Dr. Herman B. White Smashes Atoms

Tech Club salutes:

Herman B. White
Particle Physicist
Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab)

Dr. Herman B. White has been a particle physics scientist with Fermilab for the past 34 years. His research has covered a range of topics in Particle and Nuclear Physics, as well as work with accelerators and particle beams.

In a 1997 interview, Dr. White made the statement that "[The physicist's] job is to advance knowledge and erase ignorance." His efforts to bring information, concerns, and focus about physics and physical science research have caused him to appear before U.S. Congress, the National Science Foundation, National Public Radio and others. Dr. White's next lecture is at the Adler Planetarium where among other things he'll bring us up to date on the progress of starting the world's newest particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider.

But lest you think physicists do nothing but deal with a bunch of stuff we can't even see, their problem solving filters over into our every day lives as well. The World Wide Web was an idea conceived and implemented by a group of high-energy physicists at CERN who wanted to instantly share their ideas and papers with colleagues across the globe. Thanks to their creative solution, the world has become a bit more interconnected.

International Year of Astronomy

Related to this week's Photo Fridays' pics, were you aware that 2009 is the International Year of Astronomy?

Astronomy (from the Greek words astron (star) and nomos (law)) is the scientific study of celestial objects (such as stars, planets, comets, and galaxies) and phenomena that originate outside the Earth's atmosphere (such as the cosmic background radiation).

source: Wikipedia

In 2009, 400 years after Galileo first used a telescope to study the skies, the International Astronomical Union and the United Nations are honoring both astronomers and astronomical milestones by proclaiming 2009 as the International Year of Astronomy.

Celebrate the International Year of Astronomy by brushing up on your own knowledge of the skies. Visit the Adler Planetarium's site where they'll be posting a monthly Hot Topic to explore our understanding of the universe and updating their CyberSpace website with space science content and resources about each topic. Both NASA and the International Year of Astronomy also have sites celebrating this year.

To start you off, February's Hot Topic at the Adler is "Our Solar System" where you can read about what Galileo observed when he viewed the universe through that crazy new invention called a telescope.

Photo Fridays

Postcards from Mars

Photo Credit: NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory and University of Arizona

Google Earth Gets Wet

A new version of Google Earth has just been released which now contains an undersea view of the world. This new feature includes maps of the ocean bottom, photographs and videos of underwater flora and fauna and even shipwrecks. But no pirates, argh!

Google's partners in this new venture are the National Geographic Society, the Scripps Oceanographic Institution and the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration. In fact, a former chief scientist at NOAA, Sylvia Earle, once joked that Google Earth should be called "Google Dirt," because it omitted a majority of the planet's surface. That is no longer the case.

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Sean, Kaylin, Cazzie and newest Cabrini Connections and Tech Club member Elijah continued on with their quest to create websites.

Old pro Sean decided his text buttons were just too ugly for his site and quickly opened up Photoshop to create some cool looking graphics for his buttons. He and Steve worked on adding in some pretty neat effects and the result was worth the effort. Sean is just owning this project, which I can see as his site is moving forward.

Meanwhile, Kaylin, Cazzie and Elijah started learning the basics with HTML. We focused on an introduction to CSS, mainly taking about background and text colors. Specifically, we discussed:

background-color
background-image
color
font-size
font-family

and how to make a defined style be applied globally or just to one HTML element.

They soon had their first web page up and then spent some time changing colors and text in their code and seeing how it would display in a browser. There were some errors, but that's part of programming and after some troubleshooting, figured out their mistakes and the correct page was soon visible.

All in all I'm very proud of how quickly they've picked up on the essentials and look forward to seeing how they turn the basics into a site; and how Sean continues to build out his design vision. Tuesday nights at Cabrini Connections are very exciting!!!

Track that Bus!

Is there anything is more frustrating than standing at a bus stop not knowing when (or if) the next bus will come? I think not. To help alleviate that frustration, CTA has developed a very handy bus tracker service to let you know where the buses are on a specific route and when they're expected to arrive at their stops.

Not all bus routes have tracking on them, at least not yet, but those that are online have tracking devices on the buses that update the CTA servers with their location information. That information is then available to you so you can plan when you should start walking to the bus stop. Or if you should actually be running ... like right now!

Since CTA doesn't assume you're always sitting at a computer, you can access ctabustracker.com either from your computer or using a mobile device (such as a cell phone). So if you're already at the stop and your phone has internet access, you can check their site to see how much longer you'll be standing there. The site served up on a mobile device is text only and the navigation is very direct -- which is exactly what you need for a mobile device. You're first presented with a list of the bus routes that have tracking enabled. After selecting your route, choose a direction (e.g., northbound) and then choose a bus stop. CTA then displays the arrival time of the next bus and the one or two after that. When I used my phone to look up the #8 southbound to see when it would arrive at Halsted & Chicago, I was shown this information:

Halsted & Chicago (South Bound)
#8    To 79th    8 MIN    (Bus 1672)
#8    To 79th    15 MIN    (Bus 1226)
#8    To 79th    23 MIN    (Bus 1661)

When you access the site via a web browser, it has a much more rich interface but similar to the mobile device, you can look up estimated arrival times for a specific stop. In addition, the browser site has a very nice mapping feature where they integrated their bus tracking with Google maps. In this map view, they place an icon of the bus along the route so you can actually see where the buses are. The buses "move" along the map as their location information is updated. You can still view the estimated arrival time by clicking on a stop on the map, but in this view you can also set up a pop-up alert so you'll be notified when a bus reaches a given stop.

As someone who frequently uses public transportation, this is a great tool, and I hope it'll be rolled out to all the routes. Kudos to CTA for not only implementing ctabustracker.com, but also for creating a version for mobile devices. If you use it, let me know how you like it and how accurate you find the arrival times to be.

Australian Open Win

Serena Williams wins Australian Open

Photo credit: Getty Images / January 31, 2009

Over the weekend, Serena Williams won her fourth Australian Open with a 6-0, 6-3 victory over Dinara Safina in the final. Williams ran off 18 of the last 20 points in the first set to finish it in 22 minutes. That's impressive.

With this win, Ms. Williams' Grand Slam titles now add up to 10, making her only the seventh woman to have achieved double-digit Grand Slam singles titles. In addition, she's now the fifth woman to win four or more Australian singles titles and has once again reclaimed her No. 1 ranking.

This post has nothing to do with technology -- I just think she's a great athlete.