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Post started 12Sep2012, updated 15Nov2025

Thinking about it..

Liberty.. what?

(1) I rediscovered this thought-provoking book on my shelf the other day: Unbuilding by David Macaulay (1980 (*)). Maybe thinking outside of the book’s assumed intended fictional scope: I wonder what would have been worse for the present US government: (1) like in the Unbuilding, «dismantling and removal of the Empire State Building» or if (2) the same had happened to the Statue of Liberty?
Update: there now seems to be a lot of art out there, or AI-generated graphics showing «statue of liberty on travel with suitcase».
(*) Open library, (where it may be borrowed) or Google books

(2) Then the article 7 basic science discoveries that changed the world – «Ozempic, MRI machines and flat screen televisions all emerged out of fundamental research decades earlier — the very types of study being slashed by the US government«, by Michael Marshall, in Nature, vol 646, 30Oct025. (*). I guess the take-away here is that knowing what fundamental research (and the money that it takes) now might lead the way to later on, is rather difficult, or perhaps even impossible. Therefore I support all researchers whom now feel that they are losing buoyancy from their old hill top — and therefore hope that the skies may be bluer somewhere else [*].
(*) https://www.nature.com/.. – read as a magazine here
[*] Blue skies research on Wikipedia

(3) Ugelstad beads, or Dynabeads as they are now called, were invented here in Trondheim, in John Ugelstad‘s almost dreams a night in 1977. This was the opposite of the above, fundamental research, but it immediately solved a lot of needs that monodisperse particles had long been wanted for. Read about it in The big little discovery by Ingebjørg Hestvik (26.08.2025) in Norwegian SciTech News (research news from NTNU and SINTEF). I remember Ugelstad, he was often to be seen in Tronheim. He died in 1997 at 76. «Why go into space when you can go to Trondheim?” – the headline of a short article in Newsweek from the late 1970s. Microscopically identical size and shape will not lump together. They may be made hollow so as to contain paramagnetic iron salts. This means that they are magnetic only when in a magnetic field and will also not lump. Magnetically just as interesting as my Curie point based soldering iron (here). Plus the surface may be used to carry molecules to fight cancer.

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