound, blatantly ignored environmental and human safety in the pursuit of profit, putting thousands of people and livestock at risk of cancer and disease. This is the story of how one corporate lawyer went behind the company.

Popular posts from this blog

Farewell to Enthought

I started my professional career at Enthought , at the Pune office in India, on Feb 29, 2016. Over the course of eight long years, I spent time at the Austin office in the US, the Cambridge office in the UK, and I worked remotely from India. I was let go on March 27, 2024 . I had an unbelievably great time. I had three amazing mentors - Pankaj Pandey, Senganal Thirunavukkarasu, and Mark Dickinson. Pankaj mentored me in my first year at Enthought. I started paying attention to the craft of software after working with him. Senganal started mentoring me in my second year at Enthought, and continues to mentor me, even after the both of us have moved on from Enthought. He instilled professionalism in me, ensuring that the code I wrote produced precise scientific results, and that I tackled the known unknown aspects of a project first, to ensure timely communication about project progress. I was eager to manage people at the time and Senganal made me realize that I didn't want to manage ...
Read more

Arxiv author affiliations using Python

So, I wanted to get author affiliation information from papers on arXiv. arXiv provides with an API to bulk query their database and get information. Following that, I look for the attribute 'arxiv:affiliation' in the html data. Here's the code - import urllib from BeautifulSoup import BeautifulStoneSoup   url = 'http://export.arxiv.org/api/query?search_query=all:astro&start=0&max_results=1000'   data = urllib.urlopen(url).read() soup = BeautifulStoneSoup(data) #print(soup.prettify()) #list = soup.findAll('arxiv:affiliation') #for i in range(len(list)): #        print list[i].contents   test = [tag.string for tag in soup.findAll('arxiv:aiffiliation')] Now, the problem I'm having is that I'm getting affiliation of all authors which I want to split into sets of affiliations of authors of a paper, which I'm stuck on at the moment. Once I get that part, I can move on to the next part of this pet project, displaying these...
Read more

Elementary (particle physics), my dear Watson

Ground Control to Major Tom:  Shruti Patel checking in. Since my dear friend and fellow-physicist Rahul Poruri is homeward bound, and shall remain there for a week, I'm stepping in to continue his tradition of daily posts to Astronut . Even as I write, I'm not quite sure what this post is going to be about, so please forgive me for occasional rants and digressions.  By the way Rahul, I totally resent you for the name of this blog- I'm never going to start my own blog because there's no way I'll come up with a name as cool as Astronut! For now, I shall try and be happy with being a guest writer! Before I begin, a little bit on who I am and what I do; so that you can trust that my general views on science- particle physics in particular- are not entirely baseless. I graduated with a masters in Physics from IIT Madras in July this year, and I'm currently working towards (an eventual) PhD with the Theory Group at the Deutsches Electronen-Synchrotron (DESY)...
Read more