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New-Cleckit Dominie @ncdominie.bsky.social · 3h

Pockels is now recognised as one of the founders of surface science.

Here is part of her story in her own words (Kolloid-Zeitschrift, Jan 1932; link.springer.com/article/10.1...).

Remember the experimenters, and remember the translators too.

Ich bin am 14. Februar 1862 in Venedig
geboren, wo mein Vater damals also oesterreichischer
Hauptmann in Garnison stand. Beide
Eltern waren fibrigens Norddeutsche.
1866 kamen wir nach Troppau, 1871, nachdem
mein Vater sich gesundheitshalber hatte in
den Ruhestand versetzen lassen, nach Braunschweig,
wo ich einige Jahre die staeidtische hoehere
Maedchenschule besuchte. Damals fasste ich bereits
ein leidenschaftliches Interesse ffir Naturwissenschaften,
speziell Physik und hfitte gern
studiert, doch gab es fuer Frauen noch keine Berechtigung
zum Studium, und spaeter, als die ersten
Anfaenge gemacht wurden, hielt mich doch der
Wunsch meiner Eltern davon ab. Einen Doktortitel
feuhre ich somit nicht.
So suchte ich reich autodidaktisch weiter zu
bilden, zunaechst durch ein kleines Lehrbuch von

Pouillet-Mueller, seit 1883 durch Buecher, die
mir mein drei Jahre juengerer Bruder, der spaetere
Professor der Physik: Friedrich Pockels, verschaffte,
als er in Goettingen studierte. In der
mathematischen Behandlung der Physik habe
ich es jedoch auf diesem Wege nicht welt gebracht,
so dab ich theoretische Sachen zu meinem
Leidwesen nur wenig verstehe.
1881 machte ich die ersten Beobachtungen
fiber die Oberflaechenstroemungen beim Eintauchen
fester Koerper in eine Fluessigkeit und entdeckte
die Veraenderlichkeit der Oberflaechenspannung im
Zusammenhang mit der Stroemung beim Abreissen
kleiner Knoepfchen, die an einem leichten hoelzernen
Wagebalken aufgehfingt waren. 1882 kam
ich auf alas Verfahren, eine Wasseroberflaeche
dutch Verschieben eines fiber dieselbe gelegten
Drahtes oder Metallstreifchens auszudehnen oder
zu verkleinern, alles mit ganz primitiven Mitteln.

Eine Publikation war zunaechst ausgeschlossen;
wusste ich doch gar nicht, ob die fraglichen
Erscheinungen nicht schon laengst bekannt waren.
Auch zeigten die Goettinger Physiker, denen ich
Mitteilung machte, kein besonderes Interesse
dafuer.
Aber als ich 1890 noch weitere Beobachtungen
gemacht hatte und von den aehnlichen Forschungen
Lord Rayleigh's erfuhr, riet mir mein
Bruder, doch an diesen zu schreiben, und Lord
Rayleigh verhalf mir dann selbst zur Publikation
in der ,,Nature".
Hierdurch ermutigt, wagte ich darauf auch
anderen deutschen Zeitschriften meine Arbeiten
einzusenden, und habe noch etwa 10 Jahre mit
Erfolg Untersuchungen ausgeffihrt. Durch Krankenpflege
viel in Anspruch genommen, konnte
ich nach 1902 nur selten Versuche anstellen,
uebersetzte aber Sir Georges Darwin's ,,Tides"
und schrieb Referate ueber Kapillaritaet fuer die
yon meinem Bruder redigierten ,,Beiblaetter zu den
Annalen". 1921 veroeffentlichte ich noch einmal
Beobachtungen fiber Randwinkel.

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New-Cleckit Dominie @ncdominie.bsky.social · 3h

While carrying out domestic chores, Pockels had become interested in surface tension, designed her own apparatus, and carried out a sequence of experiments.

Local scientists were uninterested; John Strutt to his credit saw the importance of the work and forwarded her translated letter to Nature.

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New-Cleckit Dominie @ncdominie.bsky.social · 3h

Evelyn Strutt acted as translator, giving John Strutt (Lord Rayleigh) contact with one of Europe's leading scientific cultures.

In particular, in 1891 she translated a letter to him from an unknown German woman named Agnes Pockels, who was a full-time carer for her parents in Braunschweig.

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New-Cleckit Dominie @ncdominie.bsky.social · 3h

An image for #ALD25. This is Evelyn Strutt, Lady Rayleigh (www.npg.org.uk/collections/...).

She's not often numbered among "women in science", but she had a crucial role in the work attributed to her husband, because he didn't know German and she did.

Old photograph showing a woman in late Victorian costume holding a book.

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New-Cleckit Dominie @ncdominie.bsky.social · 19h

It pleases me that the grave of Hugh Tennent Tennent in the Necropolis attracts a tribute of abandoned cans.

(There was some left; I poured it out as a small libation to the man who brought lager brewing to Glasgow.)

Granite slab engraved with the words

"Behold the upright
for the end of that"

In front of it sits a Tennents lager can.

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New-Cleckit Dominie @ncdominie.bsky.social · 19h

(You'll notice I built an escape route into mine just in case the analogy didn't work either; I can always claim I was just flogging a d. h.)

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New-Cleckit Dominie @ncdominie.bsky.social · 20h

If it were my employer I'd have fun quoting the EA 2010 at them over this; I suspect if I tried to raise it with Not My Employer we'd have the usual circus that starts with "well it doesn't do that on our computer", and you know the rest...

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New-Cleckit Dominie @ncdominie.bsky.social · 20h

It is a university, though not the one I work for. I'm sadly familiar with accessibility compliance issues: my particular problem is colourblindness, and until I started putting my foot down I was finding myself effectively coopted into the role of unpaid accessibility tester.

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New-Cleckit Dominie @ncdominie.bsky.social · 1d

— _I_ want a horse.

— Well, we do also have a tulip-enhanced horse option.

— Tulip-enhanced?

— We fed it tulip bulbs. Very expensive tulip bulbs.

— Aren't tulip bulbs poisonous to horses?

— Funny you should mention that. Anyway, it's either EquiTulip or a dead horse. Which would you prefer?

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New-Cleckit Dominie @ncdominie.bsky.social · 1d

[Holland, 1637]

— Hi. I'd like to buy a horse.

— Sorry; we don't sell horses any more. I can offer you this!

— That is a horse.

— No, this is EquiTulip. It might look like a horse but it's a revolutionary new tuli—

— It's a horse.

— Look, nobody wants horses. We have to ride the tulip wave.

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New-Cleckit Dominie @ncdominie.bsky.social · 1d

Herbert is one of the greats. "Report from the Besieged City" is such a devastating summary of so much of the last hundred years.

and if the City falls but a single man escapes
he will carry the City within himself on the roads of exile
he will be the City

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New-Cleckit Dominie @ncdominie.bsky.social · 1d

I reckon I could fit in a haiku; maybe just about a limerick.

(Mercifully no good rhymes for the candidate's name occurred to me, which made temptation easier to resist.)

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New-Cleckit Dominie @ncdominie.bsky.social · 1d

I have a horrible suspicion that at some point somebody queried the wisdom involved, and the designer shouted "AFFORDANCES!" and ran away giggling.

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New-Cleckit Dominie @ncdominie.bsky.social · 1d

Almost running over the Hoff is quite the deeply buried lede there...

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New-Cleckit Dominie @ncdominie.bsky.social · 1d

"We use these three websites to collaborate. One is full of documents that are linked to each other; one is where we share points under discussion; and one is full of gits.

So you can remember which is which, they're called SharePoint, GitHub and LinkedIn respectively."

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New-Cleckit Dominie @ncdominie.bsky.social · 1d

It doesn't always work that way, but there is a little crack of doubt in the heads of many terrible people, and sometimes when you widen that crack, walls collapse and doors burst open, to the sound of a million jangling keys.

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New-Cleckit Dominie @ncdominie.bsky.social · 1d

The first demonstrations were met by brute force, but over the days the numbers grew and it became ever harder to pretend that this was a small group of organised agitators.

Eventually that police chief looked out at the crowd and said "It's the will of the people", and refused to disperse them.

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New-Cleckit Dominie @ncdominie.bsky.social · 1d

From a good, if grim, thread about protest.

A Czech friend was telling us recently about the Velvet Revolution. She was among the crowds who filled the streets round Wenceslas Square in November 1989; but it's a small country, and her parents also knew someone high up in the police.

"Online Rent-a-Sage" Bret Devereaux @bretdevereaux.bsky.social · 1d

In that, dreadful, terrible moment, every black bloc protestor in the world is useless, but a line of concerned senior citizens, office workers and house-spouses is actually a 'harder' target.

And 'the soldiers stood aside' is the sentence in the history book that goes before 'and the regime fell.'

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New-Cleckit Dominie @ncdominie.bsky.social · 1d

"Tuxedo Pooh" meme: "Full HTML markup for plain text fields" vs "UTF-8".

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New-Cleckit Dominie @ncdominie.bsky.social · 1d

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New-Cleckit Dominie @ncdominie.bsky.social · 1d

Join the queue. Big thumpy sticks will be issued.

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New-Cleckit Dominie @ncdominie.bsky.social · 1d

As you type the boxes change in shape and size and jostle against each other like sleepy kittens sharing a bed, which is _in no way_ intensely distracting and annoying.

All UI designs need a test run with a short-tempered user, and the designers should be present, and the user should be armed.

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New-Cleckit Dominie @ncdominie.bsky.social · 1d

In the name of mercy, could we please go back to using plain-text boxes in forms?

The default text box in an online refereeing system. About 75% of the space is taken up with three formatting menus. You could fit in maybe two short sentences at any legible size.

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New-Cleckit Dominie @ncdominie.bsky.social · 1d

www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle...

It’s all Greek to me – Plato and Socrates tackle a Captcha test: the Stephen Collins cartoon

Tick all the images with chariots …

www.theguardian.com

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New-Cleckit Dominie @ncdominie.bsky.social · 1d

Cowlairs Incline?

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