We caught this on the same day NASA announces Boeing's Starliner spaceship will return empty as Space-X rescues the stranded astronauts. It seems to have been all downhill at the Royal Society since Pepys, Wren and Newton ran the place.
From The Guardian, August 23:
Exclusive: Some fellows fear tech billionaire could bring institution into disrepute with incendiary comments
The Royal Society is facing calls to expel Elon Musk from its fellowship over concerns about the tech billionaire’s conduct.
The Guardian understands Musk, who owns the social media site X, was elected as a fellow of the UK’s national academy of sciences in 2018 in recognition of his work and impact in the space and electric vehicle industries, with some considering him a “modern Brunel”.
Musk is a co-founder of SpaceX, which among other achievements has pioneered the development of reusable rockets. He is also a co-founder and chief executive of the electric carmaker Tesla, which has also championed the development of sustainable energy sources.
However, the Guardian has learned a number of Royal Society fellows have written to the institution to raise the possibility of removing Musk’s fellowship.
According to one fellow, the concerns have come as a result of Musk’s increasingly incendiary comments, including his response to the recent riots in the UK, with fears he could bring the institution into disrepute.
Musk has been approached for comment via his companies, including X.
Musk’s tweets regarding the unrest have drawn widespread condemnation: in August, Downing Street criticised comments by the billionaire saying “civil war is inevitable” posted below a video of violent riots in Liverpool.
Musk also shared – and later deleted – a fake news report claiming Keir Starmer was considering sending far-right rioters to “emergency detainment camps” in the Falklands, and has promoted the conspiracy theory that police in the UK are treating white far-right “protesters” more harshly than minority groups....
....MUCH MORE
That two-tiered justice meme seems to have struck a nerve with British establishment media, The Economist called it a conspiracy theory as well. I'll see if anyone dropped it in the link-vault.
In the meantime we read this at CNBC, August 24:
Boeing Starliner returning empty as NASA turns to SpaceX to bring astronauts back from ISS
Regarding Brunel, he's only made a couple appearances on our pages, an oversight that we should rectify.
There was 2023's "Britain's Most Powerful Supercomputer And The Butterfly Effect Of Weather Modeling In the Cloud" about the Isambard 3 supercomputer which got a short introduction:
Great name.
Speaking of Engineering...."Do not put foreign objects in your mouth":
Following hot on the heels of "Industrial Development In Roman France and Roman Syria (could Rome have had an industrial revolution?)"
From Delancey Place:
Do not put foreign objects in your mouth
Today's selection -- from The Body by Bill Bryson.
It bears repeating -- do not put foreign objects in your mouth:
"In the spring of 1843, the great British engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel took a rare break from his labors -- at the time he was building the SS Great Britain, the largest and most challenging ship ever to come off a drawing board to that time -- to amuse his children with a magic trick. Things didn't go quite to plan, however. Midway through the entertainment Brunel accidentally swallowed a gold half-sovereign coin that he had secreted under his tongue. We may reasonably imagine Brunel's look of surprise followed by consternation and perhaps slight panic as he felt the coin slide down his throat and lodge at the base of his trachea. It caused him no great pain, but it was uncomfortable and unnerving because he knew that if it shifted even slightly it could choke him.
"Over the next few days, Brunel, his friends, colleagues, family, and doctors attempted every obvious remedy, from slapping him hard on the back to holding him aloft by the ankles (he was a small man and easily lofted) and shaking him vigorously, but nothing worked....
....MORE
Brunel was quite the go-getter; Need a bridge? Sure, suspension or the world's longest brick span? Need a prefabricated hospital to answer Florence Nighengale's call during the Crimean War? Coming right up. A railroad? Here's a thousand miles of a new wider gauge so you can take curves at higher speeds. State of the art ship building?
"The Second Greatest Briton" at Picture Britain: One Girl's Journey
And from the "News I Hope You Never Need To Use" file:
Learn THE SELF-HEIMLICH MANEUVER
And back to the Royal Society, that brick color text reminds me of this, one of the earlier mentions of global warming's impact on the Arctic:
"It will without doubt have come to your Lordship's knowledge that a considerable change of climate, inexplicable at present to us, must have taken place in the Circumpolar Regions, by which the severity of the cold that has for centuries past enclosed the seas in the high northern latitudes in an impenetrable barrier of ice has been during the last two years, greatly abated.
(This) affords ample proof that new sources of warmth have been opened and give us leave to hope that the Arctic Seas may at this time be more accessible than they have been for centuries past, and that discoveries may now be made in them not only interesting to the advancement of science but also to the future intercourse of mankind and the commerce of distant nations."
—President of the Royal Society, London, to the Admiralty, 20th November, 1817
President of the Royal Society, Minutes of Council, Volume 8. pp.149-153, Royal Society, London.
20th November, 1817.
