Off The Net For Awhile -- July 28, 2016

I guess we can add this to the Obama legacy: home ownership at 51-year low. Let's see -- 2016 - 51 = 1965. That was a great year for music. Can't say the same for the top hits of 2016. The Beatles had two songs on the top 100 song-list for 1965, and didn't score higher than 31st. That tells you exactly how good the music was in 1965. President Obama, according to available data, turned four years old in 1965.

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A Nice Write-Up Of The Montessori Method

Yesterday was the last day for one of Sophia's "tutors" at TutorTime. Ms Almas had been accepted for a position at a local Montessori school. Sophia wrote a short congratulatory note with a small monetary gift and proudly handed it to Ms Almas as her going-away present and thank you.

Today, of all things, while continuing to read Kate Clifford Larson's Rosemary: The Hidden Kennedy Daughter, I came across several pages of a nice discussion regarding the Montessori method and the eponymous school. 

Data points which are easily available at wiki, I assume, but more rewarding to read in a biography:

• Maria Montessori, born in 1870
• medical degree in 1896, one of Italy's first female doctors
• she saw first-hand the ravaging effects of poverty and the lack of education on the city's most vulnerable
• became particularly interested in those with intellectual disabilities and emotional problems
• opened her first day care in the slums: Casa dei Bambini
• in the right environment, older children readily worked with younger children
• advocated practical skills like cooking, carpentry, and domestic arts along with classical education in literature, science, and math
• to her surprise, teenagers seemed to benefit most
• the Montessori method arrived in the US in 1915
• it would be years before it was accepted in the US
• very closely allied with Catholic teachings, especially on good and evil

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DNA: Wilkens, A Physicist

From Siddhartha Mukherjee's The Gene: An Intimate History

Ernest Rutherford, to Cambridge, on a scholarship in 1895:

• a New Zealander
• a blaze of unrivaled experimental frenzy 
• deduced the properties of radioactivity
• built a convincing conceptual model of the atom
• shredded the atom into its constituent subatomic pieces
• launched the new frontier of subatomic physics
• 1919: the first scientist to achieve the medieval fantasy of transmutation: by bombarding nitrogen with radioactivity, he converted it to oxygen
• discovered that atoms were made up of even more fundamental units of matter

Wilkens followed in Rutherford's wake. BUT Wilkens had read read Schrodinger's What Is Life? and became instantly enthralled.

• he reasoned that the gene must also be made up of subunits
• he felt that the structure of DNA would illuminate these subunits
• 1946: Wilkins appointed assistant director of the new Biophysics Unit at King's College, London