Happy Thanksgiving!

Chart of the day: Sierra Erratica edition

In the annual report of the Caltech Employees’ Federal Credit Union:

They tried to carry over the mountain motif used for the page background, but the shape of the mountain, with its decrease at the end, really wrecks the first impression of the actual trend (bar height).

Beavers finally on top, as Oxy goes down

It came down to the last shot of the season, but the Caltech men’s basketball team snapped a 310-game conference losing streak that dated back to 1985. ESPN reports:

PASADENA, Calif. -- The Caltech men's basketball team ended a 26-year conference losing streak Tuesday night after posting a 46-45 victory over Occidental in the team's regular-season finale on senior night.

By my count, Caltech faculty won 9 Nobel prizes between the Beavers’ last two conference victories. I boldly predict that that’s an NCAA record that will never be broken.

Frontiers in Space: Mount Wilson and Palomar Observatories

I recently won an eBay auction for a vintage publication of the Mount Wilson and Palomar Observatories, Frontiers in Space. This black-and-white 48-page volume was one that I had not come across in previous auctions, and I have not found any information about it online. There is no date or copyright notice in the book, just a statement that “Additional copies of this book can be ordered from the Bookstore, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, California, 65 cents postpaid.” Since it seems to be an unusual book, I have scanned the book to PDF and made it available here, for educational and research purposes.

Frontiers in Space (38 MB PDF)

The book covers the general operating principles of a research telescope of the first half of the 20th century, including mount design and the movement of the telescopes; the use of photography for imaging and spectroscopy; and the various focal configurations (prime focus, Cassegrain, Coudé, Schmidt cameras). The histories of George Ellery Hale, Mount Wilson, and Palomar are presented, including the discovery of the expanding universe (with Edwin Hubble's name nowhere to be seen). A “night's work” for an observer is described, and the book concludes with an overview of the hot research topics of the day.

The book likely dates from soon after the completion of the Hale Telescope in 1948. There are numerous historical details up to that time, but little mention of events that followed.

The PDF was made searchable using the excellent WatchOCR software, which I described in detail yesterday. Final bleg: Can anyone point me to some free software that will let me adjust the logical page numbers in the PDF so that they match the page numbers in the original?

I am become Debt, the destroyer of worlds

From the Manhattan Project to collateralized debt obligations, we physicists have unleashed destruction and havoc upon the earth.

However, I don’t think that “fund our experiments or we’ll go out in the world and eff things up real good” is an ethical or compelling argument.

50 years ago…

Via the LA Times, half a century ago, Caltech triumphed in a nationally-televised athletic contest:

Rarely had a Rose Bowl seen such flawless execution.

The preparation was inspired, the key players unwavering and a national television audience enthralled.

Fifty years ago this Sunday, an intrepid interloper made an uninvited, unprecedented and unforgettable appearance in the so-called Granddaddy of Them All.

Caltech made the Rose Bowl.

A small band of ingenious Caltech students made it happen, surreptitiously altering a University of Washington halftime flip-card routine so that it would spell out "CALTECH" in what became known as the Great Rose Bowl Hoax of 1961.

We have to take our victories however we can get them.

A Tale of Two Almae Matres

Congratulations to the Penn State women's volleyball team, who defeated Texas in straight sets in the NCAA semifinals, and will try for their fourth consecutive national championship on Saturday.

And then there's Caltech men's basketball.

Conference play in the N.C.A.A. Division III Southern California Intercollegiate Athletic Conference begins after the holiday break. Caltech’s losing streak sits at 297, according to the athletic department.

...

A basketball in [Coach] Eslinger’s office is covered in autographs—not from players, but from the five Nobel laureates currently on the faculty. Pointing to a photograph of the team he inherited, Eslinger counted 5 among the 17 players who had played high school basketball. There were more valedictorians than starters.

Confessions of a market manipulator

From RISKS 26.19, Financial market automated amplification of trades:

"The two men worked out how the computerized system would react to certain trading patterns—allowing them to influence the price of low-volume stocks." Although the article gives no indication of how they did it, the day traders “gave false and misleading signals about supply, demand and prices'', which caused the robots to take action—which the day traders then took advantage of.

Yeah, I did that once.

Basic Instructions on Brian May, Ph.D.

One of my favorite web comics, Scott Meyer’s Basic Instructions, just covered a topic near and dear to my heart:

(Click through for the full comic.)

When I was in graduate school, around 2003, Wal Sargent came into our office, and the following dialog ensued: