The Guild of Scientific Troubadours

SONG: “Nine Dangshen Flowers”.

ARTIST: grant.

SOURCE:China’s quantum satellite achieves ‘spooky action’ at record distance,” Science, 15 Jun 2017, as used in the post “Here’s your sub-space radio: China gets quantum entanglement to work from orbit.”

ABSTRACT:
Spooky action at a distance, as it’s been explained to me, is a thing where you can’t really know if you’re the one making the difference in your half of the photon pair, or if your partner observed their half first and you’re …

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Ooo! Everyone loves a party!

This is a protein, though, not a party decoration. The full title of this image (or, really, description) is “Top view of ribbon diagram of ribonuclease inhibitor (PDB accession code 2BNH). Made with MOLMOL.”

MOLMOL is a piece of software – you can find it here, in fact – that lets you study molecules after learning their structure using a kind of spectroscope called an NMR (for “nuclear magnetic resonance”) spectroscope. Feed the NMR data in…

Wildflower and fruit, from two 16th-century Europeans.

More specifically:

Medlar, Poppy Anenome, Pear ( 1561 – 1562 ).

Watercolour, gold and silver paint, and ink on parchment by Joris Hoefnagel (Flemish / Hungarian, 1542 – 1600) and Georg Bocskay (Hungarian, died 1575).

Image and text courtesy The Getty.

I guess if you’re going to use gold and silver to paint with, you make sure it’s right.

Hoefnagel (who as far as I can tell was just Flemish, not Hungarian) is also kn…

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So much depends on perspective.

Image from the European Space Agency – taken by Cassini on its way to Saturn, and doing a little prep work, a little early investigating, for the upcoming JUICE mission.

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Silhouettes of polished redware from the Ancient Egyptian (or, really, older than Ancient Egyptian) Naqada culture. That’s about 5,500 years old, a mere century or two before the very first written records anywhere.

Something about this presentation (from W. Petrie’s Corpus of Prehistoric Pottery and Palettes, published in 1921) really reminds me of 1970s wallpaper. The geometry of handmade shapes.

You can see some of the actual redware pottery here and here, and sha…

SONG: “Facts Will Save Us All”.

ARTIST: grant.

SOURCE:Steve Ballmer Serves Up a Fascinating Data Trove,” New York Times, 17 Apr 2017, as used in the post “Microsoft’s Ballmer sics big data on government spending.”

ABSTRACT:
This is a song from the perspective, maybe, of Steve Ballmer’s inner voice.

He is, after all, an emotional man (about things like developers! at least).

The chorus comes from something that I remembered hearing in a public radio interview about his new da…