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The Macintosh Classic was a personal computer manufactured by Apple Computer. Introduced on October 15, 1990, it was the first Apple Macintosh to sell for less than US$1,000. Production of the Classic was prompted by the success of the Macintosh Plus and the SE. The Classic was very similar to its predecessors but, due to limited technological advances, it used the same 9-inch (23 cm) monochromeCRT display, 512×342 pixel resolution, and its performance was hampered by the same 4 megabyte (MB) memory limit of the older Macintosh computers. Nevertheless, the Classic featured several improvements over the Macintosh Plus, which it replaced as Apple's low-end Mac computer. It was up to 25 percent faster than the Plus and included an Apple SuperDrive 3.5" floppy disk drive as standard. The Classic was an adaptation of Jerry Manock and Terry Oyama's Macintosh 128K industrial design, as was the earlier Macintosh SE. Apple released two versions that ranged in price from $1,000 to $1,500. Reviewers' reactions were mixed; most focused on the slow processor performance and lack of expansion slots. The consensus was that the Classic was only useful for word processing, spreadsheets and databases. (more...)

Recently featured: Winfield Scott Hancock – André Kertész – Conatus

Winfield Scott Hancock (1824 – 1886) was a career U.S. Army officer and the Democratic nominee for President of the United States in 1880. He served with distinction in the Army for four decades, including service in the Mexican-American War and as a Uniongeneral in the American Civil War. Known to his Army colleagues as "Hancock the Superb", he was noted in particular for his personal leadership at the Battle of Gettysburg in 1863. His military service continued after the Civil War, as Hancock participated in the military Reconstruction of the South and the Army's presence at the Western frontier. After the Civil War, Hancock's reputation as a soldier and his dedication to conservative constitutional principles made him a quadrennial Presidential possibility. This nationwide popularity led the Democrats to nominate him for President in 1880. Although he ran a strong campaign, Hancock was defeated by RepublicanJames Garfield by the closest popular vote margin in American history. Following the election, Hancock carried on as commander of the Division of the Atlantic, and was elected president of the National Rifle Association in 1881. (more...)

Recently featured: André Kertész – Conatus – Oxidative phosphorylation

André Kertész (1894 – 1985) was a Hungarian-born photographer distinguished by his photographic composition and by his early efforts in developing the photo essay. In the early years of his lengthy career, his then-unorthodox camera angles, and his unwillingness to compromise his personal photographic style, prevented his work from gaining wider recognition. Even towards the end of his life, Kertész did not feel he had gained worldwide recognition. The first photographer to have an exposition devoted to his work, he is recognized as one of the seminal figures of photojournalism, if not photography as a whole. Dedicated by his family to work as a stock broker, Kertész was an autodidact and his early work was mostly published in magazines. The imminent threat of WWII pushed him to immigrate to the United States, where he had a more difficult life and needed to rebuild his reputation through commissioned work. He would take offense with several editors that he felt did not recognize his work. In the 1940s and '50s he stopped working for magazines and began to achieve greater international success. Despite the numerous and awards he collected over the years, he still felt unrecognized, a sentiment which did not change even into his death. His career is general divided into four periods - the Hungarian period, the French period, the American period and, towards the end of his life, the International period. (more...)

Recently featured: Conatus – Oxidative phosphorylation – The General in His Labyrinth

Conatus is a term used in early philosophies of psychology and metaphysics to refer to an innate inclination of a thing to continue to exist and enhance itself. This "thing" may be mind, matter or a combination of both. Over the millennia, many different definitions and treatments have been formulated by philosophers. The most important of these include the seventeenth century philosophers René Descartes, Baruch Spinoza, and Gottfried Leibniz, along with their Empiricist contemporary Thomas Hobbes. The conatus may refer to the instinctual "will to live" of animals or to various metaphysical theories of motion and inertia. Often the concept is associated with God's will in a pantheist view of Nature. The concept may be broken up into separate definitions for the mind and body, or even split up when discussing centrifugal force or inertia. After its formulation in ancient Greece, successive philosophers to adopt the term put their own personal twist on the concept, each developing the term differently such that it now has no concrete and universally accepted definition. Today, conatus is rarely used in the technical sense, since modern physics and evolutionary biology use concepts such as inertia and conservation of momentum that have superseded it. It has, however, been a notable influence on nineteenth and twentieth-century thinkers such as Friedrich Nietzsche, Louis Dumont and Arthur Schopenhauer. (more...)

Recently featured: Oxidative phosphorylation – The General in His Labyrinth – Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition

Oxidative phosphorylation is a metabolic pathway that uses energy released by the oxidation of nutrients to produce adenosine triphosphate (ATP). Although the many forms of life on Earth use a range of different nutrients, almost all carry out oxidative phosphorylation to produce ATP, the molecule that supplies energy to metabolism. This pathway is probably so pervasive because it is a highly efficient way of releasing energy, compared to alternative fermentation processes such as glycolysis. During oxidative phosphorylation, electrons are transferred from electron donors to electron acceptors such as oxygen, in redox reactions. These redox reactions release energy, which is used to form ATP. In eukaryotes, these reactions are carried out by a series of protein complexes within mitochondria, whereas, in prokaryotes, these proteins are in the cells' inner membranes. These linked sets of enzymes are called electron transport chains. Although oxidative phosphorylation is a vital part of metabolism, it produces reactive oxygen species such as superoxide, hydrogen peroxide and free radicals, damaging cells and contributing to aging and disease. The enzymes carrying out this metabolic pathway are also the target of many drugs and poisons that inhibit their activities. (more...)

Recently featured: The General in His Labyrinth – Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition – Moe Berg

The General in His Labyrinth is a novel by the Colombian writer and Nobel laureateGabriel García Márquez. It is a fictionalized account of the last days of Simón Bolívar, liberator and leader of Gran Colombia. First published in 1989, the book traces Bolívar's final journey from Bogotá to the Caribbean coastline of Colombia in his attempt to leave South America for exile in Europe. In this dictator novel about a continental hero, "despair, sickness, and death inevitably win out over love, health, and life". Breaking with the traditional heroic portrayal of Bolívar El Libertador, García Márquez depicts a pathetic protagonist, a prematurely aged man who is physically ill and mentally exhausted. The story explores the labyrinth of Bolívar's life through the narrative of his memories. Its mixture of genres makes The General in His Labyrinth difficult to classify, and commentators disagree over where it lies on the scale between novel and historical account. García Márquez's insertion of interpretive and fictionalized elements—some dealing with Bolívar's most intimate moments—caused outrage in parts of Latin America when the book was released. Many prominent Latin American figures believed that the novel damaged the reputation of one of the region's most important historic figures and portrayed a negative image to the outside world. (more...)

Recently featured: Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition – Moe Berg – Cygnus X-1

The Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition was the last major expedition of the Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration. Conceived by Sir Ernest Shackleton, its purpose was to achieve the first land crossing of the Antarctic continent. The expedition failed entirely to accomplish this aim, but it remains memorable as an epic of heroism and survival. It required two ships; the Endurance would take Shackleton’s party to the Weddell Sea, and the Aurora, under Captain Aeneas Mackintosh, would take the Ross Sea party to McMurdo Sound. In the event, Endurance became beset in the ice of the Weddell Sea before reaching Vahsel Bay. Despite efforts to free her, she drifted northward with the pack throughout the Antarctic winter of 1915. Eventually, she was crushed in the ice and sank, stranding her 28-man complement on the ice and subjecting them to a series of harrowing episodes—months spent in makeshift camps on the ice, a journey in lifeboats to Elephant Island, an 800 miles (1,300 km) open boat journey in the James Caird, and the first crossing of South Georgia—that led eventually to their rescue with not a life lost. Meanwhile, the Ross Sea party overcame great hardships to fulfil its mission, after Aurora was blown from her moorings during a gale and could not return. (more...)

Recently featured: Moe Berg – Cygnus X-1 – Tiridates I of Armenia

Moe Berg (1902–1972) was an American professional baseball player who later served as a spy for the Office of Strategic Services during World War II. Although he spent 15 seasons in Major League Baseball, Berg was never more than an average player, and was better known for being "the brainiest guy in baseball" than for anything he accomplished in the game. The Bergs were never religiously observant, although being Jewish did contribute to Moe's sense of being an outsider in mid-twentieth century America. Casey Stengel once described Berg as "the strangest man ever to play baseball." A graduate of Princeton University and Columbia Law School, Berg spoke several languages and regularly read 10 newspapers a day. His reputation was fueled by his successful appearances as a contestant on the radio quiz showInformation, Please!. Berg answered questions about the derivation of words and names from Greek and Latin, historical events in Europe and the Far East, and ongoing international conferences. As an agent of the United States government, Berg traveled to Yugoslavia to gather intelligence on resistance groups the government was considering supporting. He was then sent on a mission to Italy, where he interviewed various physicists concerning the German nuclear program. After the war, Berg was occasionally employed by the OSS's successor, the Central Intelligence Agency, but was unemployed by the mid-1950s. He spent the last two decades of his life without work, living with various siblings. (more...)

Recently featured: Cygnus X-1 – Tiridates I of Armenia – Bradley Joseph

Cygnus X-1 is a strong X-ray source in the constellationCygnus. It was found in 1964 during a rocket flight and is one of the strongest X-ray sources seen from Earth, producing a peak X-ray flux of 2.3×10^-23 Wm^-2Hz^-1. Cygnus X-1 belongs to a high-mass X-ray binary system about 6000 light years from the Sun that includes a blue supergiantvariable star designated HDE 226868. A stellar wind from the star provides material for an accretion disk around the X-ray source. Matter in the inner disk is heated to millions of Kelvin (K), generating the observed X-rays. This system may belong to a stellar association called Cygnus OB3, which would mean that Cygnus X-1 is about five million years old and formed from a progenitor star that had more than 40 solar masses. The majority of the star's mass was shed, most likely as a stellar wind. If this star had then exploded as a supernova, the resulting force would most likely have ejected the remnant from the system. Hence the star may have instead collapsed directly into a black hole. Cygnus X-1 was the subject of a friendly scientific wager between physicists Stephen Hawking and Kip Thorne in 1974, with Professor Hawking betting that it was not a black hole. He conceded the bet in 1990 after observational data had strengthened the case for a gravitational singularity in the system. (more...)

Recently featured: Tiridates I of Armenia – Bradley Joseph – Blue Iguana